Neon FTW. Been my daily driver for a while now with zero problems.
That was me banning him, a gut reaction on my part when I noticed. Maybe childish, but when they revealed himself as a bad actor I didn't want them coming into my communities.
Have you ever moderated somewhere of any significant size?
I was once a mod on a 500k+ user subreddit on Reddit. Without AutoMod, the place would go to shit within a month. AutoMod caught so many things that would otherwise disrupt the community.
It's not "authoritarian" to automatically remove posts of people spamming the N-word, especially when you can easily tell the users are trolls. Nor is it "authoritarian" to remove spammers trying to shill their T-shirts or sending links to scam websites. Or those annoying bots that would copy user comments and then try to pose as "real" users so they could build up karma and get around spam filters easier.
At a certain point, it is impossible to keep up with everything happening in your community. While reports are important, mods do have to sleep. We do have lives, and we don't pay attention to the communities we help run for every waking moment of our days.
If I wanted to ban every person who used the letter "e", I could do that without a bot. A modbot makes it easier, but simply having a tool available doesn't make the person using that tool more or less authoritarian. Not to mention both Kbin and Lemmy have open moderation logs, so you can easily see if a place has a moderation style you disagree with.
I have a solid repro:
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Sit on a page for a long period of time without other activity (for example, minimized web browser for 30-45 minutes)
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Interact with a post by hitting the upvote or downvote button
I'd imagine some session token is expiring and when you send the request for the upvote/downvote it rejects the call due to an expired token. Then the page refreshes and logs you out. Pressing the home page again will auto-log you back in.
I think it's more realistic than people think. The Digital Markets Act in the EU is likely why Threads is ActivityPub, and Reddit is (potentially) affected by it too: https://commission.europa.eu/strategy-and-policy/priorities-2019-2024/europe-fit-digital-age/digital-markets-act-ensuring-fair-and-open-digital-markets_en
Examples of the “do’s” - Gatekeeper platforms will have to:
- allow third parties to inter-operate with the gatekeeper’s own services in certain specific situations
- allow their business users to access the data that they generate in their use of the gatekeeper’s platform
- provide companies advertising on their platform with the tools and information necessary for advertisers and publishers to carry out their own independent verification of their advertisements hosted by the gatekeeper
- allow their business users to promote their offer and conclude contracts with their customers outside the gatekeeper’s platform
Let me quickly quote selected sections of the act itself:
The lack of interoperability allows gatekeepers that provide number-independent interpersonal communications services to benefit from strong network effects, which contributes to the weakening of contestability. Furthermore, regardless of whether end users ‘multi-home’, gatekeepers often provide number-independent interpersonal communications services as part of their platform ecosystem, and this further exacerbates entry barriers for alternative providers of such services and increases costs for end users to switch. Without prejudice to Directive (EU) 2018/1972 of the European Parliament and of the Council (14) and, in particular, the conditions and procedures laid down in Article 61 thereof, gatekeepers should therefore ensure, free of charge and upon request, interoperability with certain basic functionalities of their number-independent interpersonal communications services that they provide to their own end users, to third-party providers of such services.
Gatekeepers should ensure interoperability for third-party providers of number-independent interpersonal communications services that offer or intend to offer their number-independent interpersonal communications services to end users and business users in the Union. To facilitate the practical implementation of such interoperability, the gatekeeper concerned should be required to publish a reference offer laying down the technical details and general terms and conditions of interoperability with its number-independent interpersonal communications services. It should be possible for the Commission, if applicable, to consult the Body of European Regulators for Electronic Communications, in order to determine whether the technical details and the general terms and conditions published in the reference offer that the gatekeeper intends to implement or has implemented ensures compliance with this obligation.
Simply:
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You need to allow third-party apps free of charge
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You must publish your API publicly
Failure to comply causes:
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Initial fine of up to 10% of the company’s total worldwide annual turnover (or up to 20% in the event of repeated infringements)
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Daily fine of up to 5% of the average daily turnover
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Systemic infringements can cause the EU to break up the company entirely
The law has teeth. It could be I'm misunderstanding some nuances of the text, but this part seems pretty cut and dry from my perspective (I am not a legal expert):
gatekeepers should therefore ensure, free of charge and upon request, interoperability with certain basic functionalities of their number-independent interpersonal communications services that they provide to their own end users, to third-party providers of such services.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interpersonal_communication
Interpersonal communication is an exchange of information between two or more people.
If deemed an internet gatekeeper, Reddit would need to allow interoperability free of charge with all of their "interpersonal communications services" (e.g. Reddit + chat + modmail + etc.) on any kind of third-party app that wants to support it. (Which makes recent decisions even more baffling.)
From a cynical perspective, Reddit switching to ActivityPub would also work to remove a barrier between Reddit and Lemmy. If Reddit thinks they can out-compete Lemmy from a UX perspective, reversing course and going more open by embracing ActivityPub would bring traffic back to where they can monetize it. If Reddit's UX is better, people will be more likely to engage on Reddit than Lemmy, and thus Reddit wouldn't lose people.
Of course, there are 2 major issues with this:
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Reddit is terrible at UX and is actively getting worse
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Spez is a fuckwad who wants to be Elon without realizing he and Elon are about to be royally fucked by the EU next year when this starts to really take effect
There is. Lemmy.ml is currently shadowbanning kbin for unknown reasons.
Lemmy.ml is blocking the bots kbin uses for federation. The devs have ignored anyone asking why. It's been weeks and only applies to Lemmy.ml, so it appears to be intentional. They're running slightly different code on their flagship site than what all the other instances use (which makes me wonder what else Lemmy.ml has changed compared to what's publicly available).
I am using "my magazine" as a colloquial term for "the magazine I moderate", obviously not as the term for "the magazine I own". I trust you know that and are arguing in bad faith.
You can go start your own magazine on another instance if you wish. The presence of one does not preclude competition. Heck, you can even start another one here; we had similar subreddits on Reddit. The /r/WaltDisneyWorld folks were an example of a bad mod team on a power trip, which caused splinter subreddits to pop up like /r/DisneyWorld. The /r/WaltDisneyWorld mod team came here to Kbin and sure enough Kbin has already splintered too - there's @WaltDisneyWorld (original WaltDisneyWorld mods), @DisneyWorld, and @wdw.
If you think you can do a good job running a Disneyland magazine, I'm not going to stop you from making DisneylandResort or DisneyParks or going to Lemmy and making something there. Competition is good and healthy.
But... I don't think you truly appreciate how much work moderating a community can be. I literally was a mod for 1 sizeable subreddit (I was a mod on 2-3 other subs, technically, but they had subscriber counts in the dozens and rarely saw activity).
I'd love to show you what moderating a subreddit with 500k subscribers really looks like. It gets bad. Gore, scat, porn, hate, bigotry, and trolling - you deal with it all. Death threats in modmail to boot. And we were just 500k subs! The former default subs have millions and they are far worse, I've been told.
We ran a community for folks to discuss a single topic: the Disneyland Resort in Anaheim, CA. Not Hong Kong Disneyland, not Disneyland Paris, not Walt Disney World. Those have their own subreddits, with their own communities and their own mod team (plus /r/disneyparks). I wasn't associated with any of them outside of small formalities; I only got to know them during the blackout when we did look into coordinating our own site. (More on that later.)
If each mod team didn't do their job, each sub would be overrun with posts that don't fit the sub. We're constantly removing posts about WDW or Disneyland Paris or Shanghai Disneyland or whatever. We're constantly removing posts from people talking about general Disney stuff that doesn't have anything to do with the park. It's a lot of work to curate a feed, and when the effort is made in good faith we redirect people to more appropriate places to talk about the things they're passionate about.
People joined that subreddit to talk about the Disneyland in Anaheim; many didn't care about Shanghai Disneyland or whatever. If we missed something and a person posts about the "wrong" park (which happens sometimes, even with AutoMod), the community generally comes in and downvotes the post (and sometimes insults the user). From their perspective, they're seeing some content they don't care about/want in their feed. And technically, per Reddiquette, that's what the downvote button is "supposed" to be for - sorting out things that don't belong.
It's like posting a TikTok link to /r/YoutubeHaiku or a picture to /r/videos - each community has a set of rules and a social contract to enforce them. That's what makes a good community with relevant content that makes you come back. Without a good mod team, a subreddit gets overrun with posts that don't fit the sub - you can see some of that here on Lemmy/Kbin already. This is both because mod tools are lacking (no AutoMod) and because people are changing instances as they see fit. For example, @Starwars is abandoned, I think - the only(!!!) mod hasn't been active in weeks. I've seen things here like videos in the politics communities and other things that wouldn't fly with larger mod teams.
(Hit max character length, continued as a reply)
The other way around is supposed to work but is currently broken.
Bear in mind that kbin.social (the first general-purpose English-language Kbin instance) was created in... May 2023. Our Benevolent God Ernest has only been working on Kbin seriously since January 2023.
When I joined in June, it was mostly Ernest talking to himself, with a few other randos from Lemmy who were curious about this not-Lemmy thing. A couple weeks before I joined, Ernest was in here completely alone. Getting 100k people randomly show up a month after he released the first public alpha wasn't exactly in the cards, I don't think - so he's been putting out fires that come with "oh shit my little toy project now has thousands of people using it overnight".
There are issues on both the Kbin and Lemmy sides at the moment.
Lemmy released a new update with a bunch of fixes, but it seems to have caused other bugs. Lemmy servers with this update are becoming accidentally disconnected from everywhere else. They're working on a fix.
Kbin is a brand-new site (Kbin.social didn't exist in April of this year!). Ernest (our admin and the guy who made Kbin) has only been working on it "seriously" since January. When I joined Kbin in early June, there were just a couple dozen accounts here.
Poor Ernest has had a very rough month getting his fun little side project he put on the internet after a couple months' of work and scaling it to 100k+ users (and growing...). He's done an amazing job but the servers are maxing out. There's a big Kbin update coming soon, and the site will be on better servers.
The main issue is that there are 2 things happening at once on any fediverse site: it has to handle your local stuff (comments, posts, etc. made to Kbin.social) and it has to periodically sync (push/pull) the remote stuff from everywhere else and merge it into the local stuff. Right now, Kbin is focused on making it super-smooth locally at the expense of making syncs happen less often remotely.
This means it takes longer to send and receive posts from other fediverse services, but anything you do here will (usually) work first try without giving you an error. Once the big update happens in the coming days, sync times will go down and you'll get much fresher posts - assuming Lemmy fixes the issues on their end that have popped up.
You're not incorrect, and even "he was a product of his time" isn't an excuse: when he was alive, even other racists thought that Lovecraft was a bit too racist.
However, at the same time - you have to look at what impact reading his work has.
He's dead. He doesn't get money from it. The works are public domain. His estate doesn't get money from it. Further, the language used is striking, influencing a century of other work.
Does that language come from a place of racism? Yes. But it the work itself isn't overly racist - or at least, it doesn't make it more racist than Sherlock Holmes. Conan Doyle's The Sign of the Four is used in college classes today to teach Orientalism, yet largely people accept such a thing as okay because it doesn't radicalize new people into the subject.
If you reject every artistic work because the creators had questionable views, then you begin forcing yourself into strange choices. If the artist doesn't gain benefit from you reading it - then logically, it doesn't matter if you read something they made or not (contrast this to Harry Potter, where consuming said media gives money to a TERF). When the artist is out of the picture, the only thing that matters is what the work means to you.
You have the right to say "the work is abhorrent because of XYZ", but said things should be things you can point to within the work itself. If the artist isn't gaining benefit and their views aren't the focus of the work - why does it matter?