TheArstaInventor

Hello everyone!

This is u/TheArstaInventor, I have contributed to many communities as moderator both here on kbin.social and on lemmy instances like lemmy.world (my profile) and lemmy.ml. I have also made guides in the past to help new users migrate from reddit to the fediverse and was also part of the r/RedditAlternatives moderation team, helping several efforts within the community for migration especially during the Reddit API hype (although we all know at some point that had to subside down and organic growth is the long-term key anyways).

It's been a couple of months since I have been inactive as I am a student and I was very busy and didn't really have any time and was tightly packed, leading me to take a few months of time off social media in general, and I have now noticed that several things have happened in the past couple of months while I have been away, and this affects the future of the communities I moderate, including this one, and where I am planning to head my efforts towards in the future moving forward.

1. Kbin: Unfortunately the opposite of what I hoped for, it looks like development have stalled rather than taking off, when I was active a couple of months ago, the development was already slowing down and bots/spams were an issue, and unfortunately looks like things have only gotten worse. I understand and read the thread from Ernest and what he has been dealing with in his life, which has unfortunately negatively impacted the platform and I do hope he is able to turn things around at some point!

2. Lemmy: I wrote a post here on lemmy a while back, opened and ran a few communities there side by side with kbin.social and we have seen some nice growth there, I was honestly not yet decided on which platform to go for, as I was wondering if I should just switch to Lemmy due to the slow down of development with Kbin that was already an issue back then as well.

Now, as a moderator, I have looked at everything, the spam/bot has gotten worse and on all the communities I have moderated at Kbin is filled by spammers, I think at this point I must look elsewhere as I've patiently stayed supportive of this project and been here for a long time, and I am certainly not saying Ernest can't take things uphil from here, but I no longer can move forward blindly based on optimism as the past of Kbin has simply shown a downhill so far and that makes life much more difficult for us mods maintaining and investing time in these communities.

Now about Lemmy, as I mentioned, the experiment was pretty successful, after all Lemmy has always been the biggest and the oldest reddit alternative in the fediverse, despite my long discomfortness with the developers (being tankies) and they're not so clean history due to their beliefs, although that directly does not affect development and certainly isn't the reason/influence of my decision to not invest my time at Lemmy. The main problem for me with Lemmy is that the platform feels stagnant, and the development just doesn't seem fast paced either (for new features and etc, as it's pretty big and mature, adding new features or things would be slower compared to a newer/younger alternative with active developers).

At last we have Mbin, I never gave it serious consideration but even after so long after forking, looking at Mbin's development progress at Github after coming back myself from being inactive, Mbin has been developing actively and there seem to be several contributors working and helping the project out, while Kbin has been mainly/only being carried by Ernest so far, which is also because Mbin allows pull requests that can be merged by any repo maintainer (with merge rights in GitHub) and only one approval on the PR is required from one of the Mbin maintainers, this allows for much easie/more contribution - I really like this open community approach especially with Mbin.

That being said, I have made the tough decision to move forward to Mbin, this community will be archived later and I hope to see all of you continue your engagement that you've made so far in the community there at m/AskMbin which is where we will be heading towards, I will personally be moving to https://thebrainbin.org/, one of the many instances of Mbin (find other Mbin instances here). Although if you want to hold off and don't want to move instances, you absolutely don't have to! This is a change that only affects us moderators and the community itself, all you have to do to continue to be part of the AskKbin community in it's new future direction, is subscribe to our community from your existing instance even if that would be in Kbin or Lemmy, it certainly doesn't have to be mbin! The power of the fediverse!

Again we hope to see you there and if you would like contribute to this new effort and direction for AskKbin -> AskMbin as a moderator, please message me here or at mbin so I can add you as mod in our new community!

Edit: Also wanted to mention, this is just the beginning, I will slowly be moving the rest of my communities to Mbin's thebrainbin.org instance, if you are subscribed to any of my other communities please keep an eye out for a new similar announcement.

Edit 2: We have also opened a discord server! If you are interested in keeping up with my iniatives and show your support, please join my server and stay up to date!

AskKbin is back to federation with Lemmy.world!

Backstory - AskKbin was one of the several communities removed from some of Lemmy's instances like Lemmy.world on their side, which means users from Kbin were able to see all the content from Lemmy instances normally, but users from Lemmy on the other side of the fence were not able to see certain Kbin communities and we were one of them unfortunately - This was due to bot spams flowing throughout certain communities with inactive moderators at the time, while the Kbin's development was also temporarily paused back then during that period due to Kbin developer's personal issues that he wanted to handle first, but ever since the development resumed, we've got a new fantastic built-in redditrequest-style system allowing users from our community to takeover communities from moderators that are no longer active. This allowed me to takeover and revive AskKbin, among other communities, removing all the spam, placing bans on spammers while Kbin developers have also removed and addressed spams sitewide with a cleanup which has also helped us decrease this issue in a wider context. (Lemmy.world admins' original announcement regarding the above)

With that being said, as a result, after discussions with lemmy.world admins, Ask Kbin is now back and users from instances such as Lemmy.world should also be able to access our community from now on, we're glad to have everyone back!

Fundamental what/what not to post here issue needs to be solved

There is a fundemental issue (understanding) of what type of posts belong and not belong at AskKbin so far. Our original (and long-term) purpose has and will be a place for thought-provoking discussions across the fediverse, heavily inspired and similar to AskReddit, although so far this community despite multiple heads up from moderators, has had the issue of many people regardless using it as a support sub or asking general questions about Kbin itself or even the Fediverse even though the right community is KbinMeta.

Considering Kbin and the fediverse as a whole is still in a young, but developing stage, we don't want to take drastic actions on this yet although once Kbin as a project reaches more maturity, we will get back to fixing this problem through moderation.

But for now, we kindly ask that unless you are a newbie who is super lost, please make sure your submissions are thought-provoking and not a support or low-effort post. Tons of great examples can be found throughout the internet or even AskReddit itself if you are new to "Ask" type communities.

Future plans for AskKbin (Plans to recruit more moderators and more)

We have so far managed with a single moderator (me), but as the community grows and now that we are back to moderating with Lemmy's instances, we need more moderators to keep the community clean more than ever.

Mod applications are not open yet, but once they are, this section will be edited and a new post linked with mod application will be pinned in our community here, so watch out for that!

We will also upgrade our Kbin sidebar rules and information with guides and other resources linked for new users as AskKbin is one of the biggest communities on Kbin, this can be one of the first places many new users end up landing on.

Lastly, we also plan on designing and implementing new banners that will go well along with the logo, making the community more appealing than ever for Kbin users.

For those who have stayed here and contibuted, even in the dull/difficult times, thank you! And we hope to see more people connect and have great thought-provoking discussions!

Don't miss one, I want to hear it all.

To me, it's: That ancient people thought the Earth was flat.

We have records from around 430BC where Greek philosophers spoke of the Earth being a sphere. In 240BC the Greek astronomer Eratosthenes calculated the circumference of the Earth and was only about 2% out.

Currently moderate m/Cars, m/AskKbin, m/RedditMigration, and while testing out to see if federation works through my lemmy.world dummy account, I can't seem to find m/AskKbin like I used to, same with m/cars.

is anyone else facing this? This is negatively affecting both Kbin mainly and also Lemmy. Would be great if this can be addressed.

EDIT: Check this announcement from lemmy.world's admins 3 months ago.

But the "spam" is no longer the issue, as ever since then, mod requests system has been implemented, allowing many new moderators to takeover communities with inactive moderators, as a result allowing spam to exist within these communities.

So I do hope lemmy.world admins can bring back to showing Kbin's communities, although for now they have seem to done in a manner that us from Kbin can see their content, but people from there can't see our communities.

Check my post here and do support it, thank you.

Full credit goes to: /u/Pamasich for working on it and helping me out with CSS, the below CSS I will mention is fully made by he/her with my feedback, again thank you!

To all kbin magazine moderators,

Below is the CSS you can use to include your own banner of choice to your Kbin magazine/community:

h1[hidden] {
    height: 12vh;
    background-image: url(https://i.imgur.com/wbZa4eI.png);
    background-size: cover;
    background-position: center;
    display: block;
    color: transparent;
    user-select: none;
}

DEMO: Check m/cars using this CSS

NOTE: Change height's value according to your needs to fit your banner accordingly. You should also replace the image link in the above CSS with your choice, I used imgur to upload the image there, and copy/paste the image's address/link here.

This is what we have so far thanks to /u/Pamasich, and I hope this comes to rescue all of the moderators just like myself.

Why should you add a banner? This simply makes the community look more appealing and welcoming for users to participate, depending on what kind of topic your magazine is based on, a banner is invaluable.

And if you guys have your own further modifications to the given CSS above, feel free to mention them in the comments so everyone else can find this thread useful in the future!

Been helping moderate some many huge communities here on kbin such as m/AskKbin, m/Redditmigration and so on, trying to contribute in ways I can.

And over the course of my time here at Kbin, here are some of the features I really, really wish comes to Kbin one day.

• Banners for magazines: Right now we moderators are only able to make new logos and use that for our communities, but unlike Reddit or Lemmy, Kbin has been lacking the ability to make a banner apart from the Logo, the banner would help a lot more with not only the customization of the magazine but the overall appeal to it. This of-course should be optional as not every community would be going for this kind of look based on it's topic, but for the majority, this can really add more to the experience.

• More optional applicable permissions to moderators when owners add them: Right now, when I add a moderator, they can only delete, ban and moderate posts in general, but accessing the mod panel is impossible unless you are an admin, so this means, moderators can't help owners with community rules, description, or even attach a new logo. There should atleast be some kind of supermod option or role that I could enable for the mods, so that this remains an optional but needed feature for some (and I am one of them).

• Community Engagement: This is just, to put it lightly, lacking. For example, if someone make a really good post, everyone else is immediately ready to upvote/downvote and jump on the comments, but taking that first step of posting a good thread is just really, lacking. One of the reasons I believe for that is also because the platform feels very stale or dead in plain sight. To solve this, we could implement online status (OPTIONAL, I know not everyone will be into this), but we seriously need to figure out a way to make the site look more live and active, online status like Discord or Reddit (oh yes, reddit has this too, but this is optional and can be disabled) can really help add a more live and active feel to the community, this can in-directly encourage more engagement and the users will feel more inclined to particpate when they see others online.

Reddit also has some other features like showing "X number of people are viewing this thread", again adding that more of a live engaging feeling to the platform.

• Wiki: I seriously hope we can get a dedicated area to put our wiki stuff similar to on Reddit, right now I have so far done this by making a thread and pinning it, but a wiki built into the sidepanel would a lot more seamless and integrated, plus people wouldn't have to look for in multiple places and will be good to have rules, description and everything in the sidepanel.

If yall have more, add them in the comments, this is what I remember so far.

Thank you for reading!

Wiki

New Kbinners

Welcome to Kbin! For starters, please refer to the unofficial community-made guide to Kbin or another guide we attempted on our own (Both are useful resources!) to learn more about Kbin and the Fediverse. You can also visit m/KbinMeta if further support or help is ever needed. We also ask our community rules mentioned here in the sidebar to be followed.

Announcements and Development

For official updates and announcements from the admin/developers, please visit m/KbinMeta for major announcements and m/KbinDevlog for live platform updates, changes and status/news.

Mobile Browsing

To discuss issues and etc with any of the Kbin Apps, see m/KbinMobile.

Not seeing a community you are interested in?

Kbin is a young, but growing platform with new users joining every day compared to the already established big tech platforms like Reddit. Hence, you may see communities missing based on topics you are interested in, it is either up to you to start creating and moderating the community, or request someone else to step in for you from the community who may share similar interests (Visit m/MagIWishExisted), if you are not up to the challenge of moderating.

This is a community effort, and collaboration is important to achieve diverse communities with wide range of topics addressing the many interests of the people.

New and existing moderators

Moderators are the heart of Kbin, without moderators, communities won't be kept clean for on-topic, civil discussions. Moderators also spend their personal time for free to contribute and help grow communities they love, making a positive long-term impact on Kbin and everyone using Kbin every day.

Whether you are a new or existing moderator, we welcome you to join m/modcouncil, a place where all moderators are brought together in unity. It is a fantastic place for not just new moderators to ask questions and learn, it is also a great place for existing moderators to coordinate, develop new resources (for new mods and etc) and make more contributions together.

Visit the mod council and enter the world of Kbin Moderators.

This wiki will consistently be updated with new info, hence keep checking in once in a while if needed to stay up to date. Have feedback? Message our moderators.

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