/kbin meta

Before the latest kbin UI refresh there was an issue where the magazine logo's aspect ratio was altered and the pictures looked squished, but that was easy to fix using some CSS.

But now after the latest update the issue is in the image element itself; so now the logo for my magazine which I uploaded as 600x600 is served as 500x600 and then resized using CSS to 260x260. Nearly all magazines I've visited have this problem.

picture showing the issue

A few days ago clicking on the little photo-film media preview button for image links was able to display an embedded imgur image from inside kbin, but now that no longer seems to work. Thumbnail images for imgur link posts also seem to be broken, only showing the little chat bubble as if the link is actually a text post now. I don't think I've seen anyone else mention this, so I've been wondering if it's a problem on my end. I've heard imgur blocks VPNs and I do have one that I use, but I only turn it on when I need it so I don't imagine it's the problem.

Is anyone else experiencing this too?

@ernest

Sorry to tag you, but I'm not really sure what's going on. Kbin federation from my node to kbin.social doesn't seem to be working, or if it does, it's very intermittent.

kbin.social to my node works most of the time, but also loses information but much less frequently.

Is there any reason why kbin.social isn't accepting incoming federation from my note (showeq.com) or why it's so severely delayed when it does?

I wrote the first line of code for /kbin on January 14, 2021. Around this time, I started working remotely and decided that the time I used to spend commuting to the office would be devoted to /kbin. Throughout this entire period, /kbin has been a hobby project that I developed in my free time. It was also when Lemmy started federating. The full history is available on GitHub. The Polish instance - or rather its prototype - was created on 2021-09-08.

By the end of 2022, I decided to take this a bit more seriously. The work that had brought me much satisfaction began to tire me out - anyone who's experienced burnout likely knows what I'm talking about. I needed a breather and a sense of doing things my way. I had some savings put aside, so I could work on this full-time. The amount of code might not reflect this, but it's only a small part of the things that need attention in such a project ;)

I don't know if it had any impact, but on January 4, 2023, I received information that the project had qualified for the NGI0 Entrust program. I had applied for funding a few months earlier. Currently, I have outlined my milestones in the Roadmap. The plan was to gradually complete each stage (after finishing one of them, I can apply for a funds release). However, due to the situation and how /kbin has developed in recent weeks, I had to completely change my priorities. As a result, I have started each stage, but none is polished enough for me to honestly apply for a payout. I'll need to address this promptly.

The fact that I could take certain steps amidst all this confusion is solely thanks to your support. The kindness I've encountered here will be remembered for a lifetime :) My buymeacoffee account currently has 818 supporters, who have donated $11,320. This is a lot of money, and for a while, I'll be able to sleep peacefully, not worrying about maintaining kbin.social.

Nevertheless, this money is meant for project development. Every expense will be documented in monthly reports. If necessary, I can also provide insight into the invoices. Things have been so heated recently that I consider the spending over the past months to be a failure. Most of the costs need to go to S3+Cloudfront, where costs due to the traffic increased from $2-3 per month to $1,000. This is about half a year of basic servers in the current stack. But in hindsight - so much has happened that faster migration was impossible. However, this has certainly accelerated the process.

None of this would have been possible without the contributors and project guardians, and without Piotr, with whom we spent many hours and sleepless nights trying to stabilize the situation and bring it to its current state. This time we're much better prepared for potential surprises. I hadn't set the terms of collaboration before and I admit, I had some concerns when we arranged a call to discuss this. However, it turned out that within the foundation, Piotr introduced a "Pay what you can" financing model, whether it's $1 or $100 a month. As I mentioned earlier, this is a huge relief for me and we started from scratch regarding security matters.

Many of you asked me about the possibility of recurring support. I wasn't entirely convinced, especially since the current account balance should maintain the instance. However, I think it would be irresponsible of me not to consider it. /kbin has grown to a level where I can't foresee everything that will happen. It would be great if we could cover monthly costs with Patreon / Liberapay. All funds from Buy Me a Coffee will be transferred to this pool, but from now on, I'll treat it as buying me a coffee... or a beer... literally ;)

For me, this also means maintaining critical zones for the project. I see this as a long-distance run, so I've decided to allocate:

$100 monthly - donation to Piotr's foundation "Fundacja Technologie dla Ludzi" - I really encourage you to support it, they're really doing a lot for the fediverse.
$24 monthly - donation to Codeberg - a great ecosystem for free projects. We've been making quite a buzz there recently.

I also want to support contributors and creators around /kbin as much as possible - but I'll do this privately, and for now, I can only afford symbolic amounts.

|                                                   |            |              |   $  |
| ------------------------------------------------- | ---------- | ------------ | ---- |
| Hetzner Jun 2, 2023                               | €131.63    | one-time     | 145  |
| Hetzner Jul 2, 2023                               | €246.74    | one-time     | 271  |
| OVH 24 cze 2023                                   | 2246.66 zł | 6 months     | 553  |
| OVH 1 lip 2023                                    | 904.63 zł  | monthly      | 223  |
| OVH domains                                       | 116.43 zł  | annually     | 30   |
| AWS (S3+Cloudfront) July 3, 2023                  | $1079.21   | one-time     | 1080 |
| AWS current                                       | $320.45    | one-time     | 321  |
| Mailgun 2023-07-02                                | $49.76     | one-time     | 50   |
| Testing enviroments, demo instances, landing page | $130       | monthly      | 130  |
| FTDL                                              | $100       | monthly      | 100  |
| Codeberg                                          | 95.33 zł   | monthly      | 24   |
| Yubico 2x YubiKey 5C NFC Jun 22, 2023             | €135.30    | one-time     | 149  |
| Accounting and legal advice                       | $100       | one-time (?) | 50   |
| Taxes in Poland                                   | ???        |              |      |

Thank you once again for that. I will respond to your questions, but it may be delayed as I have a few important tasks I want to focus on. Soon we will also write more about the cluster and the conclusions we have drawn from creating infrastructure with Piotr. Then it will be time for the first release of /kbin.

Hi everyone, I’m back with another kbin icon pack. This time it’s flags for 18 EU countries (the non-fancy ones) + an EU flag. So 38 icons in total. All icons come in two styles: semi-transparent/glassy and opaque metallic. I also made a simple instance logo generator.

Flags
List of all countries included in this pack: Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Hungary, Ireland, Italy, Latvia, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Netherlands, Poland, Romania, Sweden + an EU flag. Here are the previews for all the glassy and metallic icons.

All icons are rendered on transparent background. Don’t trim or change the aspect ratio of the image — the icons are carefully placed to avoid both cutout zones (small icon circle/banner rectangle). I’ve also changed the lighting setup a bit so that the icons should work well on both white and black backgrounds.

Download links:
Glassy icons pack | Metallic icons pack
(edit: there turned out to be a few flag rotation mistakes, wait for an update please)

Instance mini-icon generator (that top left website logo)
Sample icon preview. Since this whole flag thing started from @cnk asking for a flag icon for his separate country-specific kbin instance, I also made a .psd file that would make it easy to create such an icon yourself. All you need to do is edit a smart group adding the flag (or any other image) of your choosing. The file also includes a preset for 2-, 3-, 4-striped, and cross flags. For those you’d need to only edit the colors.
Download .psd

Terms of use, just in case
You can use these icons for any community on any kbin instance. Attribution is not required, although I’d appreciate it if you link to my profile or to any of my communities. If you share these outside of kbin for non-commercial purposes, attribution is required (either to my profile or portfolio). Commercial use is forbidden.

Tips
Since I got asked about this a few times already, if you like or use something I made and would like to support me, you can tip me here, I'd appreciate it. But again, totally not required, you’re free to use the icons anyways.

Kbinicons community
I also started a community dedicated to these icons. There, you can request a specific icon or just lurk and see what’s new. If you want a flag icon for your community, request it in the pinned post. Or comment here.

Edited below. I imagine many of us are here from reddit, where hashtags weren't really a thing and in many places mentions were actively discouraged (/r/politics I'm looking at you). However, since everything we post or comment on kbin (and lemmy) has the potential of getting federated on a mastodon server, which leans heavily on hashtags and mentions, should we be promoting the use of hashtags and mentions, in an effort to-- I dunno-- kind of tie everything together a little more neatly?

If the answer is "yeah, we probably should" then I'd also suggest that there be an option added to the settings to auto-populate the hashtags associated with the magazine to every post and another to add them to every top-level comment, very similar to how we have the option to auto-populate mentions for posts and comments.

Does this "Tags" field, when making a new thread/post, actually do anything with respect to this, or is that more for kbin-related stuff?

Oh, and, uh... #hashtags #kbin #fediverse

Feels weird to do that.

Edit: So, I did some brief testing, and have noted the following:

• Hashtags associated with the magazine are auto-populated at the end of the mastodon snippet.
• Hashtags added to the tags field are likewise added to the end of the mastodon snippet.
• Hashtags in the body text are seen as hashtags, but for reasons that might just be mastodon weirdness, searching for the hashtag doesn't display the associated post.
• Hashtags in the body but more than ~350 characters into the body (i.e., past the point the snippet cuts it off) do not display.

Edit2: Mostly unrelated, but when I mention the "snippet" above, it seems like it is created by the first ~350 characters of the first paragraph. That is to say, if your first paragraph is 10 characters, then a blank line, then 100 more characters-- the snippet will only be 10 characters long.

Just trying to understand how the microblog function works in Kbin. When it asks to select a magazine to post to, is that basically the same as adding a hashtag to a toot as if I were posting on a Mastodon instance?

Also, if I post a microblog to a remote community (such as to a lemmy.world community), how does that show up on LemmyWorld? Also, how does that show up on a Mastodon instance?

#kbinMeta

Today, when I go to upvote a comment it directs me to an error page. I've confirmed that I'm properly logged in and it does not happen on top-level posts, just comments. Anyone else?

Apparently one of the lemmy.ml admins was overzealous in banning all User-Agent strings that contained the word "bot". Bans were entered for all of the individual strings containing that word which were observed in their webserver logs, which impacted kbin's reported agent of "kbinBot".

The issue has been fixed, and I observed that one of my kbin posts to a lemmy.ml community was successfully pushed to the original instance.

Edit:

Here are all the links that I've found with the lemmy.ml admins discussing the issue:

• https://lemmy.world/comment/1082149 (appears to have been where they first noticed and fixed the issue)
• https://lemmy.ml/post/1920972 (posted a few hours later, provides additional context for what happened)

This is really annoying. Does anyone else have this problem?

So most of us "old timers" now have been on kbin for almost a month (or more), and kbin has been around for longer. And.... we've started to have an issue and I'm not sure if y'all have noticed: early on some people went around to claim some magazines either with the intent to pass it off later, or simply to squat and ideally build it up. But the end result was: the person who made the magazine stopped using kbin, or hasn't been active in weeks at the least.

Given this, many "big" or "good name" magazines are now squatted with no actual moderation. Of course it's possible to just make a new magazine with a similar name, but that's not always great/ideal. Reddit has a system for dealing with this: a subreddit in which you can request a subreddit to be "seized" if the owner is inactive for a length of time and it ends up unmoderated. That way, dead/inactive subs held by inactive accounts can be repurposed either to revitalize the moderation, or to rebrand the content into something more popular.

Personally I have run into this issue on kbin. Namely with the /m/Sanrio magazine. @Sanrio is the full name. The issue? I'm really the only active user posting in there, and it appears I've been added as a moderator. However, both the users above me in the mod list have been inactive for 3 weeks. And I do not have access to the mod controls of the magazine. It appears that kbin lacks any sort of way to properly seize the magazine so that it may be properly moderated in the future.

So it ends up being the case that either: I start a new sanrio magazine and just start over with a less impactful name. Or I continue posting in this sanrio magazine, and just hope that my limited mod abilities are good enough to moderate any issues (I haven't checked removing posts yet). Not a good solution in either case.

I know quite a "short impactful name" magazines are this same way. Seized early on, then the user stopped posting on kbin and are inactive. I think most of the 'land grabbing' has now been done as everyone has settled in, but the "ruins" remain.

Can we get a system in place to properly reallocate magazines to more active users? I feel like bugging ernest about this every single time will just lead to larger backlogs and a waste of his time (as I've stumbled upon dozens of these at least).

An automated solution could be: if a magazine has not had any posts despite being created weeks ago, then auto-delete it. If a magazine's owner has not posted for weeks/months, then allow the magazine to be "claimed" by someone who is more active; perhaps someone who has frequently posted in the magazine?

Example:

Magazine created 3 weeks ago, by an account that last posted 3 weeks ago. It has no posts. -> auto delete the magazine.

Magazine created 3 weeks ago, by an account that last posted 3 weeks ago. It has recent posts. -> allow top 10% of posters to "claim" the magazine and become the owner.

Magazine created 3 weeks ago, by an account that last posted 3 weeks ago. It has posts, but all 3 weeks ago. -> allow anyone to claim it.

Magazine created any time, by an account still active and posting within the week. -> don't allow any seizing/claiming of magazine.

These numbers are just randomly picked, naturally they can be whatever ernest and the community feels are best. The idea here simply being that dead magazines by inactive accounts don't sit as dead/inactive, but rather can be claimed again and revitalized. Also, it goes without saying but magazines from other instances shouldn't be effected by this (let them manage things themselves).

Thoughts? I just find it annoying that many magazines that would otherwise be attracting users end up unmoderated due to the influx of users a few weeks ago who claimed them and then left. Finding dead magazines that are forever unmoderated is worse than them not existing imo. Yeah?

The random posts/threads, active users sections seem like an unnecessary bloat, especially on mobile. Complete user details and magazine details shouldn't be listed on every post. An option to turn these off would be nice.

After some time missing an app, I managed to really like Kbin even on my browser, specially with some mods (my favourites are Kbin Usability Pack and Kbin Subscriptions Panel), but I really miss notifications for interactions on my posts and comments.

I think that this would almost solve my problem of don't having an app. Does anyone else feel the same?

Like the title says, is there a way to do this? It looks like you need the old password to change, but there isn't one when you start with Google Auth.

I couldn't find support for enabling MFA in my profile anywhere. In a modern world, this is a must have feature.

While I understand that it might add some inertia to usage if enabled automatically (and that would honestly be grand), it should absolutely be hopefully planned soon even as an optional security feature.

Ok, I'm feeling like an idiot, but what does enabling "Dynamic lists" in the settings panel actually do?

I've even tried reading the source code and I still don't understand what it does. It seems like it should have something to do with notifications, but in the end I'm just incredibly confused.

How does the People tab work? Are all members automatically people or are there steps to becoming one? Just curious, I'm sure I actually want to be a person.

I asked once before before I knew the difference between a post and a thread and was wondering why I never saw my post in the Magazine.

I ask because I made an account on https://lemmy.zip and the kbin.social magazines there seems to have incomplete contents. e.g. kbinMeta@kbin.social there only have one thread from 25 days ago. RedditMigration@kbin.social there seemed more up-to-date but number of comments are still less than what I can see directly on kbin.social.

Another indication of trouble is that when I try to subscribe to a kbin.social magazine (like kbinMeta@kbin.social) it is stuck on Subscribe Pending seemingly forever and does not transition to subscribed/joined status.

At first I thought it is a configuration problem on lemmy.zip or some recent version Lemmy incompatibility with kbin, but I was able to subscribe to fedia@fedia.io there fine and it seems to be getting updated contents.

So somehow traffic is not flowing smoothly between kbin.social and lemmy.zip.

@ernest, I hate to bother you but are you seeing something like this with other instances?

just wanted to ask

Is kbin vulnerable to the same kind of Javascript insertion attack as Lemmy was recently?

#kbinMeta

I heard that votes have been changed to behave closer to how people would expect, and boost is staying here as well. So I had an idea how to bring it all together in the interface.

Sidenote: you don't have to click the links here, the images are also posted inline in the comments below.

An app (either Artemis or an official one) might use a swipe gesture to visually hint at the relation between upvoting and boosting, as shown in the attached animation. Here's a static app mockup with both swipe levels displayed. I'd also imagine that there should be a setting that auto-upvotes posts when boosting.

And on the web, it's probably a good idea to consolidate all the voting buttons into a single block by adding an additional button at the top.

Edit: I’m disappointed in you guys. How come no one noticed the memes? :)

Straight-up genitals. This probably should not be allowed to happen even when a user isn't doing NSFW flagging properly and/or an instance is not enforcing it.

Are they different from tags?

I was looking at a comment I left earlier today (several hours earlier) and realized I made a typo, and went to edit it. I'm used to Reddit putting a little asterisk next to the comment's timestamp to indicate that it was edited, but I'm not seeing anything like this on Kbin. Is this something that's tracked somewhere for users to see, or possibly something that we might see get added in as a feature in the future?

crossposted from m/kbinStyles

Introducing kbin Feed Curator! An upgraded version of my 'Enough about Reddit already' script, it now allows you to add to your blacklist from kbin itself, instead of having to edit the script.

A screenshot showing the blacklist modal

Now also includes settings, thanks to kbin-mod-options! So far the settings are 1) a toggle to completely hide blocked posts instead of displaying a placeholder message and 2) the button to open the blacklist modal.

A screenshot showing the script settings

A screenshot showing the blocked post placeholder