Removed Kbin.social communities
Removed Kbin.social communities
Hello everyone,
Recently we have been dealing with a lot of spam from the kbin.social communities. There is a bug in kbin where moderation tasks are not federated to other instances. That means even if a moderator over at kbin removes a post, it will still be visible on Lemmy instances and it's up to the instance admins to clean it up.
There have been talks about this in the Lemmy admin channels with some instances considering defederating from kbin.social - and others who have already made that step.
We don't want to defederate, because we know this would impact the kbin community greatly - but we have to do something. That's why we have currently removed most of the kbin communities from Lemmy World, making them unavailable to our users. But the kbin users can still view and interact with our communities and users.
This means that those spam-accounts will stil be able to post in our communities too, but at least it makes the task of moderation already a little bit lighter on our team. But it was either this or defederation. The moderation tools on kbin are in an even worse state then Lemmy's.
We will keep monitoring the situation and will keep you up to date should anything change.
We hope you understand and support our decision.
The Lemmy World team
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Gotta do what you need to.
Hopefully kbin development can fix their moderation tools and eventually be reconnected!
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Yep, this feels like a temporary change until things get fixed.
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Hi - mod of a small kbin.social mag here - @13thFloor - and a lemmy.world user. Is there anything we can do on our end to help mitigate the problem, or make it easier to flag spam that makes its way to Lemmy? I'd be more than willing to include a note to the lemmy.world admins if a spam post is deleted off of a mag I mod here- just need to know who to contact.
Side notes - Ernest (kbin.social admin) just responded on the spam issue here. The community has been actively working over here to flag and remove spam accounts (I've personally flagged close to 100). According to the most recent news from @ernest earlier last week, we've got a software update incoming, and a magazine cleanup in the works that will hopefully make an impact.
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Heya! Not really. It's just a few communities that are being spammed really hard, so only those are removed. I think the work you're doing by flagging these spam accounts is already very helpful to Ernest and his team. He himself was kind enough to join us in this thread and give us some more information. For now all we can do is wait..
Thank you for your patience and understanding :)
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How is it so easy to create spam accounts with Kbin? What kind of account validation is implemented? Email? Enforced 2FA? Just a curious dev who hasn't started their own lemmy or Kbin instance yet.
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There's just email verification at the moment. 2FA is on the roadmap, but I'm not sure if it will be in the next release. Here's the kbin codeberg site for more detail.
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When I signed up it was email + captcha. I cannot find even an option for voluntary 2FA.
I don't know the details but people who wanted to work on Kbin and looked into it say that it is a much less developed platform overall (i.e. not fully a beta and more like still in alpha, e.g. lacking a true API), but it does offer benefits socially (to further disconnect from the originators of the Lemmy software) and to have another codebase that offers federation.
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Devs learning in real time why social media (especially decentralized) should be designed moderation first in design.
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Seems like a very reasonable compromise to deal with the situation.
Thanks again for the transparency and keeping everyone in the loop.
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Quick reminder that kbin was still fairly early in development when the reddit exodus began and sped things up much sooner than anticipated. A few teething issues are to be expected and Ernest, the dev, has been open and communicating about what's going on.
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Quick reminder that kbin was still fairly early in development when the reddit exodus began and sped things up much sooner than anticipated. A few teething issues are to be expected and Ernest, the dev, has been open and communicating about whatβs going on.
Given that kbin is written in PHP, I honestly don't see much of a bright future for it. It's not like hobbyist developers line up to write PHP.
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For me the tell was the lack of an API.
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The system is based on the bleeding edge of the PHP stack, using PHP 8.3x and Symfony 6 as the framework. There's plenty of devs out there, especially symfony ones. The main issues I've found is pulling in people who are interested in the ActivityPub side of the project.
I think a few more months and most of the user-facing UI/UX issues will be improved. The moderation side, along with quality of life admin tools are definitely lacking though.
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Spam has consistently been the death of the open internet, even the big tech silos struggle with spam (Instagram for example -- despite having incredibly invasive techniques for identifying "genuine" users -- is STILL inundated with spam commenters). I think instances on the fediverse should reconsider their open registration policy, either totally close registrations when you reach an agreed upon critical mass of users, or adopt some form of invitation or application system for new users. I believe Mastodon supports both in the software.
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I agree. A hard limit would be a good idea, it'd nip a lot of problems in the bud.
I'm as idealist as the next guy, but I was also a hellacious misfit once, so I know what it feels like to be a hate-fueled asshole. I really hope these Fediverse idealists have started to understand that assholes do exist, and they must take measures to defend themselves.
Combat is a part of life. Violence is an aspect of competitive biology. You're gonna have to deal with attacks here. Forever. Just get the fuck used to it, you're at war and will be until you die or leave this place. Largely due to politics and the way open communication has not just empowered good people to create good things, but has also empowered extremists and criminals too. And they exist and have goals too, in case any of you people fucking forgot.
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Well, shit. I had totally forgotten.
Iβm making a note now.
For real though. Youβve summed it up pretty good here.
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I saw a punnet of really big grapes today. It was very cool; I've never seen grapes that big! Do you reckon they would've been like, suuuper juicy?
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Good transparency. Thank you for your work!
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I also noticed there was a lot of spam from kbin regarding the online sales of pharmacy drugs that require prescriptions.
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i mean theres so many kbin communities, which one???
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Thanks for not cutting us off. I sub and post to a lot of lemmy.world communities, some of them small, and wouldnβt want to have to stop contributing or make a new Lemmy account.
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Understandable, have a nice day.
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So that's why the modlogs were going ballistic. Oh, well, I hope things are fixed soon.
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Thanks for not defederating us! -Kbin users
Ernest is working on a major update for Kbin but it might be still a couple weeks out.
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We are well aware of what's going on with kbin and the development team. That's why we don't defederate because we have hope that they will fix things soon.
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I apologize for causing you trouble. I'm trying to resolve the situation as quickly as possible, but apart from the usual spammers, there have also been organized campaigns where, for an hour on Sunday mornings, our instance was flooded with spam from hundreds of accounts. This, of course, is causing federation issues. I've changed my priorities regarding the roadmap, and additional tools will be released soon. I will also ensure additional moderation. I will also get in touch with admins from other instances - my absence was due to personal issues I mentioned recently. Thanks for your understanding, and best regards.
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There's been a heap of development going on with kbin recently, with a release upcoming. Overall the development process has been a bit slow with Ernest (the guy who owns the project) having personal issues to resolve.
Definitely the moderation process needs to be improved so that we have better ways of addressing spam so it doesn't bother other instances.
Personally I'm of the opinion that we should be using a metric based system where we weigh in the users date or creation, overall interactivity, upvote / downvote ratio and other data to potentially flag spam users. But honestly fighting spam is really hard and all of that would have to be built (plus it's a public repo so bad actors could look for how this is pieced together and find new ways to get past)
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War were declared.
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And this
ham gumsocial media account is all bones -
Our people tell the same story
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Is it A.D. 2101 already?
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Pretty unfortunate, but definitely better than defederating. I'm glad there can still be a link to some degree. Hopefully the moderation tools on both platforms improve soon. I appreciate the transparency and willingness to take on more work in order to maintain some link. I think it is important for the integrity of the fediverse. But also important to remember you all are doing this in your spare time.
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Damn, I main Kbin π
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Same here, on desktop it is my go-to. Sync doesn't support it yet, so can't use it.
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You can technically use Artemis for kbin though at the moment it only supports artemis.camp (another kbin instance) and I don't know currently how long it is until other kbin instances work as well.
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alexandrite.app is pretty great for me for desktop, you can log into any instance from it and the interface is quite awesome.
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Manager of Managers (MoM) will be required long-term it sounds like.. thanks for the good work all.
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That makes sense, to be honest: add a layer of complexity in the software (such as federated instances), add a layer of management.
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Yep; ideally, each person should be able to specialize. I hope there are enough well-intentioned and knowledgeable volunteers. Over reliance on free mod labor is part of what ruined Reddit
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I'm worried kbin development is stalling.
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Not the first time Kbin caused issues...
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Keep fighting the good fight boys. It's only a matter of time until either of these websites surpass all the others. Is there a way I can donate?
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Understandable, but sucks. Hope it won't last long.
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Do you guys have a some sort of deadline for this kbin issue get fixed before defederating?
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It's more a treshold than a deadline. Should it become too much for our team to deal with we'll consider our options again.
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We have always been at war with Kbin.
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bro what
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It's a reference to 1984
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That's a shame, but it is what needs to be done
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So, that means no one from Lemmy.World can see https://kbin.social/m/functionalprint anymore?
This thread is now broken?
https://kbin.social/m/functionalprint/t/353785/Replacement-wheel-for-a-child-s-RC-car
Maybe I misunderstood, is it some kbin communities (for now) or all?
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I can see https://kbin.social/m/functionalprint just fine from my own lemmy.world account, if that helps.
This doesn't involve all of Kbin, just a select few communities that have been hosting waves of spam.
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Thanks for checking that.
Yeah, it does appear to be select communities so far. I know a few were spammy and even I blocked them.
Hopefully kbin developer will get a chance to update the tools/site so us moderators can help out and keep the spam controlled so it doesn't spill into other instances.
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That sounds reasonable. Thanks for not just slamming the door, frankly I wouldn't have blamed you if the reason is "hey, this adds a shitload of work". It's neat that this is an available workaround.
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i went to kbin the other day its not cool lile lemmy
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I think it would be a good idea to introduce limited Federation like what they have on Mastodon into lemmy, where communities from that Instance wouldn't be federated unless explicitly allowed by the Admins of the Instance who put said block in place. It wouldn't be good for all cases but it could work for ones like this where the communities are the problem and the majority of the users there are fine.
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Is it all the communities? If theres still some kbin social communities on here, does that mean its probably not part of the troublesome communities and probably wont get removed?
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Poop..
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I don't get what's the obsession with SPAM in the lemmy world. Just let thing settle for themselves or continue down the defederation route and end up without users and/or with a meaningless presence on the web as a platform :)
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Small communities are still meaningful to community members. Cutting off useless appendages doesn't make a platform worse because "less users," that's a "quantity > quality" mindset which has been proven demonstrably untrue by all of the large social media brands that currently exist
Arguably a "meaningless presence on the web" is a good thing, because it doesn't incentivize people to join who are just in it for the memes and shitposts but don't give a damn about the community.
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thatβs a βquantity > qualityβ mindset which has been proven demonstrably untrue by all of the large social media brands that currently exist
Yet those platform thrive and grow, including Reddit white Lemmy is what it is.
Arguably a βmeaningless presence on the webβ is a good thing,
Yes, until you've to go into Reddit because there's no content and/or people here that might reply to you.
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Which domains are least likely to ban you for equivalating using statistics to cull animals to eugenics and trepanning?
I think .world is slowly transitioning towards reddit.shitty. in how heavy handed the moderation is. Interesting that comments advocatin for the literal murder of cops is allowed but saying "13 % of dogs commit 90% of crime" is a bannable offense.
Which domains have the least arbitrary moderation tools?
Also: Cops are generally pigs.
Or: To put things on topic. .World has made relatively unilateral decisions regarding the health of the domain. Which domains have a more democratic regard for what is and isn't appropriate? If lemmy is going to be a more poorly paid Reddit, I'd rather go to the place with more than 1 new commented-on post per hour.
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Congrats on not reading the post at all and writing something that literally has nothing to do with this thread.
It takes a special level of determination to be so completely clueless.
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Can we stop stickying these posts to the instance? We are super appreciative of the hard work you guys do, and you are super transparent. I personally trust you guys to make good decisions and this could be a support community sticky instead of an instance sticky.