Yes, refreshing solves it - despite it being called the “login bug”, you do not actually have to log in again - thanks for making sure that people know:-). It seems that after some time - a minute? - has passed, it has already forgotten who you are, and it needs to be reminded again. But it’s annoying b/c who reads a post, all the comments on it, and writes out a response, all in under one minute!? (on a mobile screen no less, with those keyboards) And if you write a second comment, it will happen again. And again, and again, forever - at least it is predictable:-P.

The Notifications issue is pretty debilitating though - you must have managed to avoid ever running afoul of it (it does seem fairly rare), but it blocks your ENTIRE Notifications, from EVERYONE, from every instance, every post, every comment you’ve ever done, and permanently increases your Notification count, which can never be viewed and thus never go back down to zero. I even tried going back through every post and comment that I have ever made in the last several months, but I still have a “1” there that I cannot ever view (b/c once the moderator of another instance removes it - which btw Kbin lacks any moderation tools at all iirc - you cannot view the post anymore, hence you cannot view the comment of the person who replied to you, hence it is “unread”… forever). Eventually the situation that causes the error message will fall behind and you can view the newest page of results (but not the entire page on which the original comment occurs), but then the whole thing can happen again, and again, and again, each time burning your entire Notifications system all over again.

Not being able to receive Notifications almost defeats the point of a social media site?! And unlike the former issue, the latter still applies when accessing from a desktop computer. So I would not call that one a “minor” bug - it is more like a rarely occurring major one. I am glad that your own experience has been smoother than mine though:-).

Oooh, that is exciting! Yes I did not mention (my answer was already getting long-ish for social media) that the desktop experience is more or less perfectly fine, at least insofar as the first issue is concerned, but the notifications issue still applies (you must not have ever happened to comment on a post that was later removed by a mod on another instance? or else the issue could be sporadic, who knows:-D), and anyway a social media website that suffers such severe accessibility issues from a mobile device could definitely be a factor in causing a drop in number of active users… It will get better over time, but as it currently stands, it is far from perfect. (Though I’m still here:-P)

On my desktop I almost never have any issues at all. Same browser, different OS (Android vs. Mac) seems to make the difference. The first issue is often called the “login bug”, and all of these issues are widely known and discussed. But yeah, ymmv:-).

I get that it was released too soon, which is why I would have liked to try Lemmy, except then I will not get notifications (specifically Messages) from my old account. There are a LOT of rough edges still, all around the Fediverse.

Which is my answer to the OP’s question: fixing those should definitely help retain people:-).

Content ofc, but also I’m on Kbin, and the software here is atrocious. 100% of the time after like a minute goes by while I read a post and read the comments and then want to upvote/boost or write a comment, it asks me to re-login on a mobile Firefox. Also, if I comment on something and someone responds, but then a moderator removes the entire post on another instance, it breaks my entire Notifications - not just that singular one, but the entire process of receiving notifications for anything I say (the good news is that it only breaks the one page that it occurs on, so if I make enough other comments it will eventually fall behind the curve, but that’s still a whole page of notifications that I will never be able to see, ever). Also there is no API at all. Also… well, you get the idea.

At this point, I would move to Lemmy except… account migration is a lie. I already asked people to follow me from Reddit to Kbin, and I’m not doing that again.

You will be baked, and then there will be cake.

That is the saddest part of all for me: mods pour in their hearts to build up a place, and in return? Well, you said it:

Mostly we just got yelled at for “censorship” when someone was banned for being an ass or totally off-topic.

The love is not returned, nor was it ever going to be - nor was that the point of offering in any case, really. So now it is time to turn to planting different seeds that are more likely to yield better results. :-) So long as Huffman was ultimately in control, that was never going to be fully possible over there, b/c you’d be constantly fighting that system. The same one that kept doing things to hide the sidebar, hide the “Rules” for each community, encourage posting to an extreme degree and yet discourage searching by making it difficult to perform and the results pathetic afterwards anyway: you can’t turn away the tide when it has the full force of the entire ocean behind it.

Over here, things are not as refined atm as within the walled garden, but we like it better that way:-P. Here, we are truly free:-).

The problem, as I understand it, is that a company has no legal responsibility to NOT kill people. It’s ONLY task is to make money… and this is what Huffman, and more importantly even those controlling his strings behind him, are trying to do. If a few fathers, mothers, children, and maybe several adjoining households all burn up in flames as a result of bad advice given on the website, that only matters insofar as it can legally be tied back to them. Hence, the guy doing the testing of train wheels was literally FIRED for doing his job properly, as his managers were all trying to look good for their own bosses without bothering to actually BE good, b/c that takes a lot more investment.

And there are so very, VERY many stories like that. One that sticks in my mind is a famous tax prep company that predated upon returning soldiers and college students, which eventually was caught for their intentional predatory tactics (which they outright bragged about in internal company communications, looking down on those suckers who trusted them) and faced major consequences, but the thing is: the CEO that did it moved to some tropical location in the world (Greece if I am not mistaken), and then like a decade passed before the system could catch up to “punish” the corporation. So retirees who trusted their life savings to a variety of investments including that company with a solid reputation were burned, but the actual guy who did it was long gone. So long as people like Huffman, Bezos, Musk, Eisner and the like are playing with OUR money, OUR time & vounteer efforts, OUR knowledge, etc., they seem to feel very free to gamble (others not so much: not every company is evil, but some are, and the lack of justice to reign them in is very damaging to society). The risk for them is only very slight - what? they won’t make money as quickly as they otherwise would, leaving their investments sitting in a bank to earn interest? - and the consequences for failure, even for literal crimes, are virtually nill, whenever those can fall onto some OTHER, future CEO, rather than themselves.

And in this case, if someone burns down their house while tinkering, that is not Reddit’s fault, the lawyers will argue. Technically that is even true. More to the point, it is simply not a priority for them, any longer: having built up that reputation, they are now switching focus to exclusively looking to monetize it, prior promises be damned, and to the detriment of future visitors trusting in the old reputation.

I do not own a home or did anything related so I never bothered to visit your sub, but I can see where you provided a service, and want to thank you for that. For while it lasted, it was a good thing to have offered. Now… fuck spez, but I hope you find your way forward. You deserve peace after what Reddit put you through:-). Yes, people may literally die, but that will always be true in a large variety of ways (of old age if nothing else - sorry if I seem flippant but to clarify I am seriously saying that there is only so much any one person can do about that aspect that is part of the nature of the universe itself), and there is literally nothing you can do about it now: I hope you can find a way to leave that behind, and move forward to do other things. Which I see in the other comment that you will - excellent!:-P

Then I must say thank you once again for your service!!! :-D This time looking forward rather than backwards, as the need now (for Lemmy and even more so Kbin) is more technical than social, so it makes absolutely perfect sense to pivot, to use a different approach to meet that different need.

I would wish for you that you feel no guilt at all over what you were forced to leave behind: the way I see it (upon reflection, now I mean, not that I foresaw it or anything:-D), Reddit was always bound to fall, b/c it was always beholden to corporate interests, which means it was always going to be sold off in an IPO, which was thus always going to end up in the hands of some kind of Musk or Eisner or Bezos or some such, eventually - that is just a given, these days, unfortunately it seems:-(.

So it was fun while it lasted, but now it is time to build something more permanent and stable, to last for the future. I cannot do that myself right now, but you can and you will be, and that fills me with pride that more kind-hearted people are stepping up to answer that call!:-D The funny part is that moderation is needed far less here than it ever was on Reddit, so I hope you know what I mean when I say that “Reddit has died; long may Reddit yet live” (b/c that gives a place for the trolls to go, hopefully bothering us less over here!:-P although that state will not last forever ofc… yet Lemmy and hopefully eventually Kbin will be better able to handle it, as you and others continue to take it forward)

money

=> short-term profits, ftfy

It is not. The mere fact that someone is likely to get some info wrong is not a fact that is in question, only the likelihood of its occurrence is, and quite frankly neither you nor I are qualified to know how often such posts were submitted and rejected, but I have a hunch that the former mods of those exact subs just might?

It reminds me of the story where a guy was fired b/c he refused to lie and state that the train wheels were okay when in fact they were overheating (this was in the USA but probably similar stories happen in most countries, so really is much more broadly applicable). This was back in February of this year iirc. Now we know that many people have died as a result of derailments since then - and potentially worse yet, some will suffer illnesses for an entire lifetime and extremely possibly (even likely, even certain if I am not mistaken) for another generation or few from now, as a result of the carcinogens released into those areas.

Again, for emphasis: NOW we know that, but even back THEN, it still would have been a true fact that “train derailments are more likely than they were in the past, b/c of the reduction in safety controls”. We did not need to wait for people to die to be able to believe that, it was always true, and imagine a wonderful world where nobody at all had to die, b/c having seen the reduction in safety controls, someone acted and placed new controls in place that prevented it.

The fact here is that info obtained from Reddit is less “safe” than it used to be. Hopefully nobody has to die to prove that conclusively. Ofc all info on the internet should be subjected to scrutiny, but not everyone is so cautious, and moreover, “transitions” especially can be harsh, i.e. from a resource (e.g. a particular sub) that had developed an EARNED reputation for providing only safe info, to now where the sub has the same name, but has a totally different internal structure, with fewer to no safety controls inside.

That is my two cents anyway, fwiw.

Thank you so much for your service. I was a mod of a tiny gaming sub and so got only the barely taste of what you must have experienced daily. In my case we argued endlessly (& unfortunately sometimes toxically) which game mechanics are “better” to take advantage of, while you are over there dealing with literally potential life-and-death situations! (edit: oh, well it at least is true for some mods, even if not you, but I still thank you for all your efforts nonetheless!:-P) (I hoped that during a pandemic I was at least helping people deal emotionally with being indoors all the time, plus just in general trying to encourage good behavior within society, but it is nowhere near the same I am sure:-P) I can only imagine the stress you had to go through here during the fall of Reddit, but I do not have to imagine that feeling of burn-out: most mods actually who really truly care about their communities only last a handful of years if that (I think I read somewhere that the average was like 1-2 years).

You deserve peace, and maybe you’ll find some other way to contribute to your community - in fact you definitely will, though it may not be on the internet next time:-). Also, I noticed that a lot of the stressful situations I encountered were due to Reddit changing its nature YEARS before Huffman did this recent fiasco - it encouraged people to speak rather than listen, e.g. to perhaps ask for recipes rather than do a search for pre-existing ones. An additional post = an additional metric to count and potentially an additional advertisement to display, while a search showing “canned” results (hehehe pun intended:-P) did not gather them as much profit, but then the former added to your workload whereas the latter would not, so a great deal of the problems that mods faced were issues of Reddit’s own devising, I think. At least in quantity if not in quality.

But also in quality too b/c it changed the very focus away from finding facts and towards encouraging the lonely to speak with others, in a manner in which “facts” can take a backseat to that human connection… which can get some people killed in the process.:-(

So I definitely understand why you would want to distance yourself from all of that. Me too. The need will be met in some other way - maybe via books, magazines, or websites with only vetted authors allowed, or perhaps with disclaimers added to every submission, and maybe a paid curation staff, or even AI tools scanning for common misinformation specific to that genre, I don’t know. But in any case, I did want to thank you for your own efforts. I have no interest in any of those communities so never once went to any of those, but I do like to see people volunteering their time to help other human beings:-).

When asked for comment, Reddit’s director of corporate, policy, and safety communications, Gina Antonini, said via email:

Sounds like none of my problem, tho it sure would suck to be you, bi!ches! (essentially)

“Reddit” is dead. It remains to be seen what, if anything, will replace it. e.g. where did those exact mods go, who were mentioned in the article? A Fediverse location, if they can stand all the bugs here? Or nowhere, if they were too shaken to want to devote their time to some other place? Or will they go back even, seeing >95% of their communities refusing to leave Reddit (until it literally kills them of botulism ofc)? Only time will tell…

Delish…

Actually, this is the best argument I’ve heard so far as to why he should change it to X :-P

Flush

I suspect you are very correct:-P.

Articles that mention kbin though are extremely few and far between. I think I’ve only seen it twice actually - I just posted one of them separately, and there the author does mention it while explaining basically that Lemmy is better.

Kbin is like this best non-Lemmy fediverse instance that you’ve never heard of, for the average person:-).

Somebody who works at a company that produces articles like that mentioned how the sponsor of the list always goes at the top - hence why the next option works so hard to say that kbin is not as good as the original Lemmy - while everything else is placed there to make the original one look good.

Like, who wouldn’t look fantastic when compared to 4chan!? :-P

Plus isn’t there a link to donate to the original developers on all Lemmy instances? The “Support Lemmy” one I mean, unless an admin has modified the source code to remove that I suppose, and continue to do so each time they receive an update. That seems to bother many people as well, even being on a different instance that the original creators do not administer personally.

This article is posted from me with a kbin account, on a kbin magazine:-). The true beauty of the fediverse is that you need not care - like if I had a gmail account and you had a yahoo one, you could still receive the message despite being on entirely different servers.

Various Lemmy instances are part of the fediverse, and run the Lemmy code (various scripting languages - Rust, Actic, Diesel, Infero & Typescript). Each admin can do whatever, like modify the sourcecode, mess with their personal databases, etc., which can lead to different Lemmy instances using different versions of the sourcecode, which happened a few weeks ago and led to problems connecting when a new version became incompatible with the old.

Kbin is not a Lemmy instance though - it is a completely different implementation built from the ground up, in PHP & PostgreSQL - but it still uses ActivityPub so it can share with Lemmy the same as any Lemmy instance could. Meta (Facebook) will similarly implement ActivityPub in some manner and so also be able to communicate across the Fediverse. (Also as people are saying, Kbin also has implementation to share with Mastodon too while the Lemmy code does not.)

Unless an individual Lemmy - or a Kbin - instance wants that to not happen, i.e. to defederate, which is a whole other matter.

So:

• instance = a particular machine (lemmy.ml or lemmy.world or beehaw or whatever);
• Lemmy = code, or Kbin = different code, running on that instance, affecting what/how/etc.;
• fediverse = everything that shares messages, like if one day a decade from now Reddit (may the spez have been fucked over MANY times before that day:-P) was forced to adopt ActivityPub and become a member in order to stay relevant, then it would become a part of it as well;
• defederate = a specific blocking of messages from one instance to another (not necessary 2-way)

So if you thought of yourself as a Lemming/Lemmon/whatever before reading this comment, it is probably better to start thinking of yourself in terms of being a fedizen now - a member of the wider fediverse. You always were, you just did not know that yet:-).

Tbf I think I forgot the former myself. It is a rather nice feature in theory but I think one that I do not make much use of, personally.

I do not think I ever want to find out about the latter though, I mean first-hand:-P.

For one thing, stop using debit cards on the internet. Credit cards do not take the money out of your account first, thus offering you an additional layer of protection, and many like Discover in the USA are known for offering $0 liability for unauthorized purchases. They can be more of a hassle to use like they may call your mobile number to check on a suspicious purchase, but at this point it seems you want that level of paranoia. Don’t miss a rent (or any important) payment bc you have nothing left in your debit account to work with! (Even if it is added back quickly, will it be handled quickly enough?)