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
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.
Devs learning in real time why social media (especially decentralized) should be designed moderation first in design.
Seems like a very reasonable compromise to deal with the situation.
Thanks again for the transparency and keeping everyone in the loop.
Hopefully this is resolved quickly. We are stronger together.
Users can see the removed communities here: https://lemmy.world/modlog?page=1&actionType=ModRemoveCommunity
It looks like news@ and worldnews@ were spared, however both now show no moderators attached to them which feels a bit off. ( https://lemmy.world/c/news@kbin.social and https://lemmy.world/c/worldnews@kbin.social )
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.
Good transparency. Thank you for your work!
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.
Understandable, have a nice day.
So that's why the modlogs were going ballistic. Oh, well, I hope things are fixed soon.
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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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.
I'm worried kbin development is stalling.
Not the first time Kbin caused issues...
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?
Understandable, but sucks. Hope it won't last long.
That's a shame, but it is what needs to be done
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?
i went to kbin the other day its not cool lile lemmy
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.
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?
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.