Very cool! If you want to post a link or message me, I’d love to check out your gemlog. I thought this piece was really interesting.

I’m just getting into self hosting, and the “storage waste” of all this duplicated content has been on my mind a lot, but I hadn’t really considered the energy costs or the feasibility for folks with data caps, slow Internet connections, and so on.

I absolutely love the idea of federated applications. It would be great if they someday became the dominant way of running things. But, even if we could get every user interested, I haven’t really put in enough thought or research to know whether running these applications at huge scales would be feasible or desirable. It’s great to see folks talking about the problems we’ll run into and how we can be better than current big tech companies about considering the impact of our choices.

Anyway, thanks for the well-written and insightful piece.

Not completely on topic, but, in the spirit of reducing and changing consumption, some of you may be interested in the Gemini protocol. It’s supports a version of the web that’s simpler by design and focused primarily on text-first posts. Folks on the network like to compare it to the early web. I recently learned about it from this tutorial.

There’s not a ton there right now, and it’s not going to replace the web as we know it, but it’s worth a look just for fun.

The protocol is compatible with ActivityPub, so you can also have federated Gemini apps. I haven’t tried out tootik because microblogging isn’t really my thing, but it’s interesting that it exists.

@insomniac_lemon It ended up being super simple – my profile was hiding the 18+ posts by default. All I had to do was uncheck a box, and everything appeared again. Kind of a clever way by the spammers of getting around some moderation if it was intentional. It sounds like the kbin devs might consider changing the defaults on that for moderators to avoid this in the future.

The issue has been reported: https://codeberg.org/Kbin/kbin-core/issues/1377

Let me know (or post there directly) if I missed or misstated anything.

Looking at the modlog, the ones you removed were posts (microblogs). Relevant to the issue?

Nice catch!

With your direct links, I was able to see those threads. I attempted to delete two of them, and the modlog shows that I was successful. I’ve left the third for now as evidence for any developers who care to look.

Regarding “unban”, I’m hoping that’s just a bug in how things are printed. The ban does show up in the moderation log.

Okay, thanks for your patience. I think we’ve hit the limit of what we can do at this point.

Nothing changed with your downvotes or comments. Going through kbin.social/u/{user}, I was able to view and delete PellyNews’s threads. I am unable to do anything with the other two users. Even though I can see they exist, the relevant threads do not show up for me under their profiles.

I’ll file the issue and keep just deleting what I can until things are sorted out on the backend. Thanks again for your help on this.

Using those usernames/profiles to look at the posts directly, I don’t suppose there is anything that might detail what is going on?

Can you get me the full usernames including domains (e.g., PellyNews@blah.blah)? More info couldn’t hurt when compiling the issue report.

The only thing I can think of is that maybe you are somehow “subscribed” to other domains because you follow some magazine/community there, and I am not, so the posts don’t show up for me. That doesn’t really make sense, but neither does anything else.

I did do a little searching for terms like “delete”, “cache”, and even “different”, and didn’t see this exact issue anywhere. The closest I found was this: https://codeberg.org/Kbin/kbin-core/issues/875 . It doesn’t seem like a federation issue, though, since we are on the same instance. But, if you wanted to experiment further, you could try either downvoting or commenting on the spam to see whether that makes it visible to me.

Ouch, what a bug. I knew some of the moderation wasn’t being federated, but I can’t imagine how a kbin user isn’t seeing the latest version.

To be clear, you see the spam when logged in, then don’t see it logged out, then see it again when logged in again?

I don’t see it regardless of whether I’m logged in or not. Also, I don’t think I’ve ever been able to see it because I don’t see the posts in a quick look through the moderation log.

Would you mind posting an issue about this? https://codeberg.org/Kbin/kbin-core/issues Or, I can do it if you don’t feel like it and don’t mind me using your screenshots. If you do post it, just please emphasize that this makes it impossible for moderation to happen because the moderator literally cannot see the posts.

Thanks again for trying things out and sharing your info!

EDIT: I should have started with “thanks”, by the way. I appreciate the response.

This is so weird. I don’t see any of those first four posts. I see the fifth (I’m actually the downvote), and I agree it’s sketchy, but I’m trying to get just the absolute worst out for now.

Also, I have two posts you don’t have. I’m viewing this directly in Firefox – are you in an app of some kind?

@shazbot @insomniac_lemon To be clear, you’re talking about /m/food on kbin.social? And particularly the threads side?

I’m the mod for that community, and I’m not seeing any amazon links, gummies, etc. I’m usually pretty good about deleting those within at most 24 hours of them being posted. But, if you’re still seeing them, either there’s a glitch or I’m doing something wrong.

Right now, I’m seeing 51 threads total, and the newest one is a month old (tagliatelle link). Are you seeing something different?

I agree with you about the questionable food blogs and probably-ai-generated content. I’ve been on the fence about whether to delete those, but I decided to let it slide and hope that upvotes/downvotes would take care of it. Also, I didn’t get any user reports about them, so that was another metric to consider. For now, I’m just doing the absolute minimum of deleting obvious drug spam and amazon links (or, at least, I thought I was). If you notice anything especially egregious (where on earth do you see this 18+ spam nonsense?!) and could take the time to report it, I would really appreciate it.

FYI, I tried the process you mentioned, I’m not sure it’s as simple as your post implies (if that process could be called “simple” anyway). I’ve tried a few different orders of “report, delete, ban”, and clicked the “ban” button in at least two spots (one that was directly in the feed and another that comes up under Reports in the magazine panel). No matter what I do, it always shows up as “unban” in the mod log. However, there is a list of bans under the magazine panel, and that does show the accounts as banned.

So, I’m really not sure what is going on here. Maybe it’s just a problem with the log and not with the banning itself?

Anyway, thanks again for pointing this out. Hopefully someone can figure out what is going on.

What the… ugh. I’ve been doing this for months. Thanks for letting me know.

If you like those, using cdr within zsh is amazing. It automatically keeps track of where you’ve been, and you can set up tab completion to show the history with a number next to each directory for easy switching.

Iirc, that was my main reason for switching to zsh a few years ago

I love ranger. Mostly I just use the basic shell, but when I’m doing a lot of random file transfer, seeing what I’m doing with ranger is nice.

It’s super fast and intuitive if you’re already into vim and vim-style keybindings.

Fair enough. Thanks again

Bummer. Thanks for the link, though! I’ll keep an eye on the issue.

In the meantime, do you know whether it would work for me to add a federated user as a moderator? Or, for their instance owner to allow them to moderate a federated community?

I’m not sure how the technical aspects work here. I know it’s not a desirable solution, but a band-aid would be nice for the users from federated instances.

There’s a discussion about this on lwn (relevant part starting around this comment). My understanding is like @fayo said: you can pull this “trick” of releasing their source code, but only once (assuming they catch you).