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founded 2 years ago

Kbin is currently designed to encourage brigading. The fix is easy. (kbin.social)

submitted 2 years ago by 10A@kbin.social to c/kbinMeta@kbin.social

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The current default "Homepage" value is "All". That makes sense for users with zero subscribed magazines, so they see something.

But for users with one or more subscribed magazines, the default value for "Homepage" needs to be "Subscriptions".

That's partially just because subscriptions mean little if the default frontpage ignores them. But there's a more important reason than that.

The current situation is that posts in m/Conservative are heavily downvoted, and barely upvoted. (Whatever your politics may be, consider if this was happening to you.) As more ex-redditors join, this problem is likely to worsen.

Eventually moderators need better controls, to say things like "Only members can vote", etc.

But for now, a very easy fix is to change the default value of "Homepage" to be "Subscriptions". Of course, "All" should still be a selectable option for those who prefer it.

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[–] pasci_lei@kbin.social 0 points 2 years ago (1 children)

@10A Or people just don’t want to see it. It is not brigading. As I don’t want people putting photos of their masculine genitals in my eyes, I don’t want to read about conservatism in my /all or /sub. Do whatever you want on this site, but don’t complain when people disagree. That’s called opinion.

[–] 10A@kbin.social 0 points 2 years ago (1 children)

That's my point, @pasci_lei. It's natural to downvote something you dislike. And the site's set up to show everyone everything by default. So any community breaking with the hivemind is naturally downvoted by users who are not members of that community.

[–] Echutaa@kbin.social 1 points 2 years ago

The whole point of a voting system is to do exactly what your trying to stop. If you don’t want people to vote on your posts maybe you should find a platform that doesn’t use a voting system.

[–] Xuerian@kbin.social 0 points 2 years ago (1 children)

This level of control is generally handled at the instance level.

If you want to host a magazine and control interactions on it, host your own instance.

[–] 10A@kbin.social 0 points 2 years ago (1 children)

There should only be one instance IMHO. And it should be able to support widely diverse communities.

[–] Xuerian@kbin.social 0 points 2 years ago (1 children)

kbin is part of the Fediverse. It is one instance of many.

I draw your attention to the sidebar:

Create your own instance

Clone repo and develop fediverse

Several communities who have more difficult interactions with others have already followed this route.

[–] 10A@kbin.social 0 points 2 years ago (1 children)

Encouraging fracturing into factions does no good for anyone. The internet needs a frontpage, and for years that was reddit. Now it seems to be kbin, maybe. Under the hood it may be a distributed system, but in practice normal people want a single website where a wide diversity of topics and opinions is embraced and protected.

[–] Xuerian@kbin.social 0 points 2 years ago (1 children)

Maybe, but it won't be kbin, or other Fediverse sites.

It's a common enough opinion to want one site to handle everything, but that's not how this is set up.

[–] 10A@kbin.social 0 points 2 years ago (1 children)

Honestly I think it is. Much as the underlying architecture expects federation, each instance competes in a market of commoditized goods, which leads to coalescence. So if the fediverse thrives at all, it will be with one giant instance. Perhaps there'll always be a few other tiny instances for nerds (I use the word lovingly) who value that sort of thing, but normal people don't understand the concept of an "instance", and just want to show up at a .com to feast on data.

At any rate, even if you're right about federation, any social media service should seek to accommodate a wide diversity of ideas, opinions, and perspectives.

[–] hellequin67@lemmy.fmhy.ml 0 points 2 years ago (1 children)

They don't really need to understand the concepts of an instance within the federation system because ultimately you join whatever instance you want and search and then you can subscribe to anything you want it doesn't matter whether it's a one entire instance or one tiny instance in the federation.

[–] 10A@kbin.social 1 points 2 years ago

There are already many observable instances (pardon the pun) of confusion, even among us early adopters. Time will tell if you're right or if I am.