For Amusement Purposes Only.

Changeling poet, musician and writer, born on the 13th floor. Left of counter-clockwise and right of the white rabbit, all twilight and sunrises, forever the inside outsider.

Seeks out and follows creative and brilliant minds. And crows. Occasional shadow librarian.

#music #poetry #politics #LGBTQ+ #magick #fiction #imagination #tech

  • 10 Posts
  • 78 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 24th, 2023

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  • "I met a traveller from an antique land,
    Who said—“Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
    Stand in the desert. . . . Near them, on the sand,
    Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
    And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
    Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
    Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
    The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed;
    And on the pedestal, these words appear:
    My name is Spezymandias, Admin of Kings;
    Look on my Reddit, ye Mighty, and despair!
    Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
    Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare
    The lone and level sands stretch far away.”





  • @inkican - Agreed - Kbin will live or die based on its content. One thing that should be mentioned to those on the fence about contributing is how powerful Kbin is as a publishing platform in comparison to either Mastodon or Lemmy - this is one of the few places where you can post and get your content on both style of instances.

    There are a couple of factors degrading contribution that could be alleviated by more stringent moderation - particularly the bot networks and downvote spammers. I’ve seen a couple of instances where folks have gotten bullied out of trying to run a forum, and Kbin’s flaws in blocking (a blocked user can still downvote your posts and message you), make ongoing harassment an issue for contributors. No one wants to submit something to have it shat upon.

    The other factor is that a number of users set up magazines, grabbing popular names from Reddit, then did nothing to maintain them. I think removing or reassigning these ghost magazines to interested moderators would go a long way in improving the content quality here now that the dust has settled from the Reddit collapse.

    From a moderator standpoint, if you’re looking to expand the reach of your magazine and get new subscribers (and thus, hopefully, more contributors), one thing I’ve found that helps expand the audience is using a Lemmy account to crosspost, as the cross-posting functionality is built into that architecture and provides a link back to the original. This both expands the range of the content, and draws subscribers from Lemmy that normally wouldn’t see you on Kbin to subscribe to your magazine. Mastodon is similar - a single supportive account there boosting magazine content expands your reach dramatically.

    Side note: I run @13thFloor and wanted to say if you or your users ever feel like cross-posting our scifi content from there, or cross-posting your content to our magazine, feel free to do so - we fucking love scifi over here.






  • In my experience, they’re split between the Mastodon side of the Fediverse and the Lemmy side. On Kbin, which bridges both, and where you can follow users, you end up with a pretty rich feed if you follow enough people and places - I’ve got about 100 communities subbed and 300+ users and my feed is better than Reddit’s ever was.

    Another thing to note is that your instance benefits from your discovery - it doesn’t start indexing posts from another instance until someone from the first instance subscribes to it. This means a lot of smaller instances get lost in the shuffle, but they’re out there - you just have to find them. I’ve noted that this is much more difficult to do on my Lemmy account than my accounts with other software, so you might benefit from an instance jump if things feel dry on your current account.








  • This is why when a social media site gets past a certain size, the admin team and the moderation need to be clearly defined, and siloed from each other’s core responsibilities, so the admin team focuses on running the site and the mod team focuses on making it sing.

    Looks like the people actually moderating clearly had a handle on the situation. The admin was clearly overworked and didn’t agree with the direction the community was taking, and made a quick decision that was poorly thought out.

    The reason admins are admins is because they’re good at running machines. You can turn a machine off if it’s broken, and change how it runs with the flip of a switch.

    A community requires a much different approach, and never, no matter how wise the decision, reacts well to being told how to act. It takes a different skill set to properly moderate and run a community than it does to run a server - in fact most admins I know make notoriously bad moderators (myself included, although I’m no longer an admin).

    To be honest, the admin here is acting exactly like your stereotypical libertarian tech-bro computer guy who pays lip service to the left while pocketing the more palatable pieces of the philosophy of the right. I’ve worked with a lot of them in tech. LGBTQ+ is hard stretch for these guys in general - they’ll declare gays have rights but won’t march in Pride, use slurs when in like company, and generally see LGBTQ+ as a lifestyle choice and not an inescapable biological state of being.

    They don’t understand that it’s not a switch you can flick on and off.

    Just glad I’m on the Fediverse where this particular admin’s meltdown doesn’t matter too much, but I have a feeling Squabblr’s fate is going to be the same as Voat (which was cool for about two weeks before the alt-right overran it).



  • The sun always shines brighter on the day you leave an abusive partner. Welcome to what the internet was like before centralization - a playground of imagination, unfettered thought, and unbridled creativity. Congratulations on becoming part of the renaissance that is the Fediverse and breaking free from the stench of the Spezticle.


  • I’m hopeful - we’re starting to get a lot of traffic over here from redditfugees. @PoppinKREAM showed up a little while ago, and that’s a clear sign that the best content creators are making the move.

    Because I like to bag on Reddit, here’s what I think is happening:

    Supposedly they were taking down /r/place today, in the past that’s involved an infrastructure change. They are also getting rid of coins and awards and replacing them with some other bullshit, so that’s likely to break the site too. That plus the ongoing API changes and Reddit’s history of fractalized spaghetti code plus an angry userbase that includes a lot of anon and 4-chan members…

    …well, lemme just say that you couldn’t pay me enough to be a Reddit admin right now.