Hey kbinMeta.
Given the news that beehaw.org are defederating from two of the largest Lemmy instances due to issues with moderation, I thought it may be worth @ernest considering closing registrations here, for a while at least.
I’ve seen that a handful of other kbin instances have been spun up, however, kbin.social currently dwarfs their user numbers. kbin.social is currently sat at over 28,000 registered users, with the next highest, fedia.io sitting at around 3,000 users. I may be incorrect on this, but as far as I’m currently aware, @ernest is the only admin, I believe he may have mentioned that he’s taken a couple of additional trusted users on board, but at this time, I can’t find receipts to back that up, however, I am aware of the immense pressure that @ernest is in to keep things not only running smoothly, but also moving forward.
The workload overwhelmed me, and I couldn’t read all your messages.
This is in relation to account deletion requests alone, and understandably, this explosion in popularity and userbase was not only unexpected for @ernest, but possibly also for the platform itself:
Apparently fedia.io have already disabled open resgistrations due to usercount, (although that may be unverified, as this post from the fedia.io admin doesn’t suggest that, but still food for thought.). [This is not the case, they just aren’t federating, as confirmed by Jerry, thanks! I think Jerry’s comment is still very relevant to the topic at hand, however.]
Now, I’ve already seen a handful of comments denigrating beehaw.org from some of the defederated site users, as well as users local to kbin.social whose accounts were made after the defederation. This is more than likely to result in kbin.social also being defederated from beehaw.org, if not others. I completely understand that this is the nature of the fediverse, and that no one instance is going to be completely open with every other instance, however, I think it’s worth considering that we “have our own house in order”, namely in the shape of more site-wide moderation, instead of keeping the floodgates open for every reddit refugee or otherwise.
I’m well aware that many may disagree with this, but I think it’s something to consider.
Edit: Edited title of post. I just want to clarify, I don’t mean close registrations for good, just while things calm down a little bit / ernest has chance to get a solid moderation / admin team in place.
From what I have seen so far, I am confident he wants to and will eventually do this, he is just completely overwhelmed right now.
I would encourage you to read his recent “apology” post to get a sense of how he is approaching his role as admin. So far, he appears to be saying and doing all the right things from my perspective.
Yup. I’ve had some interactions with him already and I read his apology post. Judging by how kbin is, the about pages, and his apology post, I have a feeling he’s “one of us” in the sense of being a tech-first, “free speech but no legal issues please”, and transparent admin. Everything I’ve seen from the guy makes me think kbin is in good hands.
His apology post is a bit silly because IMO there’s really nothing wrong (forking and reusing code is remarkably normal in software dev) but it seems the original code devs were upset about lack of credit/licensing? and so he posted transparently and is working to make things right. at least that’s my understanding (I didn’t dig into the drama there).
I have a feeling this “openness” is part of the ethos of ernest, as well as kbin as a whole. So I think the vibe we’re all getting here is accurate: essentially the classic ethos of Aaron Swartz (co-founder of reddit, creator of markdown and rss), or similar to Internet Archive’s ethos (tech-first, info, sharing knowledge).
In this sense I have a feeling that:
kbin will try to avoid closed signups as much as possible and keep things open (unless there’s a severe problem)
kbin will try to federate as much as possible with every instance
kbin will encourage platform neutrality allowing various ideas, discourse, beliefs, and views to be posted
kbin will try to stay on the legal side of things, removing illegal content if/when the need arises.
I guess we’ll see when he does get around to writing the ethos/manifesto post. But yes, the guy is clearly overworked and overwhelmed right now, so there’s definitely no rush. Dude’s doing a fantastic job so far.