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
When I signed up it was email + captcha. I cannot find even an option for voluntary 2FA.
I don’t know the details but people who wanted to work on Kbin and looked into it say that it is a much less developed platform overall (i.e. not fully a beta and more like still in alpha, e.g. lacking a true API), but it does offer benefits socially (to further disconnect from the originators of the Lemmy software) and to have another codebase that offers federation.
Lemmy is also more of alpha-quality software. The admin tools are pretty much non-existent. On my own instance, I’ve had to go into the database to fix issues a lot using straight SQL, and I have like ten users on the platform. One of those issues caused my admin account to no longer being able to log in, another caused the whole instance to be down.
Oh that’s interesting. Kbin lacks a formalized API (or at least it did - possibly this next update was going to address that and yet Ernst did say something about shifting priorities so maybe that’s bumped now) so I got the impression that Lemmy was further along, but yeah they both have a ways to go to catch up to the decade or so of work put into Reddit. Although the latter manages to find new & innovative ways to break itself constantly anyways so maybe both Kbin and Lemmy will meet it somewhere in the middle sooner than we might think? :-P (and yet slower than most people would like I’m sure:-D)
Yeah it seems like it’s grown organically from a POC, which I think is sort of what Lemmy did too. I feel like this concept is ripe for a platform which has been designed from the start then implement.