Hi Ernest, any thoughts on whether kbin will be federating with threads or not?

Hey, a month ago I would have simply pressde the button and not thought too much about it. Now the situation looks completely different. I have bookmarked all the discussions I came across, and next week I will read every single post to have a complete picture. I owe you that.

However, we need to think about additional privacy features, as priorities have drastically changed in recent weeks, and I will have to carefully consider that. Now that I have dealt with infrastructure issues, I will focus on the most important matters.

My worry that many articles are going to have a biased take on the situation, or be coming from Mastodon etc. where things don't map up 1:1.

I moderate a medium-sized magazine here on Kbin (@Disneyland, about 264 subscribers here and a couple dozen elsewhere on the fediverse). You can't moderate a magazine from another instance, nor can you redirect a magazine somewhere else. This means I effectively must use Kbin.social, especially since I also mod the /r/Disneyland subreddit and have been redirecting people to our magazine for a month now.

I personally would like to see Threads here, if only because @disneyparks would be a nice fit to have automatically included in our microblog tab. I can't go to another instance that supports Threads because again - moderators can't be from different magazines. Now my options are basically "deal with it" or "abandon the community here".

It really sucks that there is a way that could make my magazine better by including actual official Disney sources in our Disney-themed magazine, but some people are afraid of EEE they are trying to stop that from anyone. I'd rather federate with Threads and allow users to individually block them if people so desire.

• If EEE is the worry, fight them at the "extend" step, not the "embrace" one.

• If mountains of spam is the worry - people have to manually follow people from other instances for those posts to federate to Kbin, so not every single account will magically pop up here on Kbin. It'll be accounts that people on Kbin have followed.

*Vice-versa, Threads is full of casual users who don't know much about the fediverse. Any Threads users interacting on Kbin are those who understand the fediverse and go out of their way to subscribe to Kbin magazines from Threads. We know from past history that these are going to be a minority; even within the fediverse, Mastodon is huge (and tech-savvy) but we see very few Mastodon folks posting to Kbin threads.

• If "Facebook is sucking up all my data" is the worry, they could do that anyway. The fediverse is open and public; they can easily set up a "shadow instance" that federates everywhere and slurps everything. They don't need Threads for that.

If people just don't want to see Threads users at all, making the block button defederate on the account level would be wonderful. If people choose to block Threads, then Threads users couldn't see them and vice versa. People who see Threads as a potential useful resource (myself, for the magazine I mod) would still be able to have that content in the community here on Kbin. Everyone's happy.

my magazine

and thus the entire issue with reddit. The glory of the fediverse is that there can be competition. You do not work for Disney, you do not own Disney. The community is not yours because you got to it first. If you want to own a Disney forum, start your own website.

We should not be allowing FB/IG to gain their foothold on the work of other people, yet again, so they can eventually take control once it's too late to stop them. Especially not because it would help your own ego and foothold on a community you do not own.

You can go start your own magazine on another instance if you wish. The presence of one does not preclude competition. Heck, you can even start another one here; we had similar subreddits on Reddit.

I am using "my magazine" as a colloquial term for "the magazine I moderate", obviously not as the term for "the magazine I own". I trust you know that and are arguing in bad faith.

Furthermore, I don't think you truly appreciate how much work moderating a community can be. While some powermods were on an ego trip, I literally was a mod for 1 "real" subreddit. I'd love to show you what moderating a subreddit with 500k subscribers really looks like. It gets bad. Gore, scat, porn, hate, bigotry, and trolling - you deal with it all. Death threats in modmail to boot. And we were just 500k subs! The former default subs have millions and they are far worse, I've been told.

It's a community for folks to discuss a single topic: the Disneyland Resort in Anaheim, CA. Not Hong Kong Disneyland, not Disneyland Paris, not Walt Disney World. Those have their own subreddits, with their own communities and their own mod team (plus /r/disneyparks). I wasn't associated with any of them outside of small formalities; I only got to know them during the blackout when we did look into coordinating our own site. If each mod team didn't do their job, each sub would be overrun with posts that don't fit the sub. We're constantly removing posts about WDW or Disneyland Paris or Shanghai Disneyland or whatever. We're constantly removing posts from people talking about general Disney stuff that doesn't have anything to do with the park.

It's a lot of work to curate a feed; we're constantly redirecting people to more appropriate places to talk about the things they're passionate about. If we miss some (which happens sometimes, even with AutoMod), the community generally comes in and downvotes the post (and sometimes insults the user). It's like posting a TikTok link to /r/YoutubeHaiku or a picture to /r/videos - we've laid out our rules and enforce them as written. That's what makes a good community with relevant content that makes you come back. Without a good mod team, a subreddit gets overrun with posts that don't fit the sub - you can see some of that here on Lemmy/Kbin already. This is both because mod tools are lacking (no AutoMod) and because people are changing instances as they see fit. @Starwars is abandoned, I think - the mod hasn't been active in weeks.

You say we should move off-site. There already a general-purpose forum for Disney; MiceChat. It's a classic forum, from a bygone age of the internet. People who aren't attached to a Reddit-like interface typically are on MiceChat, or one of the thousands of Disney Facebook groups. They're the largest Disney community on the internet.

We discussed running our own Disney-themed Kbin instance (like /r/StarTrek and /r/Android both did), that would be a federated competitor to MiceChat. The idea still appeals to me. But the fact of the matter is that we didn't have the time nor money to be admins. I have a full-time job (and yes, I actually used to work for Disney), and I don't have the legal know-how to host a website. On top of that - there are no ways to migrate a magazine here on Kbin, as I said earlier. We're effectively stuck here, since this is where we've been redirecting people for months.

I don't think you understand how little "ego" comes into any of this. It isn't worth moderating a community for "ego". I don't laugh maniacally when removing scat from a comments section or when telling people to make their post on /r/DisneyWorld instead. It's quite a bit of work to maintain a community of a decent size, and I think it's something you need to experience to understand.