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
Quick reminder that kbin was still fairly early in development when the reddit exodus began and sped things up much sooner than anticipated. A few teething issues are to be expected and Ernest, the dev, has been open and communicating about what’s going on.
Given that kbin is written in PHP, I honestly don’t see much of a bright future for it. It’s not like hobbyist developers line up to write PHP.
For me the tell was the lack of an API.
Modern PHP is pretty pleasant once you learn the syntax IMO. It’s not 2005 any more
And yet whenever programming languages come up, Rust comes out as a more popular whereas PHP is the “My job requires it but it’s not what I’d do for fun” language.
Far more people already know PHP than Rust, though. They’re also very different languages. While the syntax for Rust is nicer than other languages used for systems programming, there are people who question whether it is really appropriate for a web app. Certainly nobody questions whether that’s what PHP is good for.
The system is based on the bleeding edge of the PHP stack, using PHP 8.3x and Symfony 6 as the framework. There’s plenty of devs out there, especially symfony ones. The main issues I’ve found is pulling in people who are interested in the ActivityPub side of the project.
I think a few more months and most of the user-facing UI/UX issues will be improved. The moderation side, along with quality of life admin tools are definitely lacking though.