I’ve had it take up to a week for a community to show up after I’ve searched for it.

Do note that you can’t currently message users on other instances from kbin. The button will still be there, but it will bring you back to the homepage. I believe Ernest said something about it being “unimplemented,” so I’m assuming cross-instance messaging will happen someday, but is probably not a high priority at the moment.

Thanks for the style! It makes the menus a lot easier to navigate. I for one would definitely appreciate “more” menu icons as well (whether as part of the same style or as a separate style) if you do decide to add them.

I probably would have enjoyed what little I did of Utopia much better with a guide. Half of my playtime was spent trying to figure out which button to press to get my current goal to pop back up on the screen again. (The other half was spent running around looking for an alternate source of carbon, because I got distracted while going out to mine for it and started mining other things that I didn’t actually need and promptly rendered myself unable to mine anything at all.)

So yeah, I think it’s safe to say that having something to refer to to see exactly what I should be doing at any given moment would be helpful for me. Thanks for the links.

And in fact people who who want to interact with the 140million ish Threads users currently have one option - join Threads. With federation I can communicate with Threads users without joining Threads.

What if the defederation happens in the other direction? Defederating an instance is a lot like banning a user, and I’m not sure if there are any mainstream social media sites that I haven’t heard abuse their ban system. If other instances start becoming more popular because people want to use them to talk to Threads, that gives Threads a lot of power over which of those instances are allowed to thrive. In the worst case scenario, it could easily kill an instance if too many of their users were there for Threads and Threads decides to cut them off.

A fediverse that is popular because it can talk to a centralized app doesn’t sound like a particularly healthy fediverse to me.

Is the microblog tab actually that important to most people, that the instance could become dependent on Threads for dominating it?

I don’t think it could put the entire instance in jeopardy, but personally I think the microblog tab has a lot of potential (there have already been strides to incorporate it more), and I’d feel a lot less positive about its possibilities if it were full of content from Threads.

When people go to Mastodon, Kbin, Lemmy, Firefish, Misskey, etc., they do so knowing they’re going to the fediverse. When people go to Threads, most do so because they have an Instagram account.

This is my main concern.

Personally, I don’t care if the fediverse grows. I just care what it grows into. The fediverse has a nice community at the moment because everybody on it made a conscious decision to be here and not somewhere else. Threads users will not have made that decision. Furthermore, they’ll outnumber the rest of us enough as to have no incentive to try and fit into the preexisting community here (which isn’t helped by the fact that they’ve already been their own isolated community for awhile).

I second all the suggestions except the currently reading/online one: in my experience, seeing “currently reading” statistics just makes dead places feel more dead. It’s also not a useful statistic: it doesn’t tell you how good a post is, or provide any information about the poster, or even show how popular it is (because you can’t really extrapolate about the average engagement from only one datapoint). You can’t do anything with the number.

@Hikiru Hi, this is just a note to let you know that I’ve removed you as moderator, since you abandoned the magazine and your accounts are inactive. If you’re still interested in being involved with moderation here, I’m happy to discuss it with you.

There’s a cosmetic issue I’ve been having with the script that this update doesn’t seem to have fixed: with the script enabled, even with all its features turned off, certain divs (which as far as I’ve found are all children of main, with both the section class and the content id) are being given the display:unset style. This 1) removes the background and 2) conflicts with the styling for .section to somehow create two bars along the left side of the element. Examples are on the “add new thread” page, the login page, and in almost every tab of the “magazine panel” moderation tool.

I tried looking for the issue in the script and couldn’t find anything that jumped out at me (I… also don’t know javascript, so it was a bit of a shot in the dark), but I’m as close to certain that it’s this script as it’s possible to be. I’m able to replicate the issue consistently across three different devices (Ubuntu/Linux Mint laptops and Android phone), running the script via the Tampermonkey extension in Firefox. (I saw that this had already been reported awhile back specifically for the login page and that you hadn’t been able to replicate it, so I’m trying to provide any device-specific information I can think of that might be relevant).

Anyway, I was pushed to finally bring up the issue today because although previously the issue has just been a minor visual annoyance, I just changed the background on one of my magazines to an image and now, with the script removing the nice solid background from behind the formatting icons on the new thread page, I can barely see them. :(

Yes, you do.

Successfully blocked the second two magazines about two minutes after this post but @news_us_politics is still giving me errors. It doesn’t seem to be particularly consistent.

@uspolitics. I’m half suspecting the error might be related to how many requests I’ve already made to block things recently, since I was having no issues going through the first couple of pages and blocking about half the magazines on them and now suddenly am encountering a bunch of errors? But I have no actual evidence for that.

Now @politics.

Currently getting an error trying to block @news_us_politics via the magazines page.

You can also connect to non-kbin sites, including Lemmy and Mastodon! They all use the same protocol to be able to talk to each other.

It’s usually easier to search via external sites (https://lemmyverse.net/ and https://browse.feddit.de/ are the ones I’ve been using). You’ll still have to manually copy over the magazine name in order to subscribe for it, but you’ll get a wider variety of results without having to go to each instance individually.

The Kbin Usability Pack userscript adds a bookmark feature: https://greasyfork.org/en/scripts/469597-kbin-usability-pack

Yeah, I installed a few drivers manually and then came across one that was, for some reason, only available via the newest kernel and not as a separate piece of software. I’d have updated the kernel before that one if I’d realised that it might have been able to fix my issues, but it hadn’t come up as a possible solution until then. If you do figure all that out before actually installing the os, you’ll probably have a better time than I did. :)

This is a rather old post, but given that you’ve not received any answers yet, I hope replying isn’t too inappropriate.

For the first question, I back up my files on a NAS using rsync. It’s a command-line solution, but I stored the command in a .desktop file to make an icon in my app list that I can just click to back everything up to the correct places. Makes it easy, and wasn’t too difficult to implement.

Your second question might depend on your hardware. I just set up a new laptop on linux mint and had to do significant amounts of troubleshooting, all of it involving the command line, because linux mint didn’t come with or know about most of the drivers required. If you’re using an older or more well-supported computer, it might work better out of the box. Most troubleshooting will probably be command-line, but there’s a lot of support out there for that if you need it.

App-wise linux mint has a fairly robust software manager (app store) with a wide variety of apps on it that, for the most part, don’t require a lot of troubleshooting. (I only recently switched over to mint from Ubuntu, and was impressed at how many apps you could access so easily, including a large variety of unofficial releases of software that isn’t officially available on linux). Unless you’re intent on building obscure software from source, installing and using applications should be fairly painless.

I can’t speak to the stability of mint, since I haven’t been using it for long enough. However, I used Ubuntu for five or six years and never had to reinstall it, so you could always look into Ubuntu if stability is important to you.