Arotrios

Yep - @morrow corrected me on that point. I should replace that statement with platforms (aka kbin to lemmy or mastodon to lemmy, etc)

That’s pretty cool - I wasn’t aware of that functionality - makes me want to investigate further. I’m wondering if the basis for the function is within the ActivityPub protocol, or if it’s a function built into the Lemmy code.

Speaking as someone who ran a set of public forums back in the early days of the internet, the number one thing I can suggest is don’t do it alone.

Alone, you’re one person arguing with hundreds of other people that your opinion is the right one. This burns out anyone but the most narcissistic assholes (I should know, being the latter). With a team, you get to deflect attacks that would be personally directed at you to the overall team while relying on their support to provide a unified front. Bullies generally target single individuals - they rarely go after groups.

This can be hard to build, and it often relies on a third party in the admin role to encourage the creation and unity of the mod team until it gets on its feet, often becoming part of the team in the early phases until it runs well on its own. A minimum of three people is usually what it takes to really make a community thrive cleanly.

Unfortunately, the fragmented nature of the Fediverse makes it difficult to build these kind of teams, as the mods have to be users on the same instance platform, and a small instance with only 20 users can end up with an enormous amount of content and commentary from users across the wider Fediverse. This, of course, ties into @hoodlem 's comment regarding bandwidth costs for instance owners - the speed at which your traffic can scale is exponential, and you need to be prepared for it from both a financial and staffing standpoint.

One solutions that could help would be to have an ActivityPub login standard that would allow logged-in users from one instance to moderate a community on another when given permissions. A cross-platform private messaging standard would help here as well. Of course, both of these functions would have to be encrypted and secured to prevent cross-site attacks, but they could be steps in unifying the Fediverse without centralizing it.

EDIT: as pointed out in the comments, you can mod across instances, but it doesn’t look like you can mod across platforms yet.

Nope don’t feel bad - it’s totally understandable. Kbin is new, so the documentation is lacking.

Almost all content on Kbin, including users, has a follow / subscribe button in the sidebar beneath the magazine or user description. There’s also a block button. These buttons can be used on almost all Kbin content, so it’s very powerful - after spending about a week adding subs, my Kbin feed is far more active than Reddit was, even at its height.

Kbin breaks down your content into Magazines, Microblogs, and Threads. Magazines are synonymous with Communities on Lemmy, or subreddits on reddit. Microblogs are where the Mastodon Toots go, and how you interact with instances based on that architecture. Threads are just like posts on reddit, and can be text only, a link, a pic, or a video (although it seems video is still under development).

The best place to start getting subscriptions are in the magazines section:

https://kbin.social/magazines

…which lists all of the currently federated communities. Putting a domain search into the search bar will bring up all magazines in the instance on that domain:

https://kbin.social/magazines?q=lemmy.world

This domain searching is extremely powerful, especially when you use the domain section (which can be hard to find) - you can get a breakdown of any domain currently federated on kbin by using the following link:

https://kbin.social/d/lemmy.world

…where you’d put the domain you’re interested in in place of ‘lemmy.world’. You can then subscribe to the entire instance through that feed, or block it f you’d like. This also works for standard domains as well:

https://kbin.social/d/imgur.com

So it will scan all content and links for that domain that’s federated on kbin.social.

Tag searching is also another undocumented gem, as it searches across both Mastodon and Lemmy instances for relevant tags:

https://kbin.social/t/cat
https://kbin.social/t/dog

There are already some really nice greasemonkey add-ons that I highly recommend here that help make the navigational experience friendlier.

I hope that helps - I see a lot of potential in this platform, and with a bit of polishing I think it’s a better app than Reddit or Twitter ever were.

Kinda tangential, but have you tried Kbin? Handles both Mastodon and Lemmy really well from a user standpoint.

A product’s name should reflect what it does, not what you were smoking when you came up with the idea.