My thinking re: closing registrations for a time, is that if currently the only person that can action warranted sitewide bans (e.g. users actively using hate-speech in multiple posts in multiple magazines) is ernest, then there may be a point where there's simply too much to keep on top of, given everything else he has going on.
These concerns may well be completely unwarranted, and I'm well aware that even if kbin.social were to be defederated from a number of instances, that once "the situation" was under control, they could be re-federeated if agreed with the other instances. It would just be a shame to hamper our own community by being relatively powerless against a potential influx of bad faith users whilst ernest is busy being awesome and actively improving kbin as a whole.

Thanks for clarifying! Was the choice to defederate mainly down to a flood of content from other instances drowning out the fedia.io community, or the nature of content coming in, for example?

lemmy users want to stay on lemmy. they don't want to come to kbin (even to troll). and I think the few that might end up here will just be drowned out by good faith kbinauts.

Given the much higher number of Lemmy instances, you may well be 100% correct on that, that is, even trolls may just decide to 'stick with what they know' and continue to use a Lemmy based instance.

if someone has an issue with kbin being open to everyone, then they will naturally block us no matter what we do.

Also correct, however, I understand that if a post is local to kbin.social, and had comments from lemmy.world users, in addition to kbin.social users, and a beehaw.org use came to the post, they wouldn't see any of the comments from the defederated users. That is to say, so long as one instance doesn't federate with another, they will never see posts from that instance, regardless of where they are.

I'm not saying that won't still prevent people defederating with kbin.social purely because we're open / federate with another community they specifically defederated from, but there's less reason to if kbin.social maintains a quality userbase.

I think that spirit and culture is far more important than whether or not a few bad apples start getting other instances wanting to defederate.

If a large amount of "beehaw haters" start flooding kbin and changing the culture to be one of toxicity and vitriol, then I do think we'd start having a problem.

Another agreement from me here, however, the point of this post is to start a discussion around whether or not we can prevent being overwhelmed with bad apples too early on in the platforms lifespan (although I appreciate we've already addressed this above).

As has been said, at this point, it's entirely up to @ernest, but I think it's worth looking at potentially taking a couple more people on to assist with the moderation side of things.

That's actually federated users. The official count of kbin.social users can be found here.

I may have missed the mark on my point in the main post to be fair; It's not about fearing defederation from beehaw.org, it's more about ensuring we don't get overran by people with ill-intentions before the dust has settled, and whilst the site doesn't have the manpower in place to keep things like that under control.
Currently there's nothing stopping someone from the communities beehaw has defederated with from signing up here and going on a fullblown hate campaign because they disagree with the ideals of the beehaw admins. Everywhere they go, those local instances are then looking at "ih8beehaw@kbin.social", and if nothing is done to prevent that, then it colours the rest of kbin.social users in a bad light. The more bad users you get, the more likely you are to experience widespread defederation, and lose out on a lot of what should make the concept of the fediverse great.

To be fair, I think there's an issue with the obfuscation / blurring on a lot of the NSFW posts, i.e. people are tagging their post as adult only, but the thumbnail still shows "in all it's glory", I'll add an example below (don't worry, I'll still obfuscate):

Obfuscation not working properly (SFW)

I also feel like the blur isn't aggressive enough for some posts I've seen; I'd prefer something less... subtle... Sync for Reddit would just straight up show you a red box as the preview unless you went into the post.

To be fair, and whilst I am poking fun at the article with the description, unfortunately there are bound to be at least a couple of crackpots that would try and incite violence, regardless of the fact that the vast majority of Reddit staff likely don't agree with what's been going on either.

It looks like it's get enough From design philosophy from the last decade that it will feel familiar to people that haven't played any Armored Cores, whilst hopefully still feeling like AC. I've only played Gen 1 and 2 myself, but seen a fair bit of footage from Gen's 4 & 5. It looks like it's sitting somewhere nicely between the early ACs and the later in terms of combat pace, feeling fast, but still deliberate, if that makes sense.
The fact that there's not only hints of the Souls-likes, but also Sekiro has me very excited.
I hope it doesn't stray too much from the classic AC formula that it no longer appeals to long time series veterans but I'm personally really, really, pumped for this one.

well taking up the whole thread is not an issue or is it? I quite enjoy talking with you to be honnest.

If the thread is relevant to the topic at hand, then no, and I think this is relevant.

you could have just ignored them and do nothing.

I could have, but I chose to downvote a handful of comments that I didn't think were adding anything to the discussion, and I felt could have been seen on any top 100 reddit thread.

but I understand that we don't share the same value as what downvoting mean, and I'm ok with that.

I'm ok with that as well, and I appreciate that we can have a civil discussion about it. Like I've already said, it wasn't a personal attack or me saying "shut up". If I wanted to do that, I'd have commented that, and likely been deservedly downvoted into oblivion, because that's just not productive.

Edit; My first reply sounds a bit authoritarian, I think, and that's not what I want to convey- I'm not saying there can't be discussions that slowly veer off the topic of the post, but at the same time, if you're clicking into post comments, you don't want the first thing you see to be a 50 comment chain that winds up in a heated name calling argument, or two people just talking about PS1 emulators on your @knitting post, especially when there's no way to collapse comments currently (officially).

@watchdog Is there really anything wrong with 'users'? Especially when half the point of federated instances is that you're going to be interacting with people that aren't on a server called the same thing as yours, nevermind even using the same backend. E.g. fedia.io is called fedia.io, but it's still using kbin. Do they want to be called 'kbinauts'? No one using a Lemmy-based instance is going to refer to themselves as a 'kbinaut'.

Interesting, I thought it was just an abbreviation of the original Polish site, karab.in (which would also explain why 'subreddits' are called magazines, karabin = rifle). Either way, that's pretty seamless inspiration.

Hopefully someone can create something like this for kbin instances. I would say all federated 'groups' but I'm currently not sure how that would work with things like Mastodon.
I imagine in the future, we'll etiher have better built-in discoverability or a site that includes the whole of whatever ends up being the biggest aggregator platforms.

Thanks for the link!