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/kbin devlog @kbin.social ernest @kbin.social

RTR#29 Another boring update: Categories and bug fixes

Today, I wanted to introduce you to Categories - a new feature that is essentially a multi-mags view. A new tab will appear in the user panel where you can create categories (public or private) and then add magazines to them (local or remote). In the magazine listing, there will be another tab that will list public categories created by users (which can be liked - in the future, this will transform into a subscription form). In the category view, all filters and sorting options are applied, and it also collaborates with the Aggregate view.

Additionally, I've patched several annoying bugs - media preview from comments by clicking the icon, improved navigation in the aggregate view, remote magazine listing in the content submission form, and a few others.

These changes will be implemented on the instance tonight. With this note, I conclude the month, and starting tomorrow, I'll be 100% focused on developing the new ActivityPub module and matters related to instance moderation.

You can track changes in the official repository
https://codeberg.org/Kbin/kbin-core

or on Github
https://github.com/ernestwisniewski/kbin

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32 comments

  • >announces categories
    >announces fixes to a bunch of prominent bugs
    >claims the update is boring
    >leaves

    EDIT: In all seriousness, this stuff all seems great! I think "collections" would be a better name than categories though.

  • Awesome! Multireddit like functionality was what I was missing most, and Categories sounds like it will replace it nicely. Thanks!

    • I think it complements federation too. Suddenly you can have a collection of magazines sharing a name/topic from different instances all listed together in one place. That's really quite cool!

  • Another banger update! I can't tell you how convenient it is to have that media preview bug fixed. It was starting to get annoying to randomly have words missing. Are you planning to create an official Kbin category?
    Edit: Seems like it's already been made. Here's a link for anyone who hasn't seen it yet.

  • Collections are a game-changing feature, imo! Nice work to all involved.

  • @ernest
    you are so fast! how do you do that?

    • This is just a prototype, there will probably be some errors to fix ;-) But I want to see how it performs in practice and over time, I will refine the whole thing, and that will take a bit more time.

      • Yeah, I favorited my private collection (not sure why I did that...) and it seems to have permanently made it public, no big deal in this case, but I feel bad 'squatting' on collection slug.

  • Knocking it out of the park!

  • I did not expect to see the #collections/#categories feature be implemented so quickly after mentioning it in only two threads ago. It's really exciting watching #kbin develop. However, when I tried making a private and public test case, both returned with 50x error. Even though some actions are successful despite showing this error, I couldn't find my attempts at using this feature under Settings > Collections or Magazines > Collections. Regardless, your work is certainly appreciated.

  • @ernest I just made one! Thank you, this is super super cool. Least boring update ever!

    Small issue: I can't get it to let me add @world. It just adds more and more options that end in .world and if I manually type it, it won't add. Might be because I'm on mobile.

    Solved. I just have to be more patient and let it search more before I scroll.

  • I feel stupid, is this currently available? It seems yes, some people say they've made one, but I can't seem to find either a "Categories" or "Collections" option. Sorry, I don't know which area is called the "user panel", but I've looked at the tabs across the top, and in all the menus (+, channels, profile).

    I did see the collections tab on the Magazines page though, and I see Random Collections in the right side panel, just can't find where to create my own category/collection.

    • Go to settings and click the collections tab. Tbh, it feels a bit hidden rn, and I'd love to see at least some sort of link on the Magazines page in the future.

      • Thanks but I looked in Settings. There aren't what I would call "tabs" there, but there are different sections (General, Sub channel, Threads, etc) but nothing called Collections.

        WAIT, never mind, I found it in the other "settings" I forgot there are two different places for Settings. Thank you

  • @ernest, you are doing amazing work! I hope you're taking care of yourself, too. :)

    In a future update, do you think you could add the ability to set a default sort? I prefer to set my home feed to Top, 1 Day, and it's easy enough to just bookmark https://kbin.social/sub/top/1d on my PC, but I primarily use kbin as a PWA on Android and AFAIK, there's no way to set a custom home page. It would also just be convenient to open kbin to my preferred sort on any platform. :)

  • @ernest nice! One of the biggest problems I found with KBin/Lemmy was the duplication of very similar communities across them. This goes a long way to fixing that!

  • Will collections get a way to tag them like magazines?

    • Additional options will probably be introduced in the near future, but for now, I need to attend to other matters ;)

  • Will there be a way for communities to opt-out from being listed in a category?

    I think there is a lot of abuse potential in this and even if well intended, a single word or so can't really describe what communities are about, and as a result those categories (similar to the "all" feed) will bring a lot of off-topic comments and trolling from people not engaged with the communities at all otherwise.

    On Mastodon with hashtags the original poster can at least make a conscious choice of being listed under it or not. But this seems fully third party driven and I fear it will increase moderation workload significantly.

    • I don't understand how content grouping can be used for potential abuses, to be honest. Collections are related to the user, so it will be subject to instance moderation in case of such an attempt. The community can also switch to private mode - then this content will not be aggregated in collections. Moreover, from what I know, there are already external tools that do similar things.

      • Most trolling and brigading is fairly low effort, and having a sharable collection of communities to troll makes it much easier to organize lots of people to do just that. Edit: yes external tools for that exist but having it built in makes it much easier to abuse and rope in people to do the trolling that otherwise would not bother.

        But my main concern is that this isn't opt-in for communities. Having a sharable and subscribable link with for example "meme" communities means that all of them are seeing a constant barrage of random people commenting that are not members of that community and do not have any idea what the community is about other than that it is somewhat loosely related to "memes". It basically hides everything that is vital about the communities and actively damages attempts at community building.

32 comments