Lots of negativity in this thread, but that seems to be par for the course for any fandom. Personally I'm cautiously optimistic.

Skydance produced/co-produced (often partnering with Paramount) on a number of franchise movies, including Star Trek, Mission Impossible, Jack Reacher, Top Gun, GI Joe, Terminator, The Old Guard and Spy Kids. Some of their productions have been well-received (eg Mission Impossible, Top Gun Maverick) and others less so (Terminator Genysis and Dark Fate, although personally I quite liked Dark Fate). They've also produced smaller, critically acclaimed movies like True Grit, Annihilation and Air; as well as their share of dreck of course, like Geostorm.

What I think is clear though is that Skydance is primarily interested in big franchises, so if they were to acquire Paramount, I think more Star Trek movies would very likely be in the works which, as a fan, I'd be happy about. I know there's an argument that Trek is best suited to TV, but some of the best Star Trek has been big screen Star Trek. And studios are more willing these days to have franchises run across both TV and film concurrently (MCU, DC, Star Wars), granted with mixed success.

Re Larry Ellison's involvement - my guess is that he'd be a silent partner, putting some of his personal fortune - rather than Oracle's funds - to help out his son. I believe he did the same thing for his daughter, Megan Ellison, whose company Annapurna Pictures he helped fun and which went on to produce films like Her, Zero Dark Thirty, Phantom Thread and Books Smart (and the stage musical A Strange Loop). I doubt Larry Ellison will take a hands-on role in the management of Skydance/Paramount.

Ernest hasn't posted since last week, so hopefully he's okay. He's alluded to having a fever and having to figure out kbin's finances (and a bit before that, mentioned that he had to take on another job to cover the bills), so I'm guessing life has gotten in the way of kbin. It's worth bearing in mind that all the threadiverse projects are basically someone's hobby at the moment.

Some of us aspire to dwelling in a basement!

Magazine moderators have the ability to delete posts in their community (also pin/unpin them) and ban users from their community. I don't think it would take a huge amount of time as a rule - it's just a matter of checking in regularly (I suppose ideally several times a day) to see if there are any moderator actions that need to be taken.

Beyond that, moderators typically play a role in curating content and setting/monitoring community guidelines. But we've been talking about people being appointed solely to carry out the more technical/administrative functions in certain magazines to prevent the recent flood of spam. Ie, people have said they'd be happy to ban spam accounts without necessarily taking on the curation of the magazine in question.

Agree, but it's not a question of him appointing moderators. It's a question of people stepping up and volunteering to be moderators. There are literally thousands of kbin magazines which are currently abandoned, ie where the moderator of the magazine hasn't been active on kbin.social. Anyone can volunteer to take over ownership of these magazines by clicking a button, but there isn't enough interest in the userbase at the moment.

However, you are correct in that spammers are targeting the bigger magazines like m/fediverse, and because Ernest is owner of these magazines but is active on the site, these magazines don't appear in the abandoned magazines list. I agree that in order to ease the administrative burden on him, Ernest should call for additional moderators for these most active magazines, and even step down as the owner of these when one or more replacements have been found.

That's good to know, thanks.

I should have had a look at codeberg before making my post. As well as the entry you identified, there's also this, a suggestion to rate limit accounts: https://codeberg.org/Kbin/kbin-core/issues/948

No worries. Even more unfortunately:

https://kbin.social/u/kostyassmchuk

https://kbin.social/u/nipa

Wonder if these all originate from the same IP address and, if yes, if there's a way of banning accounts from specific IP addresses.

@ernest in addition to the post I made yesterday, here are some more recent spam accounts:

https://kbin.social/u/tghntrftgr
https://kbin.social/u/StaceyHutchinson
https://kbin.social/u/liae
https://kbin.social/u/tvpcon
https://kbin.social/u/dddd
https://kbin.social/u/fohita1432
https://kbin.social/u/stream-auf
https://kbin.social/u/drtgdfgasrere
https://kbin.social/u/kohiy48308
https://kbin.social/u/itwatchnow
https://kbin.social/u/emilialia
https://kbin.social/u/sasharychkova
https://kbin.social/u/sasharychkova
https://kbin.social/u/kostyassmchuk
https://kbin.social/u/kitafaj803

@ernest

Recent spam accounts:

https://kbin.social/u/chasma15hassen
https://kbin.social/u/allmovies
https://kbin.social/u/bramdev528
https://kbin.social/u/sdgfdg
https://kbin.social/u/jamesrobort064
https://kbin.social/u/itwatchnow
https://kbin.social/u/streaming21
https://kbin.social/u/sdcsdsadsad
https://kbin.social/u/ghoosebumps
https://kbin.social/u/logan232688
https://kbin.social/u/@[email protected]
https://kbin.social/u/@[email protected]

The "sort by hot" algorithm was probably designed with a larger user base in mind, but I agree with you. For small communities in particular (and the vast majority of Fediverse communities are still tiny) I think even posts with no upvotes (ie no self-upvotes) should be included in the "sort by hot" view. For larger communities, where the threshold for "new" and "hot" may be set higher, so it doesn't matter so much. (I don't know what the algorithm is, but it might be something like 'hot is defined as getting a minimum of X votes, where X scales with the size or activity intensity of the community'.)

It means you weren't the first person on your server to subscribe that community/magazine.

It would be nice to see people engaging with old posts when they stumble across a community and subscribe to it.

One barrier that will make this difficult is that instances only get a community's feed from the moment they first subscribe to it, if that community's home instance is on another server. So if you're a user on - say - leminal.space and you're the first person on that server to subscribe to - say - [email protected] then you will not see any of that community's old posts, only posts created (or boosted) after you've subscribed. This makes it difficult to engage with old content unless other people on your instance have been members of that community for much longer.

This is one of the issues with the fediverse model that doesn't exist in a centralised model like reddit. And - sadly - smaller, niche communities are the ones most likely to be affected by this limitation, because they're the ones least likely to be federated to a large number of instances. It makes smaller, less active communities look even more inactive than they actually are.

It may have something to do with the bug mentioned here:

The improved collapsible comments add-on, part of the original KES collection in version 1.0.0, has some conflicts with kbin's own implementation of collapsible comments. I am cleaning this up, but it may take some time

Unused idea for the title sequence to Westworld.

If you enjoyed On the Basis of Sex you should check out RBG, the 2018 documentary about Ginsburg. Ginsburg also appears as a character in a couple of episodes of the fifth season of The Good Fight, played wonderfully by Elaine May.

I think I preferred the early Wes Anderson, before he went full Anderson. Check out Rushmore and (what I think is his best movie) The Royal Tenenbaums.

Movies:

• Rebel Moon. If you gave an AI the prompt: "A Star Wars movie written and directed by Zack Snyder but with all Star Wars copyrighted material disguised" this is what you'd get. I know that's exactly what the movie was, minus the written by AI bit (though I wonder), but it felt almost like a parody of itself.
• Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom. Mediocre, except for Patrick Wilson who elevated every soggy line he was given to read. They desperately wanted to recreate the Thor/Loki dynamic to the point where I thought in one scene I actually heard Aquaman call his brother "Loki".
• One Life. Schindler's List if Schindler's List focused more on the red tape needed to rescue people from the Nazis, and Oskar's twilight years. Kidding aside, a decent movie, but more on the "worthy" end of the spectrum than the entertaining.
• Poor Things. The best movie I've seen this year. May still be true 51 weeks from now.

TV:

• For All Mankind. I enjoyed the "retro" early seasons more, but it's still a very watchable show, and one I still consider to be a Star Trek prequel if I squint and look at it slightly sideways. They certainly seem to be heading towards a Fundamental Declarations of the Martian colonies scenario this season. One of the few shows I'm watching week-by-week instead of saving up and bingeing.
• A Murder at the End of the World. Well acted, somewhat slow moving murder mystery. Unfortunately I guessed the identity of the killer after two episodes, and thought both that, and a certain revelation about one of the characters, were overused tropes in the early 2020s.
• Bodies. Decent crime mini series set across four time periods. I thought the more modern settings and characters were more interesting than the oldey timey (wimey) ones, but the show managed to bring all four storylines together in a pretty satisfying way.
• Silo. Halfway through. Pretty good, but maybe not as good as I heard it was.

Thanks very much for this. I've been hoping that raltsm4k updates Floating Subs List to incorporate collections, but they haven't been active since mid-last year.

Given your code is partly based on this script, I wonder if you might consider modifyingraltsm4k's Floating Subs List script so that collections appear as part of the sidebar. As a fallback, maybe modify your script so that collections appear before magazines rather than after. This would make it easier to use both scripts, one to access magazines in the sidebar, and the other to more easily access liked collections.

As others have pointed out, Foundation isn't a particularly faithful adaptation of Asimov's stories, but there good things in it. It might be more accurately titled Foundation and Empire IMO, because it focuses as much on the Empire side of the story as the Foundation. The first season was lopsided. The Empire plotline was compelling, the Foundation ones were... not. Haven't watched the second season yet, but apparently it's more consistent.

For All Mankind is the Star Trek prequel we should have had. Co-created by Ron Moore (Deep Space Nine, Battlestar Galactica), the show has a bunch of Trek alumni working behind the scenes. It features human drama (and sometimes melodrama), geopolitical diplomacy, sweeping cultural change and scientific adventure against the backdrop of a multi generational future history, starting with the first moon landing.

Fedilab is a Fediverse client for (according to the website) Mastodon, Peertube, Pixelfed, Pleroma, GNU Social and Friendica. You can also follow kbin users (and, I assume lemmy ones as well, though I haven't tried). The app will allow you to manage several accounts on Mastodon, Peertube and Pleroma instances.

You can block content by keywords or phrases (either hiding them with a warning or hiding them completely) but I don't know if you can bulk upload keywords. (You can add several keywords/phrases at a time manually.)

Unfortunately (for you) the app is currently only available on Android.

It so happens that I had a discussion with someone about this very issue on the kbin codeberg some months ago, starting with this comment here:

https://codeberg.org/Kbin/kbin-core/issues/455#issuecomment-977168

But while I've also gone back and forth on the question, I've basically settled on the view that public downvoting encourages responsible downvoting, and the risks associated with downvotes being public are exaggerated given how much else of one's activity is public anyway.