So my understanding is that KBin.social is now gone from the internet for the indefinite future. Ernest, who meant well, simply could not keep up with the demands due to his personal life and the development issues that were cropping up all the time. Let me get ahead of any replies and say that it’s perfectly reasonable to shut down a large instance if it’s taking up your time and money or becoming a burden on your personal life. Personal health should always come before a bunch of random dudes/dudettes that happen to be on the internet. Additionally, it’s a good reminder that developing software while also maintaining a large instance probably isn’t a good idea and that you should probably make sure you’re taking a reasonable amount of work off your plate.
But I can’t help but feel like there’s another story here regarding the potential risks of the fediverse: Admins need to be ready to migrate ownership to others who are willing to take on the financial or user account management burden. Additionally, there should be a larger focus on community migration features for more flexibility to sudden instance losses.
I managed a community that had partially migrated to Kbin after the great reddit exodus last year and managed to continue to admin said community up until a few months ago when Kbin’s service became very very spotty. I understood Ernests’ particular dilemma so I was willing to give it a month or two to figure out what actions I needed to take to migrate the community again, but enough time has passed now that I am no longer confident that Kbin will return to even a read-only, moderator only state. This means that whatever community I had there is now completely out of my control and the users might not know why posts have stopped entirely. Basically, I have to start from the ground up which might be OK but I’m not particularly keen to start it all over right now.
So this is basically a plea to the admins out there: If you are having trouble with management and need to stop, could you please give the community a vocal heads up so that whatever subcommunity happens to form on your site has some means of migrating? Additionally, software out there should have more policies for community migration, whether that’s lemmy or mbin, as we never know when it might be necessary to migrate to a new domain under different ownership. Lastly, if there’s an option to give ownership to others in the community, please consider it as it would really help the fediverse if admins were willing to migrate domain and databases to other users who are willing to carry the torch.
That’s it from me for now, thanks for reading this minor rant. 🤙
Has there been any news from ernest or regarding kbin.social at all?
It’s different from e.g. kbin.run or kbin.cafe (neither of which even load anymore). kbin.social appears to be broken but the servers are still around and kicking - just with no one to go in and fix things. But doesn’t this mean that someone has kept kbin.social around and alive?
So ernest may not be able to get to it anytime soon, but might it not reappear in a year or two - when ernest has recovered a bit and had a good break and holiday?
The latest I’ve seen is from https://codeberg.org/Kbin/kbin-core/issues/1383 where two months ago ernest said he’s try to fix things, and nothing since. Was wondering if everyone was just assuming it’s gone since ernest has been MIA for so long - or if anyone has heard of something a bit more definite about the subject.
I really miss kbin… 😔(no hard feelings, I genuinely wish Ernest the best and hope he makes a comeback)
I actually tried migrating my account from there before the major issues, as a backup, but realised it didn’t back up my blocked lists, which are much harder for me to recreate than my subscribed list and settings are, so decided to wait and see if anyone improved the migration tools.
Then it became too late, and I had to start from scratch, and am now regretting the instance I chose, and have not yet had the brain space to check out the other kbin/mbin instances and find a new one I like. Until then I’m reluctant to participate.
If anything, the last couple of months, with kbin dying and realising how uncomfortable I am on an instance run by people who have expectations from their users I fundamentally disagree with, have made me want to start my own private kbin/mbin instance for myself so that I don’t end up in either situation again, but I don’t know that it’s something I can take on, having no programming knowledge or any experience with anything like that.
So yes, I agree with you, for more than the reasons you’ve provided, and I hope we, as a general community use these developments to learn and improve.
I think the bigger issue is Ernest simply refused outside help. He took everything on himself and didn’t allow outside contributions, which is just not sustainable for a project of that size. It’s a shame because I really wanted to like KBin, especially since it’s written in PHP and I’m a PHP developer, but Lemmy ended out winning.
That’s unfortunate. I switched to kbin from Reddit and really liked the community feel. That’s what sold me on the fediverse. But seeing as there wasn’t SSO across from kbin to lemmy, I had a second account for the latter as there was a lot more activity on lemmy and I used kbin less and less as the site spent more time broken.
I agree there should be some more formal way of letting community operators know their instance is going away. However, the fediverse not having any way of enforcing any such rule, means we’re still looking at individual whim determining whether or not an instance will simply disappear overnight or give users time to move.
IIRC lemmy.ml is the showcase server for lemmy software as a whole, so the organizations and individual donors who fund lemmy development also fund lemmy.ml
They mention the bigger donors here
Might be pulling this out of my ass, but I recall that one of the platinum donors gets their money to fund open-source software from EU.
Yeah no $3k/m isn’t funding their full time dev work with infrastructure. It seems likely they have sources of funding they don’t disclose for whatever reason.
