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. 🤙
You’ve highlighted what is definitely a major problem with the Fediverse - all it takes for you to lose all the hard work you’ve done building up a community is the person running a server to pull the plug with no warning.
I loved kbin social - I started out on there, and only moved over to lemmy because it was getting too erratic and it was impossible to find out what was going on. Being able to move is a great thing, but if you miss your window to move, you’re SOL.
Admins definitely need to be willing and able to have the reins over to someone else if it’s getting to be too much, or to at least let people know in advance if they’re planning to shut down. Communication is key.
all it takes for you to lose all the hard work you’ve done building up a community is the person running a server to pull the plug with no warning.
This also shows the even more important lesson: if you want to maintain a community you also have to be responsible about digital community sovereignty. Set up your own instance, or at least set up your own webpage (even a Neocities one) that is kept updated with information about where the active community and any alternatives / mirrors are.
We are coming out from reddit yet still have to fully learn the lesson about renting our existence on someone else’s server. (And, to be fair, fediverse development as a whole should be helping with that: in the least migrating user accounts should be as easy as “export to file” → “import from file”).
This is an excellent point that I thought about when a previous community I was active in got shut down on the ml instance due to some admin whims. Since then, for the two communities I run, I have an external wiki that I maintain with things like complete rules or an index of past weekly discussion threads, etc. These wikis are set up on a VPS that I am responsible for, independent of the host instance of my communities.
ani.social and the admin, @hitagi@ani.social, has been excellent, and the instance is a logical place for anime/manga communities. I have also tried to keep up donations to keep the server running, but people’s lives change, not always by choice. Having some form of communication independent of the lemmy instance makes sense for those scenarios, if for nothing else except for communicating a migration to a different instance.
Hey, I remember your name from kbin.social and I have not seen you in awhile, nice to see you’re still up and kicking on the Fediverse.
I just lucked out. As soon as I figured out what I was doing I wanted off of the flagship instance to help with decentralization, went to kbin.cafe whose admin abandoned it so I went to kbin.run, and kbin.run happened to make the switch to Mbin.
A shame about kbin. It’s where I landed as well but eventually had to move to lemmy.world.
I wonder if there would be enough data on archive.org to rebuild your community? I guess not given users who moved might not have kepth the same usernames.
I wonder if there would be enough data on archive.org to rebuild your community?
you can probably find a mirror of the community on one of the big Lemmy instances
Huh. That’s… recent. TIL @Melroy, a core maintainer (mbin has this governance system created specifically to avoid the kbin scenario from reoccuring, so there’s no true founder) of mbin, which has a great feature of integrating microblog into threads (kbin in fact had more features that still aren’t implemented here since there were a lot of reliability issues to fix), uses Mastodon instead. Anyways, like I said, the good thing about mbin is that you can straight up reply to a microblog post and ask.
Well that is certainly relevant news! And sad to see too.
So long for the kbin family of platforms then (seriously, harsh to say, but so long as this is representative, I reckon that spells the end of it on the fediverse).
creator of mbin. its just a fork of kbin and its not like hes made all the commits since.
I don’t think mbin existed at that time. For a long time I was on kbin on desktop and Artemis on Android. Artemis kinda evaporated, and eventually I settled on Voyager, which meant I needed a lemmy.world amount. I still used kbin on desktop but it became less and less reliable.
kbin was the perfect storm of single developer and reddit migration. honestly, ernest could have saved everyone a lot of time and effort had they listened to the community 10 months ago when they were begging for more involvement.
account portability is a big topic in 'verse developer circles. i think it is inevitable at some point, but its highly complex and will take some serious ActivityPub cooperation and standards. that we utilize addresses as names for both users and content is a big nut in the works.
in the meantime, users should focus on community organized and operated instances. a shining example of this is beehaw.org
also please dont forget this ecosystem is still in its infancy. the kinks, they are being worked on but its still the bleeding edge of social media tech, which can be painful.
account portability is a big topic in 'verse developer circles
I think community portability is a way bigger deal, at least here
I think if communities could have aliases/mirrors, that would mostly fix the problem without completely rewriting all of the ActivityPub spec?
edit: I did find this issue on their Github https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/3100
the difference between community <-> user are less than youd think. the hurdles are nearly identical.
moving user or community data from one domain/server to another is not hard. getting that change to propagate across fediverse and be functional is fucking hard.
the difference between community <-> user are less than youd think. the hurdles are nearly identical
As a matter of fact, if you look up a Lemmy community (or *bin magazine) on i.e. Mastodon, you’ll see it’s literally just a user that boosts all posts/comments posted to it
I don’t ActivityPub has any concept of communities, since even microblog-focused groups (like Guppe) work that way
Edit: not really, see replies
I think community portability is a way bigger deal, at least here
Very true. And the aliases/mirrors idea might work well. Where content doesn’t have to be moved or the addressing problem fixed, instead people can just change their subscription and the mirror community have the ability to treat itself as the primary (and not a mirror). This feels viable to me!
The idea of migration and data preservation has been a topic since day one, since that’s a big reason why so many moved to the Fediverse. I still haven’t seen a perfect solution, and maybe there isn’t one. Perhaps just having a lot of redundancy (oh no, reposts!) is the only true way of protecting posts for as long as possible, and even then…
Ernest started things rolling with something that probably wasn’t ready for the demand, but it was there when the time came. That others forked off from it and kept it going is the bright spot here. I appreciate Lemmy and even have an account from the first days, but I like the kbin/mbin setup better so that’s where I sit.
I started out on kbin.social. It really had a lot of potential…until it didn’t. Now, I spend my time on lemm.ee or kbin.earth (they migrated over to mbin). Account migration would have been great, and made things a lot easier, but you live and you learn. The fediverse is a new frontier for all of us. I wish Earnest the best!
