Hi @piotrsikora. Great to see that kbin is responsive again and returning to usability. If possible, could you please give an update on what is going on currently with federation? It looks like some things are getting through (e.g. I can see this thread on reddthat) but threads from most lemmy instances are not showing up in a timely way in /newest still and at a quick glance it looks like communities in my collections are maybe a half day behind -- with many threads from the past week or more missing entirely.
I'm assuming some of that may be on the lemmy side -- 0.19 has a major issue with sequential message distribution as seen with lemmy.world <-> reddthat.com federation (see this bug report and this comment if you're unfamiliar) -- but it'd be best to hear from someone who has access to the infrastructure about what's going on rather than guessing.
In particular, it'd be helpful to know:
What kind of delay should we expect for threads and comments we create here to show up on Lemmy communities?
What kind of delay should we expect for threads and comments other people create on Lemmy/mbin/etc. instances to show up here? (Obviously this may vary from instance to instance, but in general are things cleared up now on the kbin side for receiving new threads quickly?)
Are comment notifications still delayed from local kbin replies -- or has that been fixed with the infrastructure changes?
Are federated upvotes propagating quickly? (It is very discouraging if you post something and it gets no interaction at all -- knowing if there's federation delay in upvotes would help with distinguishing between "no one saw this", "no one liked this", and "people probably saw it and maybe liked it but the response hasn't made it to kbin yet")
Is federation still playing catch up and old missing threads/comments will be backfilled eventually, or have they been dropped to get things back in working order?
Have any major instances defederated with kbin.social during the recent problems?
Also, should we @ you in addition to @ernest if we encounter problems on kbin.social?
@e0qdk
I can only check federation with our mastodon server (pol.social), and now is very quickly (about seconds).
Queue on kbin.social is empty, so everything should work instant. Maybe lemmy.world add some limitation due to problem with kbin.social.
Feel free to add if you encounter some problems with infrastructure ;)
There was a bug with KBin some days ago where it would send huge amounts of federation activities to Lemmy instances which would overload them. To mitigate this, lemmy.world and some other instances had to block kbin.social. I believe the .world admins tried to get in contact with @ernest. You can read some more details here.
I would also suggest that you and Ernest join the Lemmy Admin chat on Matrix where this problem was found and discussed.
That’s about where I am, honestly. I’m starting to look for alternatives.
I can deal with the site having the occasional problem, but I can’t deal with absolutely no communication at all when things break down. Kbin has gotten too big to be a one-person operation.
This is now the fourth post I’ve seen about people starting to get fed up, and honestly, you know people are starting to hit their limits once people start making posts about their frustrations. I bet a lot of folks have just quietly given up or moved to lemmy or mbin because they’ve gotten frustrated with all the issues.
I’m a pretty patient person and can put up with a lot of goofiness on a site, as long as there’s some kind of communication happening. But there’s none.
I was at that point last week and ended up biting the bullet and migrating my subscriptions over to this account. Really wish there was a first class account migration tool available though.
@stopthatgirl7 Same. I poked around beehaw a bit, but I am not sure its is good fit for me. Think I will check out lemmy.world, they seem to be really communicative on mastodon during their upgrade process.
But that's all I know about it. I am looking into mbin,too...but I really don't much about it.
I have been spending most of my social media time on mastodon lately.
I bet a lot of folks have just quietly given up or moved to lemmy or mbin because they’ve gotten frustrated with all the issues.
I guess it's not quiet once I post this, but I submitted the account deletion request a couple weeks back and spent some time setting my feedly back up after 1 too many spam posts. I'm already getting my scrolling fix from rss feeds again, and this is the first time I've been on kbin in a week.
It doesn't help that whenever this comes up there's a contingent of users who jump to Ernest's "defense" by calling the folks raising these issues "concern trolls" and accusing them of shilling for mbin.
No, this is simply a matter of what is actually working well. The point of federation is that one shouldn't need to have "loyalty" to any particular instance or any particular platform. Use whichever one's working.
Thats not what you describe. Troll is used the way you did in my response to you. A reference to other people trolling in some other threads. Not accusations of the main post being a troll. At least that is the way im reading it. I guess I just assume your first comment was refering to more blatant type posts or replies.
I bet a lot of folks have just quietly given up or moved to lemmy or mbin because they’ve gotten frustrated with all the issues.
I made an alt two months ago when Kbin would never connect. I have barely been back since, so it is now my main. I hoped Kbin would come out if its slump but... that seems unlikely at this point. I'm actually quite happy on Lemmy, especially after the v0.19 upgrade allows blocking of an entire instance. I personally virtually never see any spam (maybe one comment per month) and while connection issues do occur, they are like a handful per week rather than handful per hour (it varies a lot though, sometimes it does get bad for a day or two and then weeks go by without a hitch).
I avoided the initial hurdle of making a Lemmy account for so long and, while it was super annoying, in retrospect it wasn't that bad, compared to all the other problems here and still having to go through all that, eventually.
If anyone is thinking about switching: don't worry unduly about it, just make an account and see if you like it, but you can always keep your Kbin active too, assuming Kbin remains alive.
Also, you may need to try out a few places before you find one that fits you best. But that reduces your anxiety bc you know more and don't need to worry about having to do it again in a worst-case scenario.
Considering his last post was about going to the hospital for a few days, over a month ago, I suspect he's not okay.
Regardless, I just cancelled my $5/mo donation towards the development of the kbin software. Seeing as how there hasn't been any development in over a month.
This time is probably unrelated to @ernest's supposed inactivity. Actually, his another /kbin server, https://karab.in has been brought back on 15 of February.
Oh wow, what a day for the fediverse huh? Kbin's infrastructure went down, Lemmy.ml's certs expired (or so Firefox told me), and a ton of Misskey servers got hacked and started botspamming everyone.
Thanks for the reminder, I threw in a dozen coffees.
Thank you for all that you're doing, @Ernest ! This platform is fantastic and I really hope that you're able to get enough support to keep it alive long term without it needing to turn to outside funds to stay alive!
ETA: Get well soon! Don't overwork yourself, you've got us stable at the moment, please, don't cause yourself so much stress you delay your recovery (as they say, an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure!)
Ah, there's one more thing I forgot. I would like adding a new post/thread to be done asynchronously to reduce client-side time, but this might extend to next week because even though I have the foundation prepared, I want to thoroughly test it.
This is the first I’m hearing of it and I’m so confused. Is this just at character creation? Why was it removed?
Is this mod for people who are triggered because the field isn’t free form and the only choices are he/she/they? Or people who are triggered because the sheer existence of a they option is an anathema to their existence?
Even the argument in the comments is so vague it sheds no light.
Is this mod for people who are triggered because the field isn’t free form and the only choices are he/she/they? Or people who are triggered because the sheer existence of a they option is an anathema to their existence?
People triggered because of a they option in character creation. Basically, for folks like this dude.
There is a prominent movement where people don't want to see LGBTQA+ people anywhere. They don't want queer people to exist in their world. It makes them very mad to be exposed to the existence of LGBTQA+ people.
I personally think that they are just some queer people in denial, thinking they are going to catch the gay. Those gay thoughts aren't going to go away for these people no matter how they cater their reality.
Thanks a ton for the update Ernest! It's great to hear from you, and I hope your health improves soon.
That being said, I do have a few things I'd like to suggest.
--
In February, I spent my time visiting doctors and undergoing treatment with medications, which often had very unpleasant side effects. Therefore, I decided to hold off on any major updates to avoid causing even more chaos.
If I'm interpreting this correctly (i.e., that you chose not to give any updates as to prevent people freaking out), I don't think this was the best move. I understand where you were coming from, but (if you were able) some sort of small status update would've been preferable to a month-long silence (especially since you'd previously said that you'd be unavailable for only 2–4 days). A simple "Hey, I'm currently not doing well. I'll get back to things as soon as I'm feeling better," would've at least let us know that you were alive and that the project hadn't been abandoned.
--
Just because it's not visible that something is happening doesn't mean I haven't been doing anything during this time. In fact, two really significant things have been successful, which I've been working on for a long time and which I intended to announce soon once I recover.
I don't think this whole "holding off for a big announcement" thing is a great approach, at least not now. There are currently several issues that we're waiting to see fixed, and we have no idea which ones (if any) are being worked on. If you must wait for a big reveal though, at least telling us, "I'm still working on stuff" would be better than nothing.
--
And finally, I really suggest getting some more admins for the instance. You're absolutely correct to prioritize your health over Kbin; nevertheless, it's far from ideal for your absence to mean that spam piles up, moderation requests lie unanswered, and accounts can't be deleted. We'd all appreciate it if you could have at least one extra person on deck for whenever you're ill or in need of a break.
--
Thanks again for all you do for Kbin, and I hope things get better!
His reasoning is kind've... Like, off, isn't it? How would a single paragraph message saying "Hey guys, I'm not dead." cause... Chaos? Like what?
And him saying he's been working on stuff... So, he's been around and watching, but chose to work exclusively on the code when Kbin was under assault with spam, some of it illegal?
It's so crazily clear that Kbin needs additional admins to fill in for Ernest, to add more mods, to combat spam, to delete communities and accounts that have been sitting around for months, and yet still, there is absolutely no move toward rectifying any of that.
This isn't sustainable. People are saying it in this post, people have been saying it for months, there's no change. I don't mean to come down on Ernest, the dude is putting out all this work and effort for free selflessly, but it's becoming painfully clear that his personality traits (specifically the desire to do everything himself) is not only putting incredible stress onto Ernest himself, but it's severely effecting Kbin itself negatively, to the point that people are leaving and Ernest's response is... Basically business as usual.
He may well be referring to my posts and the chaos that ensued in the comments thereof. You have a valid point. However, Ernest's communication has up to now not been very consistent, both timing and content wise. It makes sense he hasn't given updates, for the time being, as he didn't have any real improvements to announce, unlike this one, to prevent another escalation. Not the best strategy, but given the odds of a similar situation arising again, understandable. You are already part of a similar discussion it would have started and it would have been over nothing. At least now he had some (good) news to announce. I would not likely have responded though, I haven't really paid much attention since the last time. Once again I was attracted by the notification of a message, on matrix this time, leading me to have a look at what's going on. I am saying this because some people were convinced I was stalking and harassing Ernest last time, to give you an impression of what chaos he is likely referring to. Of course odds are something would have triggered my attention and I would have, as I said I won't be silenced. But other people have taken the lead this time.
Let's hope Ernest really is doing better and will do as he says, so we can forget about the past.
I hope Ernest gets well soon and can pass through all of these stuff, but I must add one point to this:
And finally, I really suggest getting some more admins for the instance.
And, as important as this, letting more people help with Kbin development.
It's impossible to maintain the code and develop new features, while dealing with all his personal life problems (which of course are a priority) and maintaining the instance all at once and almost alone.
Why not getting some help? I know that Ernest already said he has a problem trusting people, but come on, it's visible that this approach is not working and it’s not benefiting anyone.
Good luck to you!
But i think instead of waiting to announce planned things you should just show them, even in early stages.
Then we can give feedback, check your code and contribute ourselves.
You dont have to do everything, we really want to help.
On the other hand, if people really wanted to contribute, there's plenty of open issues on Codeberg that are unadressed. I agree that it would be better to announce plans in advance rather than surprise drop them, but I doubt there would be more contributions from the community.
I know. I'm just saying that the idea people would magically help out on kbin if he was more open about his plans doesn't work out, because the people willing to do so would either already be contributing to cleaning up the backlog or have moved on to mbin.
Btw, do mbin devs look at kbin issues too or do common problems have to be posted to both repositories to be seen?
Currently I wouldn't count on it as for as long as there is no activity on codeberg, looking at it in general is a waste of time. If you find an issue on both Kbin and Mbin and are convinced it is the same issue, it's definitely worth reporting on both.
Sometimes showing that things are being done is more work and way more stressful than the act of doing them, so I can relate to that.
But it would probably be a good idea to get more admins on board - sometimes one needs to take a break, and a one-person moderation team for a page with this many users cannot be sustainable in the long run. But I guess getting to a point where that is feasible, not to mention finding qualified people, might in itself be a fair share of work. :)
And of course - get well soon, Ernest! It's great to hear from you.
It doesn't have to be a show-and-tell. Just pushing your changes to a branch is enough. That way people can at least see that something is being worked on.
As a software dev I find it strange that you can go a month or more without pushing. At work I push at least daily, even if it's just a WIP commit that I reset the next day.
Exactly this is what i mean.
Name your branch something useful and push reguarly.
Ernest feels like doing so much secrecy for code that is ultimately going to be public anyways.. We wont scold you for having fucked up code. We will fix it ourselves if we have to.
I've been wondering the same thing. I really like kbin's interface, so I'm holding out that he comes back before I think about trying another instance.
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