The nature of software development and internet communities has always been transient - frameworks and projects and websites have all come and gone. Despite how unlikely it may seem, even Facebook is not immune to becoming dust in the wind someday. God knows I've started my fair share of hobby projects and left them behind in states ranging from broken to buggy, so I should be the last person to throw stones. I know how it feels to just hit a complete motivational brick wall, or to have so many other things come up in life that my little project is the last thing on my mind.
For as long as I can remember, from the days of PHP bulletin boards to Reddit to kbin, I've never had only a single profile. So I think it's not a bad idea to prepare for the possibility that kbin doesn't last forever - literally nothing does. Nor do I think that's a foregone conclusion! But even if Ernest has moved on, or he's tied down by other matters, I think what he built is inspiring. I legitimately believe that kbin is cool tech, far far cooler than Bitcoin or VR or AI. Maybe someone else spins up a kbin instance, or mbin becomes the new de facto standard, but I don't mind running this account for as long kbin.social sticks around... no matter how many 503's I see lol.
I recognize each and every other commenter in this thread, y'all are prolific contributors. So if you are leaving, at least link your new profile in your bio.
Oh, the irony! I'm trying to upvote your comment, but keep getting an error.
I signed up here and Lemmy.world (same username), at roughly the same time, and have mostly used this account. Only in the past few days have I been leaning on lemmy.world, and giving some thoughts as to where my new backup might be. I really do appreciate the added benefits of 3rd party apps, but I'm definitely going to keep checking in here, and hoping I'll be back to using this account (almost) exclusively again soon. I don't even use the microblogging side of things here, but I've really enjoyed the vibes of Ernest and the local community.
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.
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.
Exactly this. There’s no way to know what’s going on when kbin goes down. It would be nice if there was a kbin Mastodon account or something people could check for information when the site is down.
I think a lot of us have had the same thoughts looking around kbin.
We all appreciate the work Ernest has done, but we really need someone to dedicate some time to picking out a team to help him, but it seems like that's not happening for whatever reason. I know there's a few other people in the codeberg, but I believe there was a falling out there. What we really need in addition to that though is just generic admins.
Ernest said in a previous post with some Mbin drama that he's very, very slow to trust people, and that's why he's been slow to give anyone else admin access to the project.
That may have been okay when only a few hundred people were using Kbin, but the project far outgrew what a single person can manage, especially since he's not only the main developer of the backend and frontend of Kbin, but also the only admin, moderator of multiple communities, AND decided to tackle making a Mobile Kbin app since that other one became vaporware. That is WAY too much for a single person to handle and still have any sort of existence offline.
This has been brought to his attention, but as you mentioned, nothing changes, and he continues the cycle of putting incredible load on himself, and then burning out. It's not sustainable, and unfortunately his lack of trust in others, and an unhealthy level of self-reliance, will ultimately keep Kbin from thriving.
A magazine is like a Reddit subreddit or Lemmy community.
A collection is a way to view multiple magazines in one feed. /c/Technology, for example, has a bunch of tech magazines. That way, you can view all the tech news in the fediverse without having to go to separate magazines.
@FfaerieOxide me too. I like it, I love the platform, I don't have an issue with the outages, and I like the way Ernest understands the fediverse.
If there's an outage fine, I just go to another fediverse account til kbin.social comes back. We all have other things in our life, sometimes projects have to take a back seat.
Also I have a lot of sympathy for Ernest wanting to retain control. It's his vision, let's let him do it his way.
Edit: the spam seems to be on mags that have Ernest as sole mod, so that might be an easy fix.
@FfaerieOxide yes! Well not officially, but after Arotrios had been gone a long time I applied to mod it, mainly as a sort of caretaker/safe pair of hands so that Arotrios will definitely get it back if he returns.
I don't know why/where Arotrios went. I kind of thought he'd be back by now.
I understand the desire to keep kbin a solo project in order to maintain control over it, but if this is going to see any success in the long term, then there needs to be a team. I like kbin over lemmy for the interface and mocroblog integration, but the spam and lack of updates are taking its toll. At the very least, there needs to be another admin or two to look after things whenever Ernest isn't around.
A friend of mine tells me the instance mas.to (last night, 1/2/24) produced this error message for him:
Due to the technical issues they are having we are temporarily stopping delivery to kbin.social, as the failures and retries are impacting our site performance. We'll monitor the situation and unblock once they're back up and running again.
Figured you'd want to know, and thank you for the service you provide.
Edit: Appears to be unblocked now, but who knows if there are other instances that disconnected.
I'm the admin of mas.to. We didn't block in the moderation sense (suspend/limit), we just stopped delivery of content to kbin.social to prevent even more failures and retries piling up. It wasn't good for performance and probably not helping kbin.social either! I'll start delivery again on mas.to and my other instance!
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.
kbinMeta
Ważne
Magazyn ze zdalnego serwera może być niekompletny. Zobacz więcej na oryginalnej instancji.