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. 🤙

  • Aatube@kbin.melroy.org
    8·
    5 months ago

    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.

    • Elevator7009@kbin.run
      3·
      5 months ago

      I have seen a few people with both Mbin and Mastodon accounts. From what I have seen so far, Mbin can post to Mastodon and see some Mastodon posts, but it is… rough. Link posts not sending the body out, for one. Making a Mastodon post from Mbin goes correctly without a title and displays like a microblog on Mbin and Mastodon, but on Lemmy it makes a whole new thread for that microblog with the first few words as title. Until Mbin integration with Mastodon improves (and Lemmy integration with Mastodon too, because Mbin federates out to Lemmy too) I can see getting yourself a separate Mastodon account to talk with the much higher number of people there as well.

      • debounced@kbin.run
        4·
        5 months ago

        if you can, please create an issue for this specific problem at https://github.com/MbinOrg/mbin/issues if one doesn’t already exist or thumbs-up/add a comment to an existing one so it gets visibility. broad fediverse compatibility is one of our main project goals, but not all platforms conform to the AP spec (or it’s not addressed by the spec) and instead do their own thing, so it sounds like we’ll need to work out a common ground.

        • Elevator7009@kbin.run
          3·
          5 months ago

          Part of what makes me nervous about issue creation is if I’ll get asked for examples of the issue, because I don’t want my GitHub linked back to my Fediverse account.

          I really should just go make another GitHub account so I can do this worry-free!

          • debounced@kbin.run
            4·
            5 months ago

            ah, understandable. i’m a EE by day and all of the coding i contribute to Mbin is purely for fun with no bearing on real-life, so my github profile is expendable/only for Mbin. ;-)

            • Elevator7009@kbin.run
              2·
              5 months ago

              How/where did you learn PHP? I’ve been thinking of learning to try to contribute to Mbin.

              I also know very little about networking.

      • Aatube@kbin.melroy.org
        4·
        5 months ago

        Well, replying could yield a different result. It’s not uncommon for figures big enough to mute their mentions.

            • melroy@kbin.melroy.org
              1·
              4 months ago

              I did indeed, I revoked the request towards Lunduke. I’m gay myself. Why would you be against me?

              I’m pro LGBT and pro trans.

              • Aatube@kbin.melroy.org
                2·
                4 months ago

                That’s great, but unfortunately bigoted gay people exist. In the UK, there’s enough to form the advocacy group called LGB Alliance. There’s even people who only hate bi people.

                • melroy@kbin.melroy.org
                  2·
                  4 months ago

                  @Aatube I fully understand, luckily I’m not judging anybody regardless of their religion, race, belief or sexualitiy. So I’m embracing LGBTQIA+. I personally know how hard it can be to be gay, so I I can also imagine how difficult it would be if you were trans or queer…

                  I also got a lot of hate on the street when I hold hands in the Netherlands. Meaning we are in general still far away from acceptance in society, yes even in the Netherlands. I have the feeling it goes actually more down hill in the recent years. Which hurts a lot to see and experience.