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. 🤙

  • I_Miss_Daniel@lemmy.worldEnglish
    0·
    5 months ago

    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.

    • Die4Ever@programming.devEnglish
      0·
      5 months ago

      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

      • I_Miss_Daniel@lemmy.worldEnglish
        0·
        5 months ago

        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.

        • maegul (he/they)@lemmy.mlEnglish
          0·
          5 months ago

          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).

          • BeAware :fediverse:@social.beaware.live
            0·
            5 months ago

            @maegul @fediverse yeah…in interest of fairness, I did ask him for a comment on the situation before I went public with the information, but he completely ignored me so after 3 days I had to make a public statement on it.😔

            Me asking him: https://social.beaware.live/@BeAware/112914020692638023

            Me making it public: https://social.beaware.live/@BeAware/112922757724465742

            I can only do so much “investigating” before making it known.

            • melroy@kbin.melroy.org
              0·
              5 months ago

              I did respond. And I revoked the request of lunduke after I discovered that he is transphobic. I’m part of the LGBT community myself. So I’m pro trans.

            • maegul (he/they)@lemmy.mlEnglish
              0·
              5 months ago

              Very much appreciate that you did this (and this follow up too)!!

              But lunduke is a fairly known entity by now I think. I recall many getting weird about him and his business-y linux persona shtick even before the transphobia stuff started. So while it’s completely fair to give Melroy a chance, providing a helping hand on mastodon almost just speaks for itself.

              And I’m not even saying that mbin necessarily should “die” because of this, just that it likely reflects an attitude that will not work well on the fedi over time, and probably justifiably so.

        • Aatube@kbin.melroy.org
          0·
          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
            0·
            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
              0·
              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 figure a common ground.

              • Elevator7009@kbin.run
                0·
                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
                  0·
                  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
                    0·
                    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.

        • melroy@kbin.melroy.org
          0·
          5 months ago

          I revoked this after I indeed discovered more about Luneduke behavior. I’m actually gay myself!

          So I’m actually pro LGBT, including trans. After all I’m literally part of that community.