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’m going to say it, community migration is probably more important than user migration features. While there is no official user migration there are scripts to carry over preferences and subscriptions to a new instance. Easy peesy. But community migration is a much more important concept if only because communities are what make Lemmy great.
Mirroring content is probably easy enough, but I don’t know if we’ll ever see a way for the ActivityPub spec to say “This Group is actually now this Group” or if that would even be a good idea.
That’s unfortunate. I switched to kbin from Reddit and really liked the community feel. That’s what sold me on the fediverse. But seeing as there wasn’t SSO across from kbin to lemmy, I had a second account for the latter as there was a lot more activity on lemmy and I used kbin less and less as the site spent more time broken.
I agree there should be some more formal way of letting community operators know their instance is going away. However, the fediverse not having any way of enforcing any such rule, means we’re still looking at individual whim determining whether or not an instance will simply disappear overnight or give users time to move.
At the moment of writing this there are 90 comments, none of them even considering the idea that this whole Fediverse thing is never going to be a worthy contender for a healthier Internet if we keep treating it as some hippie, amateur, “community is all you need” project.
“You get what you pay for” is still true. If the thousands of people using kbin contributed with $10/year, you can bet that the developer wouldn’t be in this situation.
We might come up with all the schemes to try to mitigate the issues and warts of federated software, but it would help a lot more if most people understood that software developers and instance admins are still professionals who still have ambitions and would like to be paid for their work accordingly.
Do Mastodon users have to pay their admins? Iirc most of them still rely on donations
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!
Sort of makes you wonder who is funding lemmy.ml
IIRC lemmy.ml is the showcase server for lemmy software as a whole, so the organizations and individual donors who fund lemmy development also fund lemmy.ml
They mention the bigger donors here
Might be pulling this out of my ass, but I recall that one of the platinum donors gets their money to fund open-source software from EU.
Yeah no $3k/m isn’t funding their full time dev work with infrastructure. It seems likely they have sources of funding they don’t disclose for whatever reason.
Agreed, but I must admit I haven’t dug deeper so I have no clue.
Yeah I’ve pretty much accepted that kbin.social is just gone at this point. I also owned a community there (/m/ai). I didn’t have any spammers appear, but it eventually just died since spam ruined the rest of the instance.
The signs were already there months in advance, but most of us stayed on the instance in hopes that the dev would eventually take up one of the offers to help maintain the instance. Was fun while it lasted, and was the best alternative to Reddit for sure as a software. I don’t even know how Ernest kept up with development during the initial Reddit exodus lol.
Honestly, I’m not impressed with Lemmy so far and I don’t really vibe with mbin for personal reasons even though the software is great.
This whole kbin story has just pointed out a lot of flaws in the Fediverse as a whole for me. I still like the idea, but the execution needs improvement.
