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. 🤙
kbin was the perfect storm of single developer and reddit migration. honestly, ernest could have saved everyone a lot of time and effort had they listened to the community 10 months ago when they were begging for more involvement.
account portability is a big topic in 'verse developer circles. i think it is inevitable at some point, but its highly complex and will take some serious ActivityPub cooperation and standards. that we utilize addresses as names for both users and content is a big nut in the works.
in the meantime, users should focus on community organized and operated instances. a shining example of this is beehaw.org
also please dont forget this ecosystem is still in its infancy. the kinks, they are being worked on but its still the bleeding edge of social media tech, which can be painful.
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!
I really miss kbin… 😔(no hard feelings, I genuinely wish Ernest the best and hope he makes a comeback)
I actually tried migrating my account from there before the major issues, as a backup, but realised it didn’t back up my blocked lists, which are much harder for me to recreate than my subscribed list and settings are, so decided to wait and see if anyone improved the migration tools.
Then it became too late, and I had to start from scratch, and am now regretting the instance I chose, and have not yet had the brain space to check out the other kbin/mbin instances and find a new one I like. Until then I’m reluctant to participate.
If anything, the last couple of months, with kbin dying and realising how uncomfortable I am on an instance run by people who have expectations from their users I fundamentally disagree with, have made me want to start my own private kbin/mbin instance for myself so that I don’t end up in either situation again, but I don’t know that it’s something I can take on, having no programming knowledge or any experience with anything like that.
So yes, I agree with you, for more than the reasons you’ve provided, and I hope we, as a general community use these developments to learn and improve.
60 days notice is standard on Mastodon, it would be nice to see instances commit to that.
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.
I sorta wish the strengths of the fediverse could be utilized by having some redundancy. Im not saying every instance should replicate everything but it would be great if you could make an account for two or three instance and then get some secret to copy and paste into each other to link them up. Maybe even allow a max of 3 for syncing.
Kbin is dead. Long live Kbin.
For those who enjoyed the Kbin experience, Fedia.io has been fantastic! It’s running Mbin, a fork of Ernest’s Kbin. It’s stable and online reliably!
Hopefully Ernest is able to take care of himself. I’ve only ever had limited interactions with him, but he seems like a good guy, and I hope he’s able to get back to work on fulfilling his vision for the project.
You’ve highlighted what is definitely a major problem with the Fediverse - all it takes for you to lose all the hard work you’ve done building up a community is the person running a server to pull the plug with no warning.
I loved kbin social - I started out on there, and only moved over to lemmy because it was getting too erratic and it was impossible to find out what was going on. Being able to move is a great thing, but if you miss your window to move, you’re SOL.
Admins definitely need to be willing and able to have the reins over to someone else if it’s getting to be too much, or to at least let people know in advance if they’re planning to shut down. Communication is key.
all it takes for you to lose all the hard work you’ve done building up a community is the person running a server to pull the plug with no warning.
This also shows the even more important lesson: if you want to maintain a community you also have to be responsible about digital community sovereignty. Set up your own instance, or at least set up your own webpage (even a Neocities one) that is kept updated with information about where the active community and any alternatives / mirrors are.
We are coming out from reddit yet still have to fully learn the lesson about renting our existence on someone else’s server. (And, to be fair, fediverse development as a whole should be helping with that: in the least migrating user accounts should be as easy as “export to file” → “import from file”).
This is an excellent point that I thought about when a previous community I was active in got shut down on the ml instance due to some admin whims. Since then, for the two communities I run, I have an external wiki that I maintain with things like complete rules or an index of past weekly discussion threads, etc. These wikis are set up on a VPS that I am responsible for, independent of the host instance of my communities.
ani.social and the admin, @hitagi@ani.social, has been excellent, and the instance is a logical place for anime/manga communities. I have also tried to keep up donations to keep the server running, but people’s lives change, not always by choice. Having some form of communication independent of the lemmy instance makes sense for those scenarios, if for nothing else except for communicating a migration to a different instance.
This happened with Firefish too, I was so disappointed.
Iceshrimp is still around
Catodon picked up where Firefish left off too.
Firefish is still in development https://firefish.dev/firefish/firefish
The head developer has vanished and nobody has access anymore.
Development is still in progress. See here https://firefish.dev/firefish/firefish
Sharkey is pretty good
Has there been any news from ernest or regarding kbin.social at all?
It’s different from e.g. kbin.run or kbin.cafe (neither of which even load anymore). kbin.social appears to be broken but the servers are still around and kicking - just with no one to go in and fix things. But doesn’t this mean that someone has kept kbin.social around and alive?
So ernest may not be able to get to it anytime soon, but might it not reappear in a year or two - when ernest has recovered a bit and had a good break and holiday?
The latest I’ve seen is from https://codeberg.org/Kbin/kbin-core/issues/1383 where two months ago ernest said he’s try to fix things, and nothing since. Was wondering if everyone was just assuming it’s gone since ernest has been MIA for so long - or if anyone has heard of something a bit more definite about the subject.
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.
Damn this sucks I liked most of the kbin users. I hope they find out what happened and migrate over.
Thanks for letting us know what happened and I look forward to your moderation in a lemmy.world community.
A lot of us migrated months ago when the writing was on the wall.
Kbin became my home when I decided to move to a smaller foreign county, and I’m glad it was, because the land of Mastodon was a bit too distant for me. When the Kbin house was burning down, fortunately the next door neighbor, Fedia, was there to take me in and make things feel familiar.
I suppose that’s the whole advantage of the Fediverse. One head of the hydra may get chopped down, but many others can spring out from it.
Don’t forget to support your admins y’all.
I just dropped Kbin from my bookmarks yesterday. I’m sad to see it gone, as it had some nice features.
mbin has several working instances such as fedia.io, and is community developed. https://github.com/MbinOrg/mbin
Pretty much all of the major issues that kbin had were long fixed in mbin, hence why I eventually switched.
I really liked kbin too. Left Reddit early into the migration and went straight there. It got too buggy to use, so I went on holiday to bsky for a minute (not my thing). When I came back, it was gone, sadly. So, here I am.
Welcome back
Thank you!
