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.
account portability is a big topic in 'verse developer circles
I think community portability is a way bigger deal, at least here
I think if communities could have aliases/mirrors, that would mostly fix the problem without completely rewriting all of the ActivityPub spec?
edit: I did find this issue on their Github https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/3100
the difference between community <-> user are less than youd think. the hurdles are nearly identical.
moving user or community data from one domain/server to another is not hard. getting that change to propagate across fediverse and be functional is fucking hard.
the difference between community <-> user are less than youd think. the hurdles are nearly identical
As a matter of fact, if you look up a Lemmy community (or *bin magazine) on i.e. Mastodon, you’ll see it’s literally just a user that boosts all posts/comments posted to it
I don’t ActivityPub has any concept of communities, since even microblog-focused groups (like Guppe) work that way
Edit: not really, see replies
That is an annoyance of mastodon. AP is not to blame in this case. Mastodon could just treat boosts by group actors differently, but they don’t
Iceshrimp and Sharkey ftw!
This is somewhat correct, somewhat incorrect. ActivityPub has a concept of Actors. Actors can be People. Both Lemmy and Mastodon users are People. Actors can be Groups. Lemmy’s communities are Groups.
https://seb.jambor.dev/posts/understanding-activitypub-part-2-lemmy/
I think community portability is a way bigger deal, at least here
Very true. And the aliases/mirrors idea might work well. Where content doesn’t have to be moved or the addressing problem fixed, instead people can just change their subscription and the mirror community have the ability to treat itself as the primary (and not a mirror). This feels viable to me!
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.
Fedia’s been great.
There are a handful of other choices, too: https://joinmbin.org/
Please have a look at the smaller mbin instances as well. It is not good to have one massive server and a lot of tiny ones. Kbin.social is the best example of it, the second best is lemmy.world which just has issues because of its size…
For people reading https://mbin.fediverse.observer/list
My understanding is that mbin encourages microblogging to !random, which you can’t see from other instances. Is that incorrect? If that’s the case, I really don’t understand how mbin federation is supposed to work
The microblog side works the same as mastodon: following people. You cannot follow random from other instances, because it would creates way too much traffic on larger instances. Imho there should be no random magazine. It only exists for things that cannot be assigned a magazine, because it is not possible to post something without a magazine. We inherited that from kbin
But on mastodon, there’s a feed that lets you view all posts from all federated instances. Wouldn’t mbin users be excluded from that feed when posting to !random?
Edit: I was looking, and it seems to me that if a user posts to !random, I can’t even see it on their profile from mastodon? Am I misunderstanding this?
That is a very good point 🤔 I just checked the code. Your “subscribed” feed does include the users you follow as well, not just the magazines
I don’t understand your added information about the mastodon post…
Actually, it seems I was misunderstanding. Apparently all mastodon posts get federated as appearing on !random, so I’m not sure what I was seeing
That is right. When you do not explicitly tag a magazine from mastodon (or a hashtag that is matched to a magazine) then the post ends up in the random mag
Agreed. Moved from kbin to fedia.io and it has been smooth so far. I hope they continue to evolve the format though
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.
Hey, I remember your name from kbin.social and I have not seen you in awhile, nice to see you’re still up and kicking on the Fediverse.
I just lucked out. As soon as I figured out what I was doing I wanted off of the flagship instance to help with decentralization, went to kbin.cafe whose admin abandoned it so I went to kbin.run, and kbin.run happened to make the switch to Mbin.
This is exactly why for everything fediverse, I only run my own.
fedia.io is the replacement you’re looking for. It’s an mbin, which is a branch from kbin
kbin.run too
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.
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 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!
@MoogleMaestro@lemmy.zip If you liked kbin (like me) I suggest checking out mbin(kbin hard fork), I moved to it a year ago when I seen first red flags, and I don’t regret it
Did you not read his actual post?
@DarkThoughts@fedia.io I have, but they’re not the only who read comments, it’s not directed only at them, it’s directed at all ex-kbin users
@MoogleMaestro@lemmy.zip
60 days notice is standard on Mastodon, it would be nice to see instances commit to that.
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 found https://kbin.run/ as well
Yes, that’s one of the many mbin instances that you can find in the various instance lists linked on their Github page.
Is the app support better now? Last I heard, kbin didn’t have nice APIs that apps could use
There’s an API now, but the only app I’m aware of is Interstellar, which only has a card view, which is not something for me and I also couldn’t log back into it at some point. I think Eternity for Lemmy wants to add mbin support in the future but I have no idea how far away that is. So, app support yes, apps themselves, not so much.
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!
But I can’t help but feel like there’s another story here regarding the potential risks of the fediverse:
It’s perhaps the most important story going forward. Rexxit was only a year ago and a lot of instances are gone already. If that’s not sorted out people will start to wonder why they should invest time and effort in an instance or community.
Admins need to be ready to migrate ownership to others who are willing to take on the financial or user account management burden.
It was touch-and-go for us on feddit.uk but it all worked out right at the last minute and we’ve been working hard to ensure that everything is set up so that the instance’s future is assured for as long as the users want it. Here is our most recent financial report.
A lot of problems could be avoided by planning ahead - never rely on a single Admin and make sure that funding is in place (and not being run from any one individual’s bank account - why Open Collective is very good for this). That way, if one Admin has to step down (and you are less likely to burn out if you can spread the load) then there are already others who can pick up the slack.
The idea of migration and data preservation has been a topic since day one, since that’s a big reason why so many moved to the Fediverse. I still haven’t seen a perfect solution, and maybe there isn’t one. Perhaps just having a lot of redundancy (oh no, reposts!) is the only true way of protecting posts for as long as possible, and even then…
Ernest started things rolling with something that probably wasn’t ready for the demand, but it was there when the time came. That others forked off from it and kept it going is the bright spot here. I appreciate Lemmy and even have an account from the first days, but I like the kbin/mbin setup better so that’s where I sit.
Also a good lesson to give up control to others. I and others volunteered to help with the spam problem - in direct messages to him - that went unanswered.
If people offering help and you might be overwhelmed, accept it.Man, I’m super glad I gave up on kbin at Christmas and migrated when I still had access to everything.
Sorry to hear you lost your community, but I’d be lying if I said this was a surprising outcome. Even back then people were seeing the writing on the wall with ernest’s personal issues, and personal issues are fine and we all have to deal with it. But as someone who has tried to run microservices for friends, I could tell he was less than a year from just turning the servers off.
Here’s hoping you can at least partially resurrect your community. And that ernest is able to get to a good place.
Yeah, I switched to mbin soon enough, because I felt the issues rather increased than getting less over the time.
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.
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.
“This Group is actually now this Group”
Locking the previous community with a post to the new one usually works quite well
