Unmoderated and now extremely delayed federation - is it time to move?
Unmoderated and now extremely delayed federation - is it time to move?
First, I think Ernest has done a fantastic job and I've been rooting for him this whole time. But it's becoming clear it's all too much for him without the support of a larger team.
Over the last several months there have been multiple posts about the spam problems on this instance, both here and on other instances. We've been fortunate so far they haven't simply defederated us.
Now when I go to the Hot page it's 12 hours out of date.
It's with a heavy heart I looked into a kbin fork mentioned in another thread in this magazine: Mbin.
GitHub: https://github.com/MbinOrg/mbin
Instance list: https://fedidb.org/software/mbin
The largest instance: https://fedia.io/
I'll miss you Kbin. It's been good. Thanks Ernest!
It's not the purpose of this post to support any particular instance. Feel free to mention your own alternatives below.
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is it time to move?
While Kbin is here I am here. I don't think Kbin is dead at all.
I appreciate kbin a lot and I hope Ernest will get back to development when he's ready, but I don't think it makes sense for him also to be responsible for administrating a major instance. That's a huge job.
I'm not entirely sure where I'd move to yet, but if kbin.social is not properly moderated it makes sense to go elsewhere. At some point other instances might have no choice but to defederate.
That's different from giving up on the software - I do still appreciate Kbin a lot. :)
I see alot of people complaining about this or that on the site, but not interacting with what people who are posting are still posting. Not posting anything of their own save complains about the site being as fucked ever it was or instigating jumping ship.
Honestly it's hard to tell what people want at times.
I guess the beautiful thing of being federated is that the content is separate from the software. If people enjoy the software but find kbin.social to be too unstable, they might very well jump ship to https://fedia.io/ or something (or even start their own instance), and we will still get to enjoy their content. :)
I don't have much patience for people complaining about how their instances are being run considering how easy it is to move somewhere else. Discussions and constructive criticism is of course a different matter, but the beauty of the fediverse as far as I'm concerned is that you can take the "if you don't like it, go somewhere else" attitude to the extreme without really being a jerk. :)
The sole maintainer of the project has been totally MIA for a month and the site has gone down or partially not worked repeatedly for months now. Now we've got issues with post federating on time and spam bots. It's not sustainable like this. I really appreciate what Ernest has done and am a big fan of Kbin, but he's clearly spread too thin and apparently wont allow people to help him.
KBin also does not honor account deletion requests.
Yep I decided to switch accounts to this username from another one I had been using that is kinda attached to my freelance business. I felt like it wasn't the wisest move to get into occasional debates with strangers like that. Some people just lose their mind if you disagree with them online.
So I requested deletion close to a month ago and it still hasn't gone through. Will it ever? Who knows
Mine was over 6 months ago.
holy shit that's bad
the site has gone down or partially not worked repeatedly for months now.
Oh please. This site never worked without a hitch. Come on over and have some fun in Taking Covid Seriously or Fagville if-and-when a page refreshes.
This site never worked without a hitch.
That is not a ringing endorsement.
I was very enthusiastic about kbin when it launched, I donated a fair bit to Ernest in those early heady days. But if he's refusing to accept help from other devs and admins I don't think it's sustainable, something like this just can't work as a one-man show. I wish him all the best but if that doesn't change I don't see this working in the long run.
That is not a ringing endorsement.
The site is just as good as it was when it was good enough for me to start using it and hasn't gotten worse.
I have posted endorsements which ring better elsewhere.
It has been getting worse for me. In addition to the sporadic outages, the spam, and the slow federation, I've had to develop the habit of refreshing the page before I try to respond to or vote on any comments. If I open the page and let it sit for a few minutes before trying I invariably get an error. It definitely didn't used to be that way.
If it was that bad for you from the outset I'm surprised you stuck around. I wouldn't've. I've only held on because I started to feel "settled".
Yep I get that comment/post error pretty frequently as well
I get where you're coming from, but don't really agree that because it's been bad it's fine that it continues to be bad or even worse when these are solvable problems. The issue with recent posts federating in a timely fashion is pretty concerning for one.
But even if I did agree with you about the site errors, the huge gaps in any communication are a big issue. It'd be great to know what's going on. And not being able to get an account deletion honored is frankly unacceptable. I've had one pending for close to a month. And having the entire project tied up with one person who just disappears without warning is also a big problem. Administering this instance all by one's self is already impractical. But doing that and also single-handedly running a software project of this complexity and magnitude on top of that is really hard to rationalize.
Anybody remember what happened Artemis? All that effort and community support poured into an app with a single dev holding the whole thing together and poof. She's gone and the app is no more. I still don't think anybody's heard from her since.
Huge props to him for what he's achieved, but Ernest needs to accept help. It's that simple.