Good morning! :) Today I want to focus mainly on reviewing the pull requests you've submitted. There are many great things there that will help improve the kbin experience. That's amazing, thank you! I'm also in the final stages of sorting out the infrastructure-related formalities. Soon, the situation with the website's functionality should stabilize, and the traffic from the fediverse will gradually be restored. I've decided to delegate some tasks as I can no longer oversee everything at this stage. There are many offers of help for which I'm very grateful, and I haven't had a chance to respond to some of them yet because I only just saw them - a lot is happening, really.
As I mentioned before, new possibilities have emerged that I couldn't have imagined before. All of this is thanks to your support; you are incredible, and I thank you. That's why it's crucial for me to ensure transparency in everything we do and provide regular reports. I want to share as much information behind the scenes as possible. That's why it may seem like it's taking a long time, but I truly want to make the most of every cent.
Now, onto the bad news. I messed up.
The workload overwhelmed me, and I couldn't read all your messages. I will diligently work my way through them, but I need time.
The registration system is far from perfect, so from time to time, I manually verify and activate accounts whose activation links didn't arrive. Please check again later if you find yourself in such a situation.
The queue for account deletions is stuck. Manual fix is needed, which will be difficult until the infrastructure is moved. I have recorded all 230 account deleiton requests, and each one will definitely be deleted, but I also need time for that. I apologize for this. If someone wants their account to be immediately deleted, please send an email through the contact form starting with "DELETE MY ACCOUNT" - it will be easier for me to filter it out, and I will delete the account manually.
That's all from me. I'm going back to stirring the cauldron. Thank you for all the messages and kind words. Thank you for being here. Have a nice day!
Since Ernest doesn't mention it himself, I would like to point out that he has a BuyMeACoffee account where you can donate to him to support him for all his hard work.
Suggestion: If you have work that can reasonably be farmed out, you might try writing up a list of what you need people for and asking for any volunteers and setting up something to let them handle some of the load.
I don't know whether that will work, but just doing reviews of pull requests on GitHub for a new project expanding rapidly may be a full-time effort for someone, much less all this other stuff.
From experience escalating other projects, he's probably at the stage where the urgent (the site collapsing) is done before the important (delegating tasks). If he stops to delegate tasks, the normal functioning of the site will collapse.
Anyone who wants to volunteer and don't know where to start can start by going to the currently opened PR and reviewing them, testing them, improving them. Of course @ernest will have to review them afterwards. But if three independent developers say they already tested and reviewed and reported the potential mistakes, that makes his life much much easier.
The author of "The Phoenix Project" would argue that you gotta just take the L for a minute while you reorganize. Because a lynchpin like ernest is never going to have a good moment to stop and reorganize, you just gotta do it now.
He's apparently found some people to help with the infra side of things - which is the hardest thing to do. This means more focus on improving the product. :D
@ernest Please hang in there and take a breath. This site is amazing quality for a beta given the insane traffic coming over from the /r debacle. Pace yourself. Development and testing is a marathon, not a sprint (no pun intended).
I hope the many new arrivals (like me) appreciate how far kbin has come so quickly. /r wasn't solid for quite a while.
I've been in a position similarly unenviable to yours. It's exciting but stressful. Even if it all feels incredibly high-priority, don't burn out; it's a marathon not a sprint!
I've been picking through issues and working on fixes locally to try and get you bundled-up PRs that use the systems and conventions you've already established, instead of just taping discontinuous new on top of everything. However, despite being a grumpy old PHP and JS veteran, I'm somehow a relative newbie to Symfony and Stimulus, so I hope I'm not doing more harm than good lol.
@ernest I've been working on a 3rd party app for kbin. I'm gonna be running a beta test within a month or two. Would love to know about official API support, seems like you're pretty darn busy. For now I'm working around that and cloudflare protection but not sure how that'll scale eventually heh. So just an FYI.
@ernest lol so you got slashdotted and people are paying you a ***** ton on buy me a coffee as an apollogee. lol wtf. never change reddit and internet.
Just chiming in to say how much I appreciate all the hard work you’re putting into this. Managing this sudden influx of traffic with so little down time and such grace is really impressive and hasn’t gone unnoticed. Cheers mate.
Thank you so much for your transparency and efforts! The only thing I can envision you're going through is that scene from Silicon Valley in which they try to bump server capacity and scale. I can imagine that it is not an easy task, it is amazing what you have achieved so far and I am confident that the platform will grow over the months to come.
Just wanted to welcome folks to https://readit.buzz - it’s ran by Universeodon.com admins on our bare metal infrastructure - should be nice & performant. I look forward to seeing everyone on fediverse! Bring your friends :)
Just wanted to welcome folks to https://readit.buzz - it’s ran by Universeodon.com admins on our bare metal infrastructure - should be nice & performant. I look forward to seeing everyone on fediverse! Bring your friends :)
Thank you for sharing this! Can I ask if you can put any context around 'soon' and 'gradually' in these statements?
Soon, the situation with the website's functionality should stabilize, and the traffic from the fediverse will gradually be restored
I originally signed up for another instance (intending to be helpful by not overloading this one!) but the huge growth of kbin.social and lack of interoperability means that if I'm not here, I'm not really getting much value out of kbin.
Really appreciate your work here, but any expectations management you can do around when interoperability will resume (hours, days, weeks, months?) would be hugely helpful for me deciding which instance I should settle down in.
@theinspectorst Hey, I hope it will stabilize in the next few hours, but knowing reality, it could take a few days. In certain matters, I simply have to wait. Once it happens, bringing the full functionality back to the fediverse will probably also take a few days. I suspect that due to CF, some instances may temporarily block us, and I will have to reach out to their administrators. I'm using these words because it's really difficullt for me to estimate anything on my own.
Thanks for taking the time to reply to this amid all the other things keeping you busy - even that amount of clarity is very helpful! Keep up the great work.
Anyone else having a problem with notifications? I receive zero notifications about any post or comment I make here if someone comments on it. Dunno why but I only know people commented if I find my post or refresh it later....... is this a setting I'm missing?
Being overwhelmed is not messing up. Taking care of number 1 should always be a priority.
Am glad to see some delegation happening. Developing, running and modding a service as large as KBin has become is no easy task for 1 person and you've done spectacular so far.