When Kbin isn’t working I check out Lemmy but it just feels too cluttered. If I didn’t need to get paid I’d help Ernest out but, ya know, capitalism 🤷♂️
Many of the lemmy instances have two or more front-ends available. I find https://photon.lemmy.world/ with the dark them and "List" post style looks pretty nice. There's at least one that just simply replicates old reddit.
Do y'all not like pertinent-to-the-conversation questions about hardcoded word bans on some of these platforms or are the downvotes on the above post due to issues y'all take with fags reclaiming and self-referring using anti-them slurs?
For me, you saying "hey, can I use slurs over there yet? Specifically, ___" is a bit like the dudebros that yell out "Equal rights, equal fights!" as they pretend to punch a woman ... like ... why the fuck did your mind go there immediately ... it's a bit disconcerting.
Had you said something like "Do they still have the hardcoded blocked words, still? I used to laugh whenever someone from England tried to mention cigarettes and it gets [REMOVED]! Haven't seen that in a while though" I don't think you'd have gotten the downvotes.
Just my opinion, others may have had different reasons to dislike your comment.
ETA: Your other comment wasn't showing before. You identify as the word and want to be able to use it and not have it be labeled as hate speech when it's against yourself ... So ... I'll update my "had you said" to "Hey, are they still redacting fag over there? We're trying to take that word back into the community (similar to how queer has largely been taken back) and it's real fucking hard when it's [REMOVED]!" instead.
Maybe you should think of non-awful words to use, instead.
Fag is a beautiful word which accurately describes me and 4/3 of my friends.
I'm all for kicking people who weaponize hate speech off of platforms but restricting the language marginalized groups can use to refer to themselves is contrary to the ends hardcoded banned word lists would seem to've been implemented to engender.
It isn't even one instance making that decision as I understand it—it's hardcoded into Lemmy (as opposed to kbin or whatever other options may exist).
I understand the idea of reclaiming a slur. But general audiences might not recognize what you're saying for what it is. And nothing stops a bad actor from making the same claims and using the terms in bad faith, hence why it's generally easier from all sides to use different verbiage.
Does anybody happen to have contact with Ernest outside of Kbin? It's a little concerning that his last update over a month ago was that he was going in for a medical procedure and that he'd only be gone for a few days. I hope he's doing alright.
I agree. I’m no marathon kbin contributor, but I like it here a lot and I would be happier if this thread was about what we can do to support kbin as an instance.
If mbin where a placeholder for doing this (as in if certain permissions aren’t available yet) then I’d be buoyed up by OP’s thread.
Anyhoo, viva la kbin, viva la federation!
I've sent requests for taking over dead communities including a private message and haven't heard anything. I'm concerned that the project will stagnate and, with it, the community.
I put in a request to take over a magazine last year when its previous moderator disappeared, and ernest actioned it pretty quickly. It looks like he hasn't posted for a month or so now though - hope he's doing okay. Running this thing must be a hell of a weight to carry.
I hate to say it, because I've been really pleased with kbin for the most part. I've liked being able to dip my toes into the Mastodon side without yet another account; I like the interface; and my interactions with Ernest have been nothing but pleasant. I certainly hope all is well with him personally. But whether it's legitimate medical issues or undisclosed burnout, the instance and platform are struggling.
The good thing is that everything has been federating and most of us have been interacting with Lemmy and mbin users daily anyway; it's "just" a loss of fake internet points and comment history to move. I'm trying to put that off, but the mobile site/pwa is only okay, API rollout has stalled (meaning app development has stalled as well), admin activities can't happen with Ernest, and technical issues with the instance are becoming more common.
I think the Reddit API mini-exodus last year hit at that exact "sweet" spot, in terms of numbers and point in kbin development, where one dev/admin could almost keep up with it, but not quite. Suddenly this thing he was noodling with to combine Lemmy and Mastodon has thousands of people wanting it to be production ready. I don't begrudge him anything even if it is just burnout, but if that is the case then maybe it's time to bless mbin as a successor and start migrating people off kbin.social or find someone else to admin it and ugrade it to mbin. Ernest has built up a ton of goodwill; if he's done, then he's done (and of course, if he's ill then he's ill). Who among us could stand up a minimum viable product of a reddit clone and admin two instances? Not me, that's for sure.
Edit: I checked, and Ernest's Polish-language instance karab.in is completely down right now.
We have all been very lucky that these open source projects are there as an alternative, and there are ways Ernest can step back if being the sole PM of a sprawling social network project isn't good for him. I just don't want it to happen in a way where people are left with a bad taste in their mouths for the Fediverse or him personally.
I agree completely with you about the state of kbin and what it means for Ernest: if it's become too much for him, or he has medical issues, just ask for help.
That said, I don't know what to say about switching to mbin: I don't know what caused the split, and honestly the 2-3 threads by some noisy bozos going "KAY GUYS KBIN'S DEAD, YOU'RE ALL INVITED ON MBIN" don't exactly make me wanna rush there.
The initial split largely seemed to be that people were submitting code fixes and Ernest wasn't accepting them or updating /KBin fast enough for them. The lack of API that was already done and approved by Ernest and ready to go (that to my knowledge still hasn't been implemented on KBin!) seemed to have been the last straw that got them traction.
Ernest doesn't want to band aid fixes, he wants to fix the underlying problems and eliminate the "tech debt" he's already accumulated rather than letting it continue to pile on to the point that fixing anything becomes unmanageable due to all the band aids. This is GOOD, but it means everything will be much slower. MBin is just pedal to the metal and literally accepting any bit of code at all, which also isn't really sustainable for a product that people want to use.
At this point, I dunno though, Ernest has been gone for a month and the site has been super slow and blips up and down all the time. I REALLY hope he's ok, but I'm not sure of the long term viability of /KBin anymore and am wondering what if the next blip just doesn't get resolved???
I agree on the MBin bros thing, 100%. Their attitude has really made me not want to even consider their project at all. I don't like the tankie devs on the Lemmy side of things, but, at the same time don't really think that matters all that much. If they do something bad, people can break off and spin off like MBin did.
To me, ideal world, enough people donate that Ernest can pay himself to work on it full time and maybe hire an extra FT dev (Nabu Casa hires like 30 devs to work on Home Assistant without taking in any VC debt or 3rd party money, so, it's at least feasible, but they built up 5ish years of goodwill before they spun up Nabu Casa and people were still initially skeptical), but that's not going to be possible if he disappears constantly so it's a catch-22.
Seriously though, I really hope he's ok and this hasn't been because something happened to him. It's really ominous that his last communication indicated he had surgery coming up and then complete radio silence
It wouldn't be impossible to find a middle ground between pushing the pedal to the metal and solving the underlying problems, Mbin has more active maintainers and people who collaborate with pull requests. Considering that, Ernest and the Mbin team/community could work together. We all want the same thing, a quality Kbin working.
Thanks for the explanation :)
Recent news told us that Ernest is alive and kinda well, so that's a relief; still, the question remains that he probably get help, as developing and adminning could be too much to handle.
Also, like u/Facni also said, there could be a middle ground between the fast&furious of Mbin and the slow&steady of Kbin, and everyone would benefit from it.
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.
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.
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".
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.
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
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. :)
It's increasing. It's up to about 12 hours. I've officially migrated off of kbin for now. I'm sure it's started to throw errors to other instances. Last time it did that we got temporarily defederated.
I have to admit I have been moving over to mbin. It's the same layout and hot algo but with bug fixes. I submitted an issue and they had it fixed within a few days.
kbin.social in particular only has the one admin. I keep an eye on the two ghost-town mags that I mod so they don't become spam vectors, but there's only so much we can do without an admin/dev.
It’s really frustrating because kbin has gotten too big to still basically be a one-man operation. Unless he lets other people take over some things, the wheels are gonna fall off sooner rather than later.
I’ve been feeling it too, and have been on the fence about jumping ship. My block list is growing so fast it’s just a touch obscene. So many pill pushers junk websites and… random and science are hit so hard it’s frustrating.
I will be registering elsewhere to see if the experience is any better. I really like the overall direction and design of kbin, but things have been dragging on updates and improvements.
For example, my settings are identical as far as I can tell between desktop and mobile, but my mobile feed is generally hitting day old on the first page while desktop has several pages of more recent content. I walked through the settings side by side and they appear identical.
But I haven't reported it or searched to see if someone else has because of the absence making the effort to document and report less urgent.
I'll keep my account of course and keep an eye out if it picks back up because do like the browser based interface and the combo of lemmy and mastodon in a single feed.
I know the admin here recently had a minor surgery. I'm hoping for some kind of solution for when normal life stuff keeps him away. Like a few people just in charge of getting rid of spammers and worse people.
Do you need to? No. But I do have accounts on both and will keep it that way, because they’re just completely different experiences and Kbin isn’t to a point yet IMO to fully replace Mastodon on the client level.
There is a plus up in the top right group of icons. When you click it, it gives you options to choose from and asks if you want to make a thread, post, link,ect. Once you are in that page there is an option for what magazine you want it to go in. [FYI I have been using kbin for three days so I could be wrong.]
Go to the magazine that you want to create a thread in, hit the + in the top bar, and select "Add new link" or "Add new thread". There's also a select box for the magazine once you hit one of those.
For a microblog post, make sure to hit "Add new post" and again, there is a dropdown select box for the magazine. Also, you can add a hashtag to make the microblog post show up in various magazines.
This is my understanding as well, @a@kbin.social¹. And with this understanding, I concur with @anonymouse:
they made things overly complicated
Indeed. It’s not a meaningful separation particularly when the microblogs have no significant enforcement of being “micro”. The /feeling/ I get is that kbin threads (which are very poorly named as @s6original discovered) are for high effort often lengthy content with a graphic, formatting, and more thought-out content. But kbin supports formatting in both which makes them redundant.
I suspect if someone makes a lot of short off-the-cuff “threads” a moderator might want to have a word with them.
/kbin
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