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. 🤙

  • originalucifer
    98•5 months ago

    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.

      • originalucifer
        20•5 months ago

        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.

        • SpookyAlex03English
          10•4 months ago

          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

      • maegul (he/they)English
        4•4 months ago

        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!