cross-posted from: https://fedia.io/m/fedia/t/349909

As you are all painfully aware, kbin has been my nemesis pretty much from the start. Unlike Lemmy, Mastodon, Firefish, writefreely, akkoma, synapse, pixelfed, and peertube, I simply cannot competently run kbin. It’s a complete goat rodeo of database errors, kbin and lemmy aren’t getting along, and so on. Though I love the idea and trajectory of Kbin, it simply needs a more time to cook in the oven before being ready.

I will contrast lemmy (infosec.pub) with kbin on fedia.io: fedia.io runs an separate app server and database server. Both servers are larger than the single server that infosec.pub runs on, yet infosec.pub has about 10x the traffic, and kbin is struggling under the load.

If this were all I did, I could likely sort out the various database layout issues and make contributions to fix the code, since I am somewhat familiar with php. Unfortunately, I don’t. And more than that, I have observed a general slowdown in the rate of contributions to the code base of kbin, leaving me to think that it’s not going to get better any time soon.

I don’t take this decision lightly, and I kicked the can down the road for a long time hoping to find a way through so that I didn’t have to do this, but I have to face facts: it’s not getting better and I see nothing that is going to change that.

Most unfortunately, kbin has no options for account migration, which makes this all the more painful. My intention is to shut fedia.io down at the end of November.

I am intending to resurrect it as a lemmy instance, assuming I can sort out how to ensure there are no issues with account keys.

My sincere apologies for this…

Jerry

  • @[email protected]
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    171 year ago

    Sad news for Kbin, how is the development going on their side?

    Good to know that Fedia is coming back as Lemmy, could be an interesting instance

    • debounced
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      181 year ago

      some of us have moved over to mbin, it’s a fork of kbin with an emphasis on community driven development. i’ve already migrated kbin.run over. ActivityPub is very domain name specific once things federate out, so i’m sticking with kbin in the domain…for now.

      • yukichigai
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        1 year ago

        Huh, got me intrigued, gotta say. Any significant differences between mbin and kbin you can point out? I know for me in kbin the Mastodon interactivity doesn’t work the best, and finding the context of replies in threads doesn’t work when it goes to multi-page.

        • debounced
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          1 year ago

          mbin is a very recent fork (has all the latest commits from the kbin dev branch as of today), so not much of anything “new” or groundbreaking has happened yet. i think the main thing right now is catching up on the backlog of PRs that have been stuck in the kbin queue for months, even basic things like bumping the dependency versions to improve package security was enough to convince me to move my instance over.

          • yukichigai
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            1 year ago

            Ahh gotcha. So this is the start of the fork. Interesting.

            Well I’m definitely gonna keep an eye on it. Think I’ll make an account over on your side too just to keep up with my basic plan of diversification. That way whichever one winds up becoming the superior product, I’ll already be established there.

            EDIT: Oh snap, mbin already has an option to put the reply bar at the top. That opens up the option for expanding infinite scroll to comments as well, which has been one of my major gripes about kbin.

            EDITx2: Oh and it has 2fa support. Well damn, that’s significant. Huge even.

      • @[email protected]
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        41 year ago

        someone pointed out that Melroy, a very active developer on kbin, forked kbin to mbin […] so I am retracting my shutdown announcement

        I wonder if he’s talking about you in here