Hello everyone, benevolent overlord #376465 here!
This wonderful little community of ours has grown a lot since it was started by AKittyCat and gloomchen back in June when Reddit chose to increase its decade-long process of going to hell at Mach 3.
That being said no one can predict the future. At the time kbin seemed like an amazing alternative to Lemmy. More features, better interface, improved functionality with Mastodon, etc etc. The reality now 8-9 months later is that kbin is falling drastically behind. I’m sure everyone has noticed the random 500 errors, the errors when upvoting and/or boosting, the occasional downtime, etc etc. Development seems to have stalled out. Ernest (kbin’s dev) has had personal issues (which I won’t rag on him for letting get in the way, real life comes before this dumb-ass Internet shit 10 times out of 10) but regardless, an absent dev (especially when there’s only one) does not make for a good software experience.
But…this is not just my community: It’s yours. So it’s time for everyone’s favourite activity: Sounding off in the comments!
As things stand we have two basic options:
A: Ride the wave, stay on kbin and deal with it cause life sucks while hoping Ernest comes back.
B: Jump ship and move to another instance with whatever turbulence it could cause.
For A, well nothing changes. Things might get better? Things might get worse? Who knows, roll a die.
For B, we’d be starting fresh with (theoretically) fewer problems, but depending where we go would mean we could lose some features (like if we went to Lemmy, no more microblog and Mastodon integration).
I have set up a SQ backup community a day ago, located on Lemmy.zip (https://lemmy.zip/c/squaredcircle) as it’s Federation is fairly wide open which should prevent issues (and from my own experience they don’t have much if any issues error-wise like we do here) tho I am not opposed to other instances should people suggest em and they look better (though I love how the .zip community already has 31 subscribers for no reason besides existing lmao).
I’ll make two comments below to keep the responses kinda-sorted, and this poll will remain up until approx. March 18th to give time for visibility.
Edit: Our current backup (and possible new home) which I linked above (and again, here) has been unlocked for posting given the heavy weekend we’re coming to here, and with kbin’s issues seemingly increasing today.
My 2 cents:
Speaking as a community member, I created an account on lemmy.zip this morning (same name, same avatar) and comments here on kbin.social are taking over 4 hours to appear there and vice-versa. We have a rather significant pay per view event coming up this Sunday, and with federation taking that long, the live discussion will suffer.
Speaking purely as a moderator, it’s important that we be able to take swift action against spambots, trolls, and harmful content. It’s also important that those actions federate quickly, too. The absolute last thing I want is some jerk posting NSFL/CSAM in a live discussion thread and mod actions removing it taking hours to federate. That’s obviously a worst case scenario, but not an impossible one.
It took 7 attempts to post the above comment. I vote leave.
7, ffs lol.
In the meantime while things are being decided here, I’m gonna unlock the .zip community so its ready at a moment’s notice for posting should you, Tellum or anyone else need it or need to direct anyone to it. Both of you make sure to comment or post on it asap and I’ll mod you there (I can’t do it blindly like on kbin it looks like lol).
Edit: ok that’s 6 attempts so far myself lol
Done.