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.
I’ve gone ahead and made a fedia.io magazine for us as well https://fedia.io/m/SquaredCircle in addition to lemmy.zip’s since they are currently the most populated mbin instance (and likely the most supported as a result). Going to post a thread or two on it and see if things federate. (Kbin hasn’t sent anything their way in 4 days it looks like, at least as far as our community goes.)
When I log into Fedia, this is the only post in this entire thread… which is impressive because it’s the first thing that appears to have federated in a week… this is being posted 5:19 am EST on 3/3/24.
Yeah I’ve been testing a bunch of different instances in the last day, here, kbin earth, kbin run, lemmy zip, dbzer0, beehaw, etc to see how the Federation is working before deciding where to move the community, so far Fedia seems (in terms of what has been received from Federation) the worst lol. Wouldn’t even have known you commented on this thread had I not come over here and looked.
It’s why I included the time and date, to see when or if it ever showed up on Kbin, lol. I love the Kbin/Mbin functions best, and I hate to admit it but it federates poorly right now.
The timestamp was much appreciated, trust me lol.
And I agree. Right now things seem to be working best via lemmy.zip. The posts and comments, albeit small in number, seem to come across fine (plus their de-federation list is quite tiny so they aren’t blocking much if anything).
Kbin.social, fedia.io, mbin.elroy and kbin.run aren’t seeing things (and only kbin.social is even seeing the lemmy.zip SQ community, the other 3 aren’t and searching isn’t pulling it up to subscribe to trigger federation. kbin.earth does see lemmy.zip, and everything federated!..but kbin.earth can’t see the SQ community I made on fedia.io (and is also way behind on Federation with kbin.social, but more up to date with it than fedia is), etc etc etc.
Edit: Ok fedia may be working better than it was.