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

  • MHLoppy
    link
    fedilink
    99
    edit-2
    1 year ago

    UPDATE: the shutdown has been (for now) retracted.

    The admin (jerry) has switched from kbin to a fork called mbin that has apparently been able to integrate changes faster than the base kbin project. Jerry seems satisfied with the number of issues fixed in the fork (for now), so has retracted the shutdown announcement (for now).

    FEDIA.IO update!!!

    After I made the announcement about shutting down fedia.io, someone pointed out that Melroy, a very active developer on kbin, forked kbin to mbin. I just migrated to mbin and so far it seems to have resolved all the problems I’ve seen. It’s likely too early to tell, but I think that Melroy is VERY responsive and helpful, so I am retracting my shutdown announcement. And that makes me very happy.

    https://infosec.exchange/@jerry/111235153655966812


    Followup: https://fedia.io/m/fedia/t/350673 tl;dr retraction has become more concrete. No need for the “for now” qualifier anymore.

  • Ab_intra
    link
    English
    591 year ago

    I guess we’re now seeing what software will survive the long run.

    • DarkenLM
      link
      fedilink
      201 year ago

      Things can still take a turn. There are a fuck ton and a half of pull requests still not pushed on the main branch that fopefully fix many issues.

      Also, lemmy has been in development for quite a bit longer, so I wouldn’t give up on kbin yet. At least I won’t.

      • @[email protected]
        link
        fedilink
        English
        121 year ago

        I mean, Kbin is written in PHP and Lemmy uses Rust. If I went with just that knowledge alone, I’d say that Kbin would have trouble attracting developers since PHP isn’t exactly a hip new language like Rust is.

        • DarkenLM
          link
          fedilink
          4
          edit-2
          1 year ago

          Not being a hip new language is an advantage on my books, and on many others’. PHP has been battle-tested and was once (and in a way, still is) a pillar of the internet. Stability always trumps novelty. Rust wasn’t exactly created with the internet in mind, but PHP was, and it’s way easier to find PHP developers than it is to find Rust developers (last time I checked).

          Though the performance boost provided by Rust over PHP is not something to be ignored, though servers written in C or C++ have also been around for quite a while, and PHP still managed to trump many of them.

          • @[email protected]
            link
            fedilink
            English
            10
            edit-2
            1 year ago

            You may be right but the popularity of a language has a MAJOR effect on the number of people willing to contribute to a project.
            For example, I’ve been considering contributing to Lemmy while I wouldn’t touch php with a 10’ pole since it’s basically being replaced everywhere.

      • Ab_intra
        link
        English
        71 year ago

        I hope I didn’t sound like I wanted it to fail, I definitely think it’s great with different platforms.

        • DarkenLM
          link
          fedilink
          21 year ago

          It did sound a bit like you were cheering for it, but I understood the message you were trying to transmit.

          • Ab_intra
            link
            English
            41 year ago

            Yeah, unfortunately sometimes things can be misunderstood by how we write…

    • ram
      link
      fedilink
      English
      131 year ago

      The beauty of FLOSS is that forks can come into existence, things the parent’s maintainer likes can be upstreamed to that project, and things that the fork’s maintainers like will deviate. There’s a nice ebb and flow, and there’s not really any need for one fork or another to “survive”. If kbin stops being used in favour of mbin, it wouldn’t be unusual for the maintainer of kbin to move into mbin development, even.

    • ᴇᴍᴘᴇʀᴏʀ 帝
      link
      fedilink
      English
      71 year ago

      Lemmy has been forked, so we may end up not actually using Lemmy here either (it’s not unusual as I’m on Calckey a fork of Misskey, although Calckey is now called Firefish and has been forked as IceShrimp - I don’t care as long as it works).

  • Xusontha
    link
    fedilink
    English
    251 year ago

    RIP local post history, at least the posts are all saved because of federation

    • @woelkchenM
      link
      English
      12
      edit-2
      1 year ago

      at least the posts are all saved because of federation

      Really? And how can the owners of those posts control what happens to them?

      EDIT: Since the replies were not helpful, I researched myself and got an answer surprisingly fast. Lemmy pull request “after 30 days, replace comment.content and post.body with ‘Deleted’” merged into LemmyNet:main on Jun 26. So at least Lemmy is safe in that regard.

      • Xusontha
        link
        fedilink
        English
        101 year ago

        Well they don’t have control over the posts anymore cuz the request would have to be sent out from the original server, but they always could ask a mod/admin if they wanted to delete something

        for posts all the posts made to a federated community or a local community that has been federated by another instance should be saved by that other instance, however I’m not sure what it would mean for someone trying to subscribe to a community hosted on fedia.io from another instance. The only problem would be image uploads, since those aren’t stored on the federated servers (except for cached versions)

        • @woelkchenM
          link
          English
          5
          edit-2
          1 year ago

          Well they don’t have control over the posts anymore

          So the entire Fediverse is illegal throughout EU under GDPR Article 17 then? That seems way too major of an issue that this was just overlooked when developing the protocol.

          EDIT: Since the replies were not helpful, I researched myself and got an answer surprisingly fast. Lemmy pull request “after 30 days, replace comment.content and post.body with ‘Deleted’” merged into LemmyNet:main on Jun 26. So at least Lemmy is safe in that regard.

          • @[email protected]
            link
            fedilink
            English
            211 year ago

            This topic has been brought quite a few times earlier.

            When you close your Gmail or Outlook email account, can you ask Google or Microsoft to ensure that copies of your emails are deleted to all the recipients you ever sent emails to?

            • @woelkchenM
              link
              English
              -21 year ago

              When you close your Gmail or Outlook email account, can you ask Google or Microsoft to ensure that copies of your emails are deleted to all the recipients you ever sent emails to?

              That comparison makes no sense. e-mail is no public forum. In case I’ve mailed a mailing list and the archive is public, I have only the mailing list owner to ask for deletion from the archive. Private mails cannot legally be published.

              • @[email protected]
                link
                fedilink
                English
                101 year ago

                I think this will end up being the same case as things that end up on search engines. I.e. you’ll need to send hundreds of right to be forgotten requests to every service.

              • @asdfasdfasdf
                link
                English
                31 year ago

                GDPR isn’t specific to public forums.

                • @woelkchenM
                  link
                  English
                  31 year ago

                  GDPR isn’t specific to public forums.

                  The context here is obviously about removing public posts, not private e-mails from the servers of the recipients.

          • @[email protected]
            link
            fedilink
            English
            71 year ago

            No. The servers that host your account comply with GDPR. If you post something on reddit and, for example, archive.org scrapes the post, reddit is not responsible for that. Adding to that, there is no personal information transmitted between Lemmy servers, only the name of your account and the content of the post.

            • Kayn
              link
              fedilink
              English
              41 year ago

              But ActivityPub is push-based. Each Lemmy server is actively pushing its content to other servers that house subscribers.

  • @[email protected]
    link
    fedilink
    English
    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
      link
      fedilink
      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
        link
        fedilink
        6
        edit-2
        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
          link
          fedilink
          10
          edit-2
          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
            link
            fedilink
            8
            edit-2
            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]
        link
        fedilink
        English
        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

  • sj_zero
    link
    fedilink
    141 year ago

    I ended up giving up on kbin after almost a week of trying to simply get it to run and federate. Ended up running Lemmy (though I’m presently using lotide as my main threadiverse experience) and after days of not being able to federate with kbin.

    Hoping kbin federates with lotide soon.

    Really like the project in a lot of ways, but when I tried it, it just wasn’t ready yet.

  • pruwyben
    link
    fedilink
    English
    2
    edit-2
    1 year ago

    I signed up on two small kbin instances (kbin.lol and fediverse.boo) to check it out. Both have since shut down. The first was due to similar complaints; the second just disappeared as far as I know.