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Thoughts Around KBin's Current Status and the Importance of Community Migration Features (lemmy.zip)

submitted 4 months ago by MoogleMaestro@lemmy.zip to c/fediverse@lemmy.world

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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. 🤙

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[-] originalucifer@moist.catsweat.com 98 points 4 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.

[-] Die4Ever@programming.dev 27 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago)

account portability is a big topic in 'verse developer circles

I think community portability is a way bigger deal, at least here

I think if communities could have aliases/mirrors, that would mostly fix the problem without completely rewriting all of the ActivityPub spec?

edit: I did find this issue on their Github https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/3100

and: https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/4619

[-] originalucifer@moist.catsweat.com 20 points 4 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.

[-] WeirdAlex03@lemmy.zip 10 points 4 months ago* (last edited 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

[-] BentiGorlich@gehirneimer.de 9 points 4 months ago

That is an annoyance of mastodon. AP is not to blame in this case. Mastodon could just treat boosts by group actors differently, but they don't

[-] Blaze@sopuli.xyz 5 points 4 months ago

Iceshrimp and Sharkey ftw!

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[-] Chozo@fedia.io 67 points 4 months ago

Kbin is dead. Long live Kbin.

For those who enjoyed the Kbin experience, Fedia.io has been fantastic! It's running Mbin, a fork of Ernest's Kbin. It's stable and online reliably!

Hopefully Ernest is able to take care of himself. I've only ever had limited interactions with him, but he seems like a good guy, and I hope he's able to get back to work on fulfilling his vision for the project.

[-] bacon_saber@fedia.io 25 points 4 months ago

Fedia’s been great.

There are a handful of other choices, too: https://joinmbin.org/

[-] BentiGorlich@gehirneimer.de 15 points 4 months ago

Please have a look at the smaller mbin instances as well. It is not good to have one massive server and a lot of tiny ones. Kbin.social is the best example of it, the second best is lemmy.world which just has issues because of its size...

[-] Blaze@sopuli.xyz 8 points 4 months ago

For people reading https://mbin.fediverse.observer/list

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[-] classic@fedia.io 9 points 4 months ago

Agreed. Moved from kbin to fedia.io and it has been smooth so far. I hope they continue to evolve the format though

[-] Stopthatgirl7@lemmy.world 40 points 4 months ago

You’ve highlighted what is definitely a major problem with the Fediverse - all it takes for you to lose all the hard work you’ve done building up a community is the person running a server to pull the plug with no warning.

I loved kbin social - I started out on there, and only moved over to lemmy because it was getting too erratic and it was impossible to find out what was going on. Being able to move is a great thing, but if you miss your window to move, you’re SOL.

Admins definitely need to be willing and able to have the reins over to someone else if it’s getting to be too much, or to at least let people know in advance if they’re planning to shut down. Communication is key.

[-] lambalicious@lemmy.sdf.org 13 points 4 months ago

all it takes for you to lose all the hard work you’ve done building up a community is the person running a server to pull the plug with no warning.

This also shows the even more important lesson: if you want to maintain a community you also have to be responsible about digital community sovereignty. Set up your own instance, or at least set up your own webpage (even a Neocities one) that is kept updated with information about where the active community and any alternatives / mirrors are.

We are coming out from reddit yet still have to fully learn the lesson about renting our existence on someone else's server. (And, to be fair, fediverse development as a whole should be helping with that: in the least migrating user accounts should be as easy as "export to file" → "import from file").

[-] wjs018@ani.social 8 points 4 months ago

This is an excellent point that I thought about when a previous community I was active in got shut down on the ml instance due to some admin whims. Since then, for the two communities I run, I have an external wiki that I maintain with things like complete rules or an index of past weekly discussion threads, etc. These wikis are set up on a VPS that I am responsible for, independent of the host instance of my communities.

ani.social and the admin, @hitagi@ani.social, has been excellent, and the instance is a logical place for anime/manga communities. I have also tried to keep up donations to keep the server running, but people's lives change, not always by choice. Having some form of communication independent of the lemmy instance makes sense for those scenarios, if for nothing else except for communicating a migration to a different instance.

[-] Elevator7009@kbin.run 10 points 4 months ago

Hey, I remember your name from kbin.social and I have not seen you in awhile, nice to see you're still up and kicking on the Fediverse.

I just lucked out. As soon as I figured out what I was doing I wanted off of the flagship instance to help with decentralization, went to kbin.cafe whose admin abandoned it so I went to kbin.run, and kbin.run happened to make the switch to Mbin.

[-] jay@mbin.zerojay.com 8 points 4 months ago

This is exactly why for everything fediverse, I only run my own.

[-] Glowstick@lemmy.world 33 points 4 months ago

fedia.io is the replacement you're looking for. It's an mbin, which is a branch from kbin

[-] strawberry@kbin.run 13 points 4 months ago

kbin.run too

[-] I_Miss_Daniel@lemmy.world 25 points 4 months ago

A shame about kbin. It's where I landed as well but eventually had to move to lemmy.world.

I wonder if there would be enough data on archive.org to rebuild your community? I guess not given users who moved might not have kepth the same usernames.

[-] Aatube@kbin.melroy.org 12 points 4 months ago

Just curious, why did you choose lemmy.world over mbin?

[-] I_Miss_Daniel@lemmy.world 5 points 4 months ago

I don't think mbin existed at that time. For a long time I was on kbin on desktop and Artemis on Android. Artemis kinda evaporated, and eventually I settled on Voyager, which meant I needed a lemmy.world amount. I still used kbin on desktop but it became less and less reliable.

[-] Die4Ever@programming.dev 9 points 4 months ago

I wonder if there would be enough data on archive.org to rebuild your community?

you can probably find a mirror of the community on one of the big Lemmy instances

[-] readbeanicecream@lemm.ee 24 points 4 months ago

I started out on kbin.social. It really had a lot of potential...until it didn't. Now, I spend my time on lemm.ee or kbin.earth (they migrated over to mbin). Account migration would have been great, and made things a lot easier, but you live and you learn. The fediverse is a new frontier for all of us. I wish Earnest the best!

[-] Fitik@fedia.io 20 points 4 months ago

@MoogleMaestro@lemmy.zip If you liked kbin (like me) I suggest checking out mbin(kbin hard fork), I moved to it a year ago when I seen first red flags, and I don't regret it

https://joinmbin.org/

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[-] aeharding@vger.social 19 points 4 months ago

60 days notice is standard on Mastodon, it would be nice to see instances commit to that.

[-] Treczoks@lemmy.world 18 points 4 months ago

I just dropped Kbin from my bookmarks yesterday. I'm sad to see it gone, as it had some nice features.

[-] DarkThoughts@fedia.io 17 points 4 months ago

mbin has several working instances such as fedia.io, and is community developed. https://github.com/MbinOrg/mbin

Pretty much all of the major issues that kbin had were long fixed in mbin, hence why I eventually switched.

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[-] BlorpTheHagraven@startrek.website 9 points 4 months ago

I really liked kbin too. Left Reddit early into the migration and went straight there. It got too buggy to use, so I went on holiday to bsky for a minute (not my thing). When I came back, it was gone, sadly. So, here I am.

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[-] Emperor@feddit.uk 16 points 4 months ago

But I can’t help but feel like there’s another story here regarding the potential risks of the fediverse:

It's perhaps the most important story going forward. Rexxit was only a year ago and a lot of instances are gone already. If that's not sorted out people will start to wonder why they should invest time and effort in an instance or community.

Admins need to be ready to migrate ownership to others who are willing to take on the financial or user account management burden.

It was touch-and-go for us on feddit.uk but it all worked out right at the last minute and we've been working hard to ensure that everything is set up so that the instance's future is assured for as long as the users want it. Here is our most recent financial report.

A lot of problems could be avoided by planning ahead - never rely on a single Admin and make sure that funding is in place (and not being run from any one individual's bank account - why Open Collective is very good for this). That way, if one Admin has to step down (and you are less likely to burn out if you can spread the load) then there are already others who can pick up the slack.

[-] Rhaedas@fedia.io 15 points 4 months ago

The idea of migration and data preservation has been a topic since day one, since that's a big reason why so many moved to the Fediverse. I still haven't seen a perfect solution, and maybe there isn't one. Perhaps just having a lot of redundancy (oh no, reposts!) is the only true way of protecting posts for as long as possible, and even then...

Ernest started things rolling with something that probably wasn't ready for the demand, but it was there when the time came. That others forked off from it and kept it going is the bright spot here. I appreciate Lemmy and even have an account from the first days, but I like the kbin/mbin setup better so that's where I sit.

[-] Hello_there@fedia.io 12 points 4 months ago

Also a good lesson to give up control to others. I and others volunteered to help with the spam problem - in direct messages to him - that went unanswered.
If people offering help and you might be overwhelmed, accept it.

[-] Passerby6497@lemmy.world 11 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago)

Man, I'm super glad I gave up on kbin at Christmas and migrated when I still had access to everything.

Sorry to hear you lost your community, but I'd be lying if I said this was a surprising outcome. Even back then people were seeing the writing on the wall with ernest's personal issues, and personal issues are fine and we all have to deal with it. But as someone who has tried to run microservices for friends, I could tell he was less than a year from just turning the servers off.

Here's hoping you can at least partially resurrect your community. And that ernest is able to get to a good place.

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[-] HubertManne@moist.catsweat.com 11 points 4 months ago

I sorta wish the strengths of the fediverse could be utilized by having some redundancy. Im not saying every instance should replicate everything but it would be great if you could make an account for two or three instance and then get some secret to copy and paste into each other to link them up. Maybe even allow a max of 3 for syncing.

[-] JackbyDev@programming.dev 10 points 4 months ago

I'm going to say it, community migration is probably more important than user migration features. While there is no official user migration there are scripts to carry over preferences and subscriptions to a new instance. Easy peesy. But community migration is a much more important concept if only because communities are what make Lemmy great.

Mirroring content is probably easy enough, but I don't know if we'll ever see a way for the ActivityPub spec to say "This Group is actually now this Group" or if that would even be a good idea.

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[-] rglullis@communick.news 10 points 4 months ago

At the moment of writing this there are 90 comments, none of them even considering the idea that this whole Fediverse thing is never going to be a worthy contender for a healthier Internet if we keep treating it as some hippie, amateur, "community is all you need" project.

"You get what you pay for" is still true. If the thousands of people using kbin contributed with $10/year, you can bet that the developer wouldn't be in this situation.

We might come up with all the schemes to try to mitigate the issues and warts of federated software, but it would help a lot more if most people understood that software developers and instance admins are still professionals who still have ambitions and would like to be paid for their work accordingly.

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[-] BonesOfTheMoon@lemmy.world 9 points 4 months ago

This happened with Firefish too, I was so disappointed.

[-] cupcakezealot@lemmy.blahaj.zone 6 points 4 months ago

yes but sharkey rose from the ashes :)

[-] schizo@forum.uncomfortable.business 6 points 4 months ago

Firefish isn't quite dead yet. There's a new maintainer and they're doing a pretty good job of keeping security patches, bug fixes, and progress to cleaning up and making the code more maintainable happen.

I've kept my instance up and it's like... fine?

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[-] Flax_vert@feddit.uk 8 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago)

I think it's important if people don't get too attached to a fediverse account, especially right now. Although it would be nice to see easier solutions to self hosting. I've actually never managed to get a federated app to work via self hosting. Even if there was an instance which you simply could plug(point) your domain into, and have that work if you care about your identity.

Main concern though would be communities

[-] RememberTheApollo_@lemmy.world 8 points 4 months ago

That’s unfortunate. I switched to kbin from Reddit and really liked the community feel. That’s what sold me on the fediverse. But seeing as there wasn’t SSO across from kbin to lemmy, I had a second account for the latter as there was a lot more activity on lemmy and I used kbin less and less as the site spent more time broken.

I agree there should be some more formal way of letting community operators know their instance is going away. However, the fediverse not having any way of enforcing any such rule, means we’re still looking at individual whim determining whether or not an instance will simply disappear overnight or give users time to move.

[-] blindbunny@lemmy.ml 6 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago)

Damn this sucks I liked most of the kbin users. I hope they find out what happened and migrate over.

Thanks for letting us know what happened and I look forward to your moderation in a lemmy.world community.

[-] wildncrazyguy138@fedia.io 12 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago)

A lot of us migrated months ago when the writing was on the wall.

Kbin became my home when I decided to move to a smaller foreign county, and I’m glad it was, because the land of Mastodon was a bit too distant for me. When the Kbin house was burning down, fortunately the next door neighbor, Fedia, was there to take me in and make things feel familiar.

I suppose that’s the whole advantage of the Fediverse. One head of the hydra may get chopped down, but many others can spring out from it.

Don’t forget to support your admins y’all.

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[-] maegul@lemmy.ml 5 points 4 months ago

Admins need to be ready to migrate ownership to others who are willing to take on the financial or user account management burden.

Yes. Even more, any administration (and frankly community mod team too) needs to have backups in place from the start. Or at least very early.

It's not hard. Find someone willing to be a co-admin or mod. If you can't do that ... then you're not actually in a position to be an admin (or even a mod).

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