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I’m making this post because I’m shutting down my Kbin instance, kbin.lol, and
redirecting it here for an undetermined amount of time. ## But why? Kbin isn’t
ready. Not even close. I know the developer, Ernest, has been working his ass
off trying to get everything fixed and pushed, and I really value his efforts.
However, it’s still beta software, and as I’ve been unable to make a good user
experience, it’s being shut down until there’s a better release, or a stable
one. ## What issues? Kbin.social works fine! - There is no option to delete a
user, except from the command line. Users can’t delete their own data. I have to
manually process all user removal requests, with the backend. - Federation
appears to be broken due to the messenger backend repeatedly crashing, with no
information on how to fix it. All I did was restart the Docker stack, which
shouldn’t break anything. - Compiling and running the site is extremely
difficult. With Lemmy, I just pull a docker-compose, set some variables, and
start it. With Kbin, I have to clone the git, change many variables across many
config files, and then compile the entire stack from source(even though stable
releases of some containers exist). I did eventually manage get the site
running, except this leads into the next point… - There’s no way to do a stable
update. I’ve tried pulling Git updates into the existing folder - that
overwrites all my variables and the site doesn’t start. I pulled it into another
folder, and not only does it not start, but all the users and database get
wiped. I’m sure I could figure it out…but I don’t want to be providing a site to
my users that’s so duct taped together. Ernest, bless his heart, is patching
stuff up on the source daily - but how do I update? - It doesn’t appear to be
scalable. The main instance, Kbin.social, runs slow and unresponsive because of
the sheer volume of users on it(which baffles me, because it’s beta software
that wasn’t ready for prime time). It’d be better if we had more instances, but
it’s hard to deploy, so we don’t have many instances…it’s a never ending circle.
## Okay, so it’s got some issues. What now? For now, you’re more than welcome to
join my Lemmy instance, which is right here. It’s nice and stable and I feel
confident providing it as a service. I’m still subscribed to Kbin development,
and if it has a proper Docker stable release, or something that just makes it
easier to host, I’ll look into it again. It’d be a damn shame to let the
kbin.lol domain name go to waste, lol, so I’m definitely invested in getting it
running. If you happen to be a smart web developer with spare time, and would
like to volunteer your skills to get it running, feel free to reach out to me,
but again, it’s a hairball I don’t feel comfortable with. With the right help,
though, maybe it could work. ## I don’t like Lemmy, it’s got tankie devs!
Personally, to be perfectly frank, I couldn’t give a shit less. I’ve got a long
history in the FOSS community and if I banned everybody I disagreed with it’d
just be me, a scratch kernel, and nano. Outright political instances and
instances that allow blatant racism are defederated here on my instance. Lemmy
devs are willing to create a product that makes the entire internet better, and
share it with everyone, for free, regardless of your beliefs. That’s good enough
for me. I’d rather see the internet become a better place, than to turn our nose
up at a FOSS project, because of disagreements between humans. That’s ruined
enough of the world already. ## What’s a tankie? Google it. I’m not here to be
political. ## Never mind all that, I just want Kbin! Well, you’re free to use
any instance of anything, of course! Kbin.social [https://kbin.social] is open
for signups - although I can’t guarantee that it’ll keep up with the flow of new
users from Reddit. We have hundreds of Lemmy instances including this one that
seem to be doing fine, if you would like. ### If Kbin can pull together a
release that is actually worth running, I will deploy it and relaunch the site.
- P.S. All user accounts and data from the kbin instance have been deleted.
Don’t worry - your data is gone, not being kept or spied upon.
Looks like the admin for kbin.lol has some pretty valid gripes with the current status of Kbin. I have to agree, you can tell the platform is not up to speed at all.
Kbin looks visually great but the backend just isn’t there. Check out his statement, it’s worth the read.
I really like some of what Kbin is doing, but from a purely user standpoint, the federation stuff doesn’t work well enough to be usable.
Important to note that’s not necessarily Kbin. Some of the major instances of Lemmy had an issue where they were blocking inbound Kbin traffic but allowing their traffic out.
It was unclear if it was somehow intentional or the result of a bug in their most recent upgrade.
Federation with Kbin has been broken since before the upgrade. Reading OP, it sounds like Kbin Lemmy compatibility is going to be problematic until Lemmy stabilizes. User bases is going to dictate that Kbin follow Lemmy rather than the opposite, unless they find a solution that is fundamentally better than how Lemmy does it.
I don’t thinks that’s accurate, Kbin has only co-existed for a few Lemmy versions. I’ve been on Kbin before the initial wave of new users, when the site had about 200 users, federation was fine. You may be thinking of when federation was deliberately broken by Ernest with the entire fediverse for about a week when he had to enable Cloudflare DDOS protection during the first surge of signups.
The specific issue here was highlighted by a Kbin user several days ago. They monitored the traffic back and forth and saw that inbound Kbin-bot requests were denied by Lemmy.ml after the latest upgrade. At the time of that post, Lemmy.world did not have the issues and it had not upgraded yet. I’m not sure if that issue has since been fixed in the code or not.
Federation with Kbin has been broken since before the upgrade. Reading OP, it sounds like Kbin Lemmy compatibility is going to be problematic until Lemmy stabilizes. User bases is going to dictate that Kbin follow Lemmy rather than the opposite, unless they find a solution that is fundamentally better than how Lemmy does it.