Thoughts Around KBin's Current Status and the Importance of Community Migration Features

MoogleMaestro@lemmy.zip to Fediverse@lemmy.world – 327 points –

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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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.

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

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.

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

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

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

Very true. And the aliases/mirrors idea might work well. Where content doesn't have to be moved or the addressing problem fixed, instead people can just change their subscription and the mirror community have the ability to treat itself as the primary (and not a mirror). This feels viable to me!

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.

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...

My understanding is that mbin encourages microblogging to !random, which you can't see from other instances. Is that incorrect? If that's the case, I really don't understand how mbin federation is supposed to work

The microblog side works the same as mastodon: following people. You cannot follow random from other instances, because it would creates way too much traffic on larger instances. Imho there should be no random magazine. It only exists for things that cannot be assigned a magazine, because it is not possible to post something without a magazine. We inherited that from kbin

But on mastodon, there's a feed that lets you view all posts from all federated instances. Wouldn't mbin users be excluded from that feed when posting to !random?

Edit: I was looking, and it seems to me that if a user posts to !random, I can't even see it on their profile from mastodon? Am I misunderstanding this?

That is a very good point 🤔 I just checked the code. Your "subscribed" feed does include the users you follow as well, not just the magazines

I don't understand your added information about the mastodon post...

Actually, it seems I was misunderstanding. Apparently all mastodon posts get federated as appearing on !random, so I'm not sure what I was seeing

That is right. When you do not explicitly tag a magazine from mastodon (or a hashtag that is matched to a magazine) then the post ends up in the random mag

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

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.

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").

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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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

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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!

@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/

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

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.

Is the app support better now? Last I heard, kbin didn't have nice APIs that apps could use

There's an API now, but the only app I'm aware of is Interstellar, which only has a card view, which is not something for me and I also couldn't log back into it at some point. I think Eternity for Lemmy wants to add mbin support in the future but I have no idea how far away that is. So, app support yes, apps themselves, not so much.

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

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.

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.

We were seeing the warning signs already by the amount of bots and spammers who were taking over abandoned instances. They just posted a lot of garbage that filled up everywhere they went. And there was almost nobody there to deal with them. Ernest being out of action for prolonged periods didn't help this.

I really hated to see kbin social get mistreated this way considering it was my true alternative since Lemmy got mostly bombarded with former Reddit users that took that over and made it their own.

Kbin social is a learning lesson that if you're unable to maintain something due to personal problems, it is time to hand over the reigns. Ernest did do that but I'm not really sure if the person running it now knows what to do.

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.

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.

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.

Yeah, I switched to mbin soon enough, because I felt the issues rather increased than getting less over the time.

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.

“This Group is actually now this Group”

Locking the previous community with a post to the new one usually works quite well

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.

Do Mastodon users have to pay their admins? Iirc most of them still rely on donations

Mastodon is not any better. Plenty of stories of instances that disappeared, admins made amateur mistakes and lost databases, moderators burn out and leave everything...

Even the "successful" donation-based instances make enough money to cover only the costs of hosting and the admins and moderators are expected to do all the grunt work out of "love for their community". It's simply not sustainable, and it will become even less so with all the upcoming regulations and controls around social media.

Zuckerberg will use and abuse of regulatory capture to make it impossible to run an instance without significant costs. If we don't "suit up" and professionalize the Fediverse quickly, we will have no other choice but to put all social media infrastructure on his hands.

This happened with Firefish too, I was so disappointed.

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?

Iceshrimp is still around

Catodon picked up where Firefish left off too.

Firefish is still in development https://firefish.dev/firefish/firefish

Firefish is still alive - every week an update of the stable release! Why do you post here fake news?

I'm talking about Firefish.social, the microblog platform.

And I am talking about the software Firefish which is still developed. So "Firefish is dead" is very unclear information.

Firefish the social microblog platform is gone.

What nonsense. An instance is running here without any problems and with very frequent updates.

Where?

See here https://fedidb.org/software/firefish

But where is the social media site? Firefish.social is gone and sold to someone else. I don't know what everyone is talking about here.

"Firefish" ist NOT a sole instance, it's a software which is running on different servers (see the list). Even if the instance firefish.social is no longer running, the software Firefish is still being developed and continues to run on many servers and therefore Firefish is not dead.

Well the social platform is gone and that's what I meant.

And as already said - your "Firefish is dead" was wrong. It's only this platform - Firefish is developed and is running on a lot of servers.

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

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.

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.

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.

I migrated to mbin 7 months ago because the issues became more and more, not less. Kinda felt obvious that things slowly went downhill for kbin.

Well I'm glad kbin was open source so the migration was easy(?) for y'all.

Yeah I've pretty much accepted that kbin.social is just gone at this point. I also owned a community there (/m/ai). I didn't have any spammers appear, but it eventually just died since spam ruined the rest of the instance.

The signs were already there months in advance, but most of us stayed on the instance in hopes that the dev would eventually take up one of the offers to help maintain the instance. Was fun while it lasted, and was the best alternative to Reddit for sure as a software. I don't even know how Ernest kept up with development during the initial Reddit exodus lol.

Honestly, I'm not impressed with Lemmy so far and I don't really vibe with mbin for personal reasons even though the software is great.

This whole kbin story has just pointed out a lot of flaws in the Fediverse as a whole for me. I still like the idea, but the execution needs improvement.

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).

I really miss kbin.. 😔(no hard feelings, I genuinely wish Ernest the best and hope he makes a comeback)

I actually tried migrating my account from there before the major issues, as a backup, but realised it didn't back up my blocked lists, which are much harder for me to recreate than my subscribed list and settings are, so decided to wait and see if anyone improved the migration tools.

Then it became too late, and I had to start from scratch, and am now regretting the instance I chose, and have not yet had the brain space to check out the other kbin/mbin instances and find a new one I like. Until then I'm reluctant to participate.

If anything, the last couple of months, with kbin dying and realising how uncomfortable I am on an instance run by people who have expectations from their users I fundamentally disagree with, have made me want to start my own private kbin/mbin instance for myself so that I don't end up in either situation again, but I don't know that it's something I can take on, having no programming knowledge or any experience with anything like that.

So yes, I agree with you, for more than the reasons you've provided, and I hope we, as a general community use these developments to learn and improve.

I think the bigger issue is Ernest simply refused outside help. He took everything on himself and didn't allow outside contributions, which is just not sustainable for a project of that size. It's a shame because I really wanted to like KBin, especially since it's written in PHP and I'm a PHP developer, but Lemmy ended out winning.

Has there been any news from ernest or regarding kbin.social at all?

It's different from e.g. kbin.run or kbin.cafe (neither of which even load anymore). kbin.social appears to be broken but the servers are still around and kicking - just with no one to go in and fix things. But doesn't this mean that someone has kept kbin.social around and alive?

So ernest may not be able to get to it anytime soon, but might it not reappear in a year or two - when ernest has recovered a bit and had a good break and holiday?

The latest I've seen is from https://codeberg.org/Kbin/kbin-core/issues/1383 where two months ago ernest said he's try to fix things, and nothing since. Was wondering if everyone was just assuming it's gone since ernest has been MIA for so long - or if anyone has heard of something a bit more definite about the subject.

Sort of makes you wonder who is funding lemmy.ml

IIRC lemmy.ml is the showcase server for lemmy software as a whole, so the organizations and individual donors who fund lemmy development also fund lemmy.ml

They mention the bigger donors here

Might be pulling this out of my ass, but I recall that one of the platinum donors gets their money to fund open-source software from EU.

Yeah no $3k/m isn't funding their full time dev work with infrastructure. It seems likely they have sources of funding they don't disclose for whatever reason.

Agreed, but I must admit I haven't dug deeper so I have no clue.