Fedia.io is shutting down (and re-opening as a Lemmy instance)

simple@lemm.ee to Fediverse@lemmy.world – 210 points –

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

47

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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).

Interesting, do you have a link to the fork? Is it the one by pawb.social, https://github.com/PawbSocial/lemmy ?

The one I saw the other day was !pangora@programming.dev - the developer said their idea was to work on things the community really wants like moderation tools with the idea that this could either be integrated back into Lemmy or, if it got traction, it could become a thing in its own right.

I did Google for others and found Lenny, described by someone else as a "Lemmy fork/instance for bronies" or "a Lemmy where I can use ethnic slurs".

Thanks, Pangora seems promising!

I think the main developers being tankies might put people off from contributing, so it might also be a way to get more people involved even if the changes ultimately feel back into Lemmy itself.

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

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.

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)

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.

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?

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.

GDPR isn't specific to public forums.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

What's lotide?

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.