I started with kbin but left it for lemmy + mastodon. It was not mature enough to handle so many users (which was unexpected by its own creator). Too many issues with bots, the instance itself, and the lack of mobile apps motivated me to move on. It’s sad because it’s creator seemed pretty invested into its project (and I loved the UI, and the ability to get both a Reddit-like and a Twitter-like experience).
this post was submitted on 18 Jun 2024
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Same here almost exactly.
Although I left after it seemed like he was just having a tremendously hard time coping with the new expectations that came with having a lot of users. At some point he seemed happy to do the admin stuff - responding to reports, etc - but started to become paralyzed on everything else. But also was unable to hand things over to someone else.
I get it, but it wasn't where I wanted to be anymore.
If it was today I might have moved to mbin instead (which exists for many of the same reasons) but app support on Lemmy was the big draw.
As a reddit moderator having a Twitter like interface seems essential. Too many people on Reddit treat it like Twitter
19.4 on lemmy adds some pretty crucial modding tools though so I'm torn LoL
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The admin has been having medical issues and has been MIA for months. Last week there was a roumors about him potentially handing over the server but seems nothing come of it.
I'm more or less defaulting to kbin.earth now. It's a shame to see the original fall apart, but the idea and foundation are being carried on. I hope Ernest is doing alright
According to that website, Kbin.Social has >10x more registered users (had? looks like it only counts accounts) than all Mbin servers combined.
At this point people need to stop being surprised - whether he is sick or whatever the cause, this is by no means a rare occurrence for that instance.
I think it is good to point it out though. kbin.social is missing from the fediverse observer, but if you have a look at this: https://mbin.fediverse.observer/list you'll see that almost all mbin servers have a >98% recent uptime and a >95% uptime over the whole lifetime of the server. Sadly, fedidb does not have an uptime metric
(yes mine is not up there, because it was offline for a week in september last year)
https://kbin.fediverse.observer/kbin.social there you can go to graphs and see the uptime. The overall uptime is actually still quite good with 95.94%, but in recent months it has been a bit rough
A lot of the time it was technically 'up', but just non-functional/unusable.
Most common for me was just not being able to do anything but look at the front page, couldn't click on anything without errors.
That is an excellent point - I so rarely went there but I thought I recalled that being my experience as well, and yet I wasn't certain enough to say so. It really does mess with the stats if we are trying to use "server uptime" to compare between instances or Kbin vs. Mbin.
well server uptime is usually, and in the case of fediverse observer, coupled to a successful response. If the server spits out a 500 internal server error, that does not count as being up
Kbin still has 3.8k monthly active users: https://kbin.fediverse.observer/dailystats
Curious to see how it will be tomorrow
But that page is for "Kbin", not specifically "Kbin.social" which I note does not appear among the list of all Kbins already - https://kbin.fediverse.observer/list. So you don't have to wait for tomorrow - it's already too late to see its former traffic today.
Interesting: the Active Users Monthly (https://mbin.fediverse.observer/stats) for Mbin is 568, whereas that stat for Kbin was 2280. So even without including the extremely large Kbin.social (well... large in terms of total users, but obviously not active ones bc the service is down, which by definition precludes people being active on it:-), the suite of Kbin instances still seems to have ~4x more active users than the Mbin ones.
I would not have expected that, given the chatter about Mbin being exciting, and I wonder why - potentially historical precedence, if an older server simply has more traffic bc it was created first?
But obviously something more is going on with that data - i.e. & e.g. supermeter.social is reported to have the highest user count among the Kbins, but with only 736 total users, and if you add up all users from all 8 of those servers you get only about half of the 2280 "Active Users Monthly" figure - so I suspect that the activity for Kbin.social is being included in that after all? Otherwise something is very wrong with the extrapolation of "active users", to be more than twice the total ones (one possibility... past active ones vs. a smaller current total of people who deleted their accounts rather than merely abandoned them by walking away without going to the trouble of deletion).
Which would make sense - the website is reporting numbers accumulated over time, and even though Kbin.social is down now, it was not always thus, and it seems it cannot discriminate the history in terms of active users (Kbin.social vs. some other Kbin server I mean).
But that does complicate - possibly even invalidates - trying to compare the non-Kbin.social Kbins vs. the Mbins, in terms of active users.
So leaving active users aside then, I note that the largest Mbin has a ~6-fold higher total user count than the largest Mbin server. Also there are 8 total Kbin instances (aforementioned not including Kbin.social bc it does not appear on that list today), vs. 23 total Mbin instances. It's shaky, but it really does look like the Mbin instances seem healthier than the Kbin ones? (Again minus Kbin.social, which despite monthly active users seems by no means "healthy" to me?)
This ignores things like possible hyper-focusing on specific niche topics so a deeper look would involve how many communities are there, and perhaps traffic patterns like do people actually comment in those or is the server mostly just a base from which to access the Fediverse at large (which may not be a bad thing at all? just a bit different), etc.
so I suspect that the activity for Kbin.social is being included in that after all?
I think so, because https://fedidb.org/software/kbin shows the MAU for kbin.social, and it's 3,843
I think the instance is not showing because it is not online at the moment... here you can see the stats of kbin.social on fediverse observer https://kbin.fediverse.observer/kbin.social
Regarding the amount of instances and the rather small users/server: a lot of the mbin instances used to be kbin ones (like you can tell by their name) including mine. So we did not start with one central instance that all the users went to, but with a lot that already had a small number of users. And the project itself is not that old, not even a year (we start in September or October 2023). I'd say we really only have one hyperfocused instance and that being rimworld.gallery
And to be clear, hyper-focused isn't "bad", just not the same as someone wanting to join a more general-focused one.:-)
Thank you for sharing some of that back story.
Really surprised by that. Granted, I logged in yesterday to check and that makes me part of that statistic but it's like 90% spam there and many places do not federate properly. The kbin.meta magazine, who clearly has newer posts, do not show anything but 7 month old threads from within kbin.social itself. Super weird, but ultimately unusable.
I'm not sure of the accuracy of the user count for kbin, because account deletion requests, at least for kbin.social, are not being processed.
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I gave up on kbin social months ago when it went down with no idea when it would be working again. I ended up going over to lemmy.world.
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I have been on kbin.run (kinda confusing name lol) for awhile now because of the instability of of .social and the added functionality of mbin. For some reason .run's certificate doesn't work with my home computer's browser (Waterfox) so I made a fedia.io account as well.
I'm satisfied with the mobile web interface for m/kbin so I don't feel a need for a dedicated app.
kbin.run admin here, i'm curious if this cert problem is still happening as i recently loosened up some of my super strict bot killing mechanisms... give it a shot again and DM me if it still doesn't work so i can try to figure out what's going on.
as for the name... yea, i should have named it something different. at the time, kbin was the only horse in town and the intent was to help alleviate some traffic from .social before the foundation took over to run it on their cluster... then things fell apart. unfortunately, i can't rehome it to a new domain because it will break federation of all existing content, accounts, etc.
Thanks for you hard work! I'll give it a try when I'm home (if I remember to do so lol). The naming makes sense at the time I suppose
Wasnt kbin development abandoned?
Yes but not by choice Ernest has had health problems and has not been able to work on it. The instance is going to be handed over to a new team when he gets the chance.
I'm guessing kbin's original code is going to be deprecated in favor of mbin then. There's not a whole lot of reasons for a new team to develop it separately.
Switched a good while ago already because I felt the development wasn't really going anywhere. Checked yesterday again and it is 95% spam there and weird federation issues even with its own instance, like kbin.meta only shows 7 month old posts, from within .social, even though there's clearly new ones. Super weird.
fedia switched when i was on it
I've been using kbin.run for a while now and I like it.
made this one during the last one and been spending more time on it.
kbin.earth is where I hang out lately, I like it here. I hope kbin.social comes back to it's former self though.
Kbin is better than Lemmy IMHO so it is good to see other instances sprouting up.
I moved from social to run a few months ago after being fed up. I like it.
I still have my kbin.social account as well as this current one. Its good to have back ups for both
~~fedia: No. Registrations are closed.~~
Thanks for the correction, DarkThoughts. Seems there were enough donations do reopen registrations. 👍
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I only look into kbin.social occasionally to see if they finally got their spam problem under control. They were nice maybe a year ago, but now it is a dumpster fire with half the main page being ads for drugs and junk services.
I still use kbin social when it is up though I have been using here on kbin.run and I have been testing fedia.io. I did make a matrix to try and keep in contact with other kbin users but I think a lot of us are already spread out to different instances.
There are alternate ones, but they're getting fewer as they migrate to MBin
I still keep Social on my Home Screen, but I’ve been using Run for a while now. I’m also starting to use lemmy world a bit more because I’m tired of waiting for a dedicated iOS app. I’ve seen like 3 come and go now and I just don’t think it’s going to happen anymore.
I've recently heard that an iOS developer account costs 100$/year. I think that's one of the reasons why...
Without a doubt, but it hasn’t stopped a cornucopia of lemmy apps from cropping up on iOS.
Interstellar could support iOS, but the dev was actually the one that told me about the costs and that he just don't want to pay it. Maybe he could be convinced to support iOS if a developer or tester with an iPhone helped him and the community chipped in for the dev account. After all he does everything for free, like most of us do
I would venture a guess there are at least 50 kbin users willing to pay $2 a year for a dedicated kbin/mbin app on iOS. I personally gave some money to the developer of Artemis back when she was active, but I have no idea what became of her.
Does interstellar’s developer have a donation link where I might buy him some coffee and drop a request?
Thanks for the interest. So far, I've only had one (or maybe two) other person(s) ask about iOS support, so I haven't really looked much into it so far.
I could set up a donation page (like GitHub sponsors), but my guess is that it would receive nowhere near the amount of an Apple Developer account ($100 a year).
I also don't have an iPhone or Mac. I should be able to get around the Mac by using a VM (I've done it before), but it is a pain.
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He does not have a donation page, yet. The GitHub repo for it: https://github.com/jwr1/interstellar
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