Kbin.social down again? Are people moving to mbin instances (kbin.run, fedia.io)? (kbin.social)
from Blaze@reddthat.com to fediverse@lemmy.world on 18 Jun 08:17
https://reddthat.com/post/20820191

Link to a list of mbin instances: fedidb.org/software/mbin

#fediverse

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breadsmasher@lemmy.world on 18 Jun 09:19 next collapse

Wasnt kbin development abandoned?

Gamers_Mate@kbin.run on 18 Jun 09:44 collapse

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.

starfennec@fedia.io on 18 Jun 10:18 collapse

Ernest's post on codeberg

DarkThoughts@fedia.io on 18 Jun 13:41 collapse

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.

Gamers_Mate@kbin.run on 18 Jun 09:32 next collapse

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.

NataliaTheDrowned2@kbin.run on 18 Jun 10:06 collapse

There are alternate ones, but they're getting fewer as they migrate to MBin

Drusas@kbin.run on 18 Jun 09:44 next collapse

I've been using kbin.run for a while now and I like it.

Skua@kbin.earth on 18 Jun 10:18 next collapse

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

BentiGorlich@gehirneimer.de on 18 Jun 10:48 next collapse

I always welcome new people at https://thebrainbin.org (EN) and https://gehirneimer.de (DE) :)

originalucifer@moist.catsweat.com on 18 Jun 16:05 collapse
sunzu@kbin.run on 18 Jun 11:10 next collapse

Kbin is better than Lemmy IMHO so it is good to see other instances sprouting up.

OpenStars@discuss.online on 18 Jun 11:43 next collapse

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.

Blaze@reddthat.com on 18 Jun 11:46 next collapse

Kbin still has 3.8k monthly active users: kbin.fediverse.observer/dailystats

Curious to see how it will be tomorrow

OpenStars@discuss.online on 18 Jun 12:32 next collapse

But that page is for “Kbin”, not specifically “Kbin.social” which I note does not appear among the list of all Kbins already - 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 (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.

Blaze@reddthat.com on 18 Jun 12:41 next collapse

so I suspect that the activity for Kbin.social is being included in that after all?

I think so, because fedidb.org/software/kbin shows the MAU for kbin.social, and it’s 3,843

BentiGorlich@gehirneimer.de on 18 Jun 12:53 collapse

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

OpenStars@discuss.online on 18 Jun 13:00 collapse

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.

DarkThoughts@fedia.io on 18 Jun 13:39 collapse

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.

BentiGorlich@gehirneimer.de on 18 Jun 11:50 next collapse

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)

BentiGorlich@gehirneimer.de on 18 Jun 11:53 collapse

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

BarbecueCowboy@lemmy.world on 18 Jun 14:38 collapse

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.

OpenStars@discuss.online on 18 Jun 17:19 collapse

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.

BentiGorlich@gehirneimer.de on 18 Jun 18:44 collapse

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

SuperSpaceFan@lemm.ee on 18 Jun 15:01 collapse

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. <edited>

ripcord@lemmy.world on 18 Jun 16:00 next collapse

Is that likely to be a large percentage?

SuperSpaceFan@lemm.ee on 18 Jun 20:22 collapse

The point is there are those who, like myself and others, who requested account deletions on kbin.social. And they have not been processed. Over a period of time those numbers add up. Then you have whole instances that moved (kbin.earth etc)

ripcord@lemmy.world on 18 Jun 22:44 collapse

That doesn’t wound like a very relevant point at all.

A relevant point would have been something that had a significant impact on the thing we were talking about, which is why I asked.

OpenStars@discuss.online on 18 Jun 17:18 collapse

I believe it, but I already did not trust those numbers for a different reason - e.g. I abandoned my account there six months ago to come to where I am at now, so technically I have an account and yet I’ve been there like 6 times since then and commented or interacted fewer than that.

Still, the total user count represents a “high mark” that it had once reached, and the Mbins collectively still seem far away from that. But good point, b/c how many accounts are e.g. alts or deleted from Mbin successfully but from Kbin that request gets ignored.

“Activity” would be a better measurement. Down below in some of the other replies we looked into that, and I think technically Kbin.Social is still fairly active, more so than the Mbins, but overall the Mbins are obviously in a healthier state with fewer of these insanely long (weeks-long) outages.

Btw, in my link above (for “sick”), Ernst mentioned that:

The care of the instance will also be handed over.

So it looks like things will change at Kbin.Social regardless of his health & life issues.

SuperSpaceFan@lemm.ee on 19 Jun 03:23 collapse

I hope things turn around.

OpenStars@discuss.online on 19 Jun 07:42 collapse

I for one hope that he goes back to what he seemed to enjoy the most: writing the code. Let someone else handle the admin duties, which he mostly abandoned anyway. We would get the non-Lemmy codebase enhanced, while he would get the fun of chasing his passion:-).

tiredofsametab@kbin.run on 18 Jun 11:55 next collapse

I moved from social to run a few months ago after being fed up. I like it.

kindenough@kbin.earth on 18 Jun 11:59 next collapse

kbin.earth is where I hang out lately, I like it here. I hope kbin.social comes back to it's former self though.

Shawdow194@kbin.run on 18 Jun 12:06 next collapse

I moved to Mbin purely because kbin.social has been down

melroy@kbin.melroy.org on 19 Jun 18:36 collapse

Mbin is not all bad ;)

Eggyhead@kbin.run on 18 Jun 12:07 next collapse

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.

BentiGorlich@gehirneimer.de on 18 Jun 12:45 collapse

I've recently heard that an iOS developer account costs 100$/year. I think that's one of the reasons why...

Eggyhead@kbin.run on 18 Jun 12:51 collapse

Without a doubt, but it hasn’t stopped a cornucopia of lemmy apps from cropping up on iOS.

BentiGorlich@gehirneimer.de on 18 Jun 12:56 collapse

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

Eggyhead@kbin.run on 18 Jun 13:36 collapse

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?

debounced@kbin.run on 18 Jun 13:43 next collapse

paging superstar @jwr1

BentiGorlich@gehirneimer.de on 18 Jun 13:53 next collapse

He does not have a donation page, yet. The GitHub repo for it: https://github.com/jwr1/interstellar

BentiGorlich@gehirneimer.de on 18 Jun 13:53 collapse

And there is magazine hosted on his instance for it: !interstellar

jwr1@kbin.earth on 18 Jun 14:01 collapse

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.

Eggyhead@kbin.run on 18 Jun 15:44 collapse

Well one or two other people doesn't sound too promising, so I get the concern. If you do get curious, I would consider making a post on one of the main kbin magazines probing if people are interested in helping crowd-fund an apple dev account for you. $100 isn't all that steep when a group is involved. A lot of the fediverse apps have optional in-app purchases as well that are just for tips and donations, so if you get something on the App Store, particularly if it's the ONLY kbin app there, it might be a little easier to get it to keep itself afloat.

I don't know anything about programming, economics, or app development though, so feel free to completely ignore me. Also, don't do anything to make your life any more stressful than it needs to be. If you do decide to crowd-fund, however, I will be happy to toss a few bucks in for you.

woelkchen@lemmy.world on 18 Jun 12:27 next collapse

fedia: No. Registrations are closed.

Thanks for the correction, DarkThoughts. Seems there were enough donations do reopen registrations. 👍

DarkThoughts@fedia.io on 18 Jun 13:37 collapse

It's not.
https://fedia.io/register

woelkchen@lemmy.world on 18 Jun 14:24 collapse

It’s not. fedia.io/register

They certainly removed the register link from the header bar and at some point announced that to keep server costs in check, registrations would be closed. I don’t know if you can successfully submit a registration when opening that address directly but considering that the admins don’t want additional users for understandable reasons, I’m not going to try what happens.

Edit: Oh the register link is there under the login window. Seems they reversed their decision, maybe after enough donations arrived. Very good.

djidane535@sh.itjust.works on 18 Jun 13:02 next collapse

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).

ghen@sh.itjust.works on 18 Jun 14:51 next collapse

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

ripcord@lemmy.world on 18 Jun 15:59 next collapse

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.

fuckingkangaroos@lemm.ee on 18 Jun 19:01 next collapse

Bots are a big problem on Lemmy too.

laughterlaughter@lemmy.world on 19 Jun 08:13 next collapse

its* creator.

ZILtoid1991@lemmy.world on 19 Jun 12:43 next collapse

Same here, although I already had a Mastodon account.

Mars2k21@sh.itjust.works on 20 Jun 16:10 collapse

Was super invested in it (was considering moderating multiple magazines), as I really like Kbin and the vision of it being an all-in-one microblogging and link aggregator platform in the Fediverse. With there being so many federated platforms serving the same purpose, I like how Kbin sort of went against the fragmentation. Had to leave it for Lemmy just the other day as well. I think that Ernest has created the best alternative to Reddit despite the struggles he’s faced with development and maintaining the instance alongside with personal issues.

mbin looks great but I think I’ll just stay with the more stable option and community…being an early adopter was fun for a year though. I’m still a little iffy about mbin personally. If there’s a mbin/kbin API release I may reconsider.

BentiGorlich@gehirneimer.de on 30 Jun 07:14 collapse

mbin has had an accessible API for a few months now. You can use Interstellar with for example (not on iOS thuogh)

RandomStickman@kbin.run on 18 Jun 13:06 next collapse

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.

debounced@kbin.run on 18 Jun 13:14 collapse

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.

RandomStickman@kbin.run on 18 Jun 13:35 collapse

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

DarkThoughts@fedia.io on 18 Jun 13:43 next collapse

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.

pewgar_seemsimandroid@lemmy.blahaj.zone on 18 Jun 13:50 next collapse

fedia switched when i was on it

HubertManne@moist.catsweat.com on 18 Jun 13:52 next collapse

made this one during the last one and been spending more time on it.

Sabata11792@ani.social on 18 Jun 13:56 next collapse

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.

dumples@midwest.social on 18 Jun 14:06 next collapse

I still have my kbin.social account as well as this current one. Its good to have back ups for both

NataliaTheDrowned2@kbin.run on 18 Jun 18:48 next collapse

KBin instances list for those who doesn't move to MBin: https://kbin.fediverse.observer/list / https://fedidb.org/software/kbin

Whirlygirl9@kbin.melroy.org on 18 Jun 20:53 next collapse

I've been on kbin.melroy and it's pretty stable most of the time. Like @dumples, I keep both accounts (kbin.social) but mainly live on melroy

Stopthatgirl7@lemmy.world on 18 Jun 22:28 next collapse

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.

Coffee_Addict@lemmy.world on 20 Jun 15:12 collapse

Same…

I am still hoping that Ernest is able to recover and get back on his feet. I did really like how Kbin was able to interface with Mastodon and Lemmy.

Ernest did respond a couple weeks ago on codeberg. Looks like he plans to hand the instance over for new management. I have no idea when exactly that will happen.

Treczoks@lemmy.world on 19 Jun 12:56 next collapse

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.

DontMakeMoreBabies@lemm.ee on 19 Jun 14:33 next collapse

I moved to lemme.ee because Kbin.social was down. Sort of a bummer…

melroy@kbin.melroy.org on 19 Jun 18:35 next collapse

Welcome to Mbin :)

Blaze@reddthat.com on 20 Jun 15:17 collapse

Happy cake day, and thank you for your work on Mbin!

melroy@kbin.melroy.org on 20 Jun 15:22 collapse

Ow right! It's happy cake day for me! Thanks..

Coffee_Addict@lemmy.world on 20 Jun 15:15 next collapse

I am not sure if this has been posted here, but @ernest@kbin.social posted this on codeberg a couple weeks ago.

”I have been away from home for a long time now and do not have all accesses. I will try to restore access in the coming days. The care of the instance will also be handed over.”

I sincerely hope Ernest is able to get back on his feet; his health hasn’t been good since the beginning of the year. Kbin is a great concept.

ShadowRam@fedia.io on 21 Jun 15:23 next collapse

I've moved to fedia.io (mbin)

kbin.social is always down, always spitting our errors/etc.

StarChip@fedia.io on 25 Jun 17:19 collapse

I really like KBin! I wish Ernest the best with his health, and hope development of the project will continue in the future. In the meantime I have created this new account on fedia.io and will be exploring mbin!