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.

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!

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

This happened with Firefish too, I was so disappointed.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.