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!
”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.
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 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.
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 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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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>
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)
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.
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:-).