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).
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
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.
its* creator.
Bots are a big problem on Lemmy too.
Same here, although I already had a Mastodon account.
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.
Kbin still has 3.8k monthly active users: https://kbin.fediverse.observer/dailystats
Curious to see how it will be tomorrow
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.
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’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>
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 hope things turn around.
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:-).
Is that likely to be a large percentage?
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)
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.
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.
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.
Wasnt kbin development abandoned?
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.
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 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.
I’ve moved to fedia.io (mbin)
kbin.social is always down, always spitting our errors/etc.
fedia: No. Registrations are closed.Thanks for the correction, DarkThoughts. Seems there were enough donations do reopen registrations. 👍
It’s not. https://fedia.io/register
It’s not. https://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.
deleted by creator
I moved to Mbin purely because kbin.social has been down
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!
