Can we not like, do that Reddit thing at every turn where a certain topic/title always makes it to the top and everybody just duplicates it even though the exact same conversation happens every time?
The guy that manages Kbin has been having personal issues and stepped away from the fediverse so yeah Kbin is kind of in limbo at the moment and indeed not well moderated. There's mods but there's just so much they can do. The software doesn't federate the deletions so even if they're gone on Kbin, they remain everywhere else.
One of the main problems is that Ernest is the owner and only mod on those magazines getting all the spam. I guess I missed the memo (figuratively speaking) about deletions not being federated though. That seems like a problem even if there were alternative moderators.
There's at least one person on the mod-request queue for most of the spam-ridden magazines. That "at least one" is me, which is how I know. I'm not here all the time and wouldn't be great at it, but at this stage even a part-time mod would be better than none at all. Hopefully, as and when Ernest comes back he can assign some roles. Twice as hopefully, someone else who would be better at it gets it instead.
I hope it goes on. And being open source, it definitely will! (e.g. Mbin)
Ernest likewise will be remembered, fondly or otherwise, for his contributions in starting it.
That said, I'm close to personally blocking it due to all the spam hitting other servers from it, and the FBI may come knocking soon as well if people decide to hit it with illegal stuff like CP.
This isn't "the fediverse." This is one instance. "The fediverse" is a network of interoperable instances, each one owned and maintained separately.
Personally, I think the best way to interact with the fediverse is to maintain accounts on multiple instances. I have a dozen or so accounts total, and regularly use four or five of them. They're all under the same name, so they're all "me," but they're spread out instead of everything being on one account on one instance.
The main reason I prefer that is that every instance is different. Even though they're all interacting with the same broad pool of content, they each have a different userbase with different preferences, which means that they each have a different set of federated instances and subscribed communities. There's a fair amount of stuff I'll see on one instance but not on another, and it follows the overall focus of the instance. So whatever my mood might be or I might be interested in, I have an account on a suitable instance to match it.
Another advantage though, and directly on topic, is that I always have an alternative if one of them is having problems. Since each instance is privately owned and maintained rather than being owned by a corporation and maintained by its staff, there's any number of quirks and difficulties and failures. And that's just the way it is - the people running these instances are just ordinary people who are basically donating their time and resources, and they don't owe us anything. We get whatever we get, and have no right to demand any more than that.
With accounts on multiple instances, it doesn't matter if one or another of them has difficulties at the moment, or even if one shuts down completely (as two of my favorites have), since i can just switch to a different instance any time.
Kbin is special. It's an entirely different piece of software from Lemmy (and a better one in many ways). But it was written primarily by one person - Ernest - and he's also the owner of this instance. And while he's a great guy, he's also a single individual with other interests and responsibilities, and with some health issues. So it's a great place running on a great piece of software, but it has some difficulties and is often slow and/or glitchy. That's fine - I still like it here, so it's one of my most-used accounts, and I can always use a different one on a different instance if this one is too much of a problem.
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).
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.
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.
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
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
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
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