this post was submitted on 16 Feb 2024
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94
What's going on with kbin.social? (lemmy.world)
submitted 8 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
32 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

It's been inaccessible for roughly 24hrs right now and I'm having a hard time finding any group talking about it. Was there a change recently, or some kind of an explanation posted?

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[–] [email protected] 61 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago)

The developer behind KBin seems to have issues delegating/accepting contributors.

If you look at the pull requests, most have been unreviewed for months and he tends to regularly push his branches once complete and just merge them in.

That behaviour drove the MBin fork, where 4-5 people were really keen to contribute but were frustrated.

To some extent that would be ok, its his project and if he doesn't want to encourage contributions that is his decision but...

KBin.social has gotten to the size where it really should have multiple admins (or a paid full time person). Which it doesn't have.

The developer has also told us he has gone through a divorce, moved into his own place, gotten a full time job and now had surgery.

Thats a lot for any normal person and he is going through that while trying to wear 2 hats (dev & ops) each of which would consume most of your free time.

Personally I moved to kbin.run which is run by one of the MBin devs

[–] [email protected] 30 points 8 months ago (2 children)

I just visited and got this message:

We are working on resolving the issues Over the next few days, there will be a change in server infrastructure. Temporary problems with the website's functionality may occur during this time.

[–] [email protected] 17 points 8 months ago (1 children)

That's the default "kbin is down" message, I wouldn't put much stock in the specifics of it

[–] [email protected] 3 points 8 months ago

Huh. Didn’t know. Thanks.

[–] [email protected] 15 points 8 months ago

It finally just came up. Posting here from it now.

The admin last posted almost 2 weeks ago saying he was having a minor surgical procedure and hadn't publicly posted since. Hopefully he's okay and fixed this himself, but he's still silent at the moment.

[–] [email protected] 14 points 8 months ago

This time is probably unrelated to @ernest's supposed inactivity. Actually, his another /kbin server, https://karab.in has been brought back on 15 of February.

Why not kbin.social? Well, this server is co-administered by FTdL (Technology for People Foundation) (https://kbin.social/m/kbinMeta/t/177112).

Entire FTdL infrastructure was down from 16 o'clock in Cracow to this morning.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 8 months ago (3 children)

I’m not one to knock a developer on their software. Making things like kbin are complex and they certainly take effort to maintain and improve. That being said, these are my complaints about the management of kbin:

Why is there hardly ever any feedback from Ernest about why kbin is down? It just comes back up and that’s the end of it, until the next outage. A link to an explanation, or detailed banner message, or a schedule would be nice, assuming that these outages are scheduled.

Why has Ernest insisted on being the only developer to work on this? This creates a potential “single point of failure” situation.

None of the git issues on Codeberg seem to get triaged or responded to.

Ernest rarely responds to DMs on kbin.

At this point, I think I’m just going to create an alternate Lemmy account to avoid these blackouts.

[–] [email protected] 15 points 8 months ago (1 children)

MBin is a fork by a group who tried to push into KBin but couldn't. There seems to be at least 4 active committers and stuff gets merged.

You will see a number of the KBin instances moved over https://fedidb.org/software/mbin

[–] [email protected] 3 points 8 months ago (4 children)

I created an acount on kbin.run (which is mbin) earlier today. I tried on the most populous mbin instance, but the request page throws 429s and the contact page 500s. This morning, I was ready just to go back to reddit for a bit (I didn't care for Lemmy, but I guess I would give it another shot before that).

[–] [email protected] 10 points 8 months ago (1 children)

hi, kbin.run admin here, i wanted to confirm that the 429 and 500s you're seeing are not on kbin.run but fedia.io? thanks!

[–] [email protected] 3 points 8 months ago

Correct. Thank you!

[–] [email protected] 6 points 8 months ago (1 children)

im looking for testers if you want to give mine mbin a shot https://moist.catsweat.com

im an oldschool sysadmin, so it pains me to see ernest so ... uncommunicative.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 8 months ago

Much appreciated. This seems to be working for now, but I'll keep that in mind. Thanks!

[–] [email protected] 5 points 8 months ago (1 children)

Just tried to create an account on fedia.io, which is the biggest of the mbin instances (at just about a bit above 4K users, so not THAT much), and it just could NOT take the registration, all i get is "429 Too Many Requests", after multiple tries. I suspect that says the instance is woefully underpowered for the traffic it's handling

[–] [email protected] 1 points 8 months ago (1 children)

Yeah, something's misconfigured, underpowered, or something.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (1 children)

Hi there, mbin dev here. We have a configuration problem with rate limits. "429 Too Many Requests" is the server saying "you requested to much, I will not send you any responses anymore". Feedback is noted and we'll try to get that sorted out asap

@[email protected] @[email protected]

[–] [email protected] 1 points 8 months ago

Yeah, my very first request was a 429 so the back-off seemed really weird, heh. Thanks!

[–] [email protected] 4 points 8 months ago (2 children)

Sad to hear. 429s seems to be a known issue: https://github.com/MbinOrg/mbin/issues/470

Any reason why you don't want to try Lemmy? Alternatively, the is https://narwhal.city that runs Lotide (https://sr.ht/~vpzom/lotide/)

[–] [email protected] 4 points 8 months ago

microblog. if you do any serious following lemmy is.. not the right toool.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 8 months ago (1 children)

I actually started on Lemmy and it auto-refreshed and did some other things I found so annoying I was gone in about half a day.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 8 months ago

Auto-refresh has been disabled since a few months.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 8 months ago

https://github.com/MbinOrg/mbin is a fork and being actively developped

http://sublinks.org/ is another Lemmy alternative

[–] [email protected] 5 points 8 months ago (1 children)

@NegativeLookBehind pretty sure this outage was unscheduled, as Ernest usually warns us

At this point, I think I’m just going to create an alternate Lemmy account to avoid these blackouts.

You should. I have accounts all over the fediverse, probably one of the reasons I don't get angsty if my main on kbin's down.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 8 months ago (1 children)

Where are the warnings? If they’re in some particular magazine that maybe not every user is subscribed to, then this is a bad practice.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 8 months ago (1 children)

@NegativeLookBehind kbinDevlog. Personally I feel pretty chill about it.

I don't think Ernest owes us anything. It's his early development project, he didn't specifically invite me here. I just showed up one day, and feel grateful to be able to come along for the ride.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 8 months ago

Cool, and I respect that. And I respect Ernest for what he does and he doesn’t owe anyone anything at all. But if you open source a thing and then almost completely ignore your user base, it’s just a bit disappointing.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 8 months ago

Probably related to this:

https://kbin.social/m/[email protected]/t/838038/We-seem-to-be-getting-attacked

[–] [email protected] 5 points 8 months ago

Probably to do with the recent spam wave.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 8 months ago

Works fine on my machine

[–] [email protected] 1 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago)

I remember reporting so many free money open source app posts in their open source community. May be due to spamming ?