FOSSDLE PieFed[Instance] Kbin.run down
submitted by
Blaze (he/him)
From this post (https://sopuli.xyz/post/15865566) on !AskMbin@fedia.io
It’s very likely related, but we also figured out that both of debounced’s (the admin of kbin.run) accounts on GitHub and Matrix were deleted last night. So there is a possibility that kbin.run is no more.
Well I started on kbin.social, migrated to kbin.run…
Are there any other servers anyone would like me to ruin?
How do you feel about stomaching 4chan for a few weeks?
Not even for the betterment of humanity would I dare venture into such places…
You could try fedia.io if you prefer the Kbin/Mbin interface over Lemmy
I started using Fedia.io
As of a few minutes ago I’m getting a 502 Bad Gateway error and having flashbacks….
Nooo
Seems to be fixed!
I mean I am running thebrainbin.org and gehirneimer.de and they will not go anywhere, pinky promise
My home instance was kbin.run, and when I found debounced (its admin) was an Mbin maintainer/contributor it made me feel good about the lifespan of the instance. Now I don't feel so good… if they dipped without any warning, so can you.
And they did this a few weeks after they put up a "how is my driving?" check-in post about how users felt about their server running, and I said it was going well… pretty sure I also said something about being grateful they were long-running, and talked on other places on the Fediverse about how reliable kbin.run was… all signs pointed to the instance having longevity.
Wonder if they just got hacked or something, because it really was out of nowhere, with no warning signs like Ernest had.
Kind of upset because I don't mind hopping accounts, but I had a magazine there, !otomegames@kbin.run. I had just started it new a few weeks ago, moving from its longer-lived iteration on kbin.social because I was unaware kbin.social was down. And now if debounced does not come back I'll have to make yet another new version of the community. Does not set a good precedent, "will I have to put up with constant new versions to follow this community?" The most appropriate place would be ani.social but I'd *also* probably have to make yet another Lemmy alt to mod it properly—things like reports do not seem to federate properly unless your account is on the same instance as the community you mod. And I *really* do not want to give Lemmy more users at the expense of Mbin. Lemmy is already the big guy, and we want more *diversity* on the Fe*diverse*. So I can probably just remake it on whatever Mbin instance I end up on.
I can absolutely understand that. I was very surprised as well as I stated often 😅 I can only tell you that I've been running my mastodon server a little longer and I commit to the mastodon server covenant (I think that is what its called). But if you have any doubts you should join fedia.io. Jerry has been a reliable admin for years and years (of all kinds of services)
Sorry, I realized my message came off as an attack. Did not mean it that way.
I'll probably *not* do that because I would much rather support smaller instances and fedia.io is big for Mbin. I'll probably go with you and hope you do not do a debounced. (The only reason I have a .world is because I needed it to effectively mod the preexisting community !bunnies@lemmy.world whose original mod disappeared for about a year before I asked to take over.)
Thanks man. I can completely understand frustration in that regard though (even if you didn't mean it that way) :)
Sorry for this, it was a nice community.
!otomegames@ani.social
Now on ani.social with yet another Elevator7009sAlt account. Waiting to add content until .run has been down for a week (just to make sure it is really gone and not something like them getting hacked), and the same for remaking my main account.
Subscribed, good luck!
Out of curiosity, you seemed interested, knowledgeable, and reliant on them so were you giving them money?
Thank you for the service, good sir.
I just made an account on Fedia, but I’ll sign up for brain bin as well later. I think my username might suit that instance.
Absolutely 😁
Well, it could be you, or it could be me, as I've hit the same waypoints.
fedia.io wasn't taking sign-ups at the time I went to kbin.run, but they are right now, so that's where I've ended up this time.
If this one dies too, I guess I'll take the jinx with me back to Reddit and see what happens there.
fedia.io , its an mbin which is a branch from kbin
Kbin.run was running mbin too
Yea in fact kbin.run was run by debounced. A very beloved mbin maintainer, if I say so myself.
8chan/8kun or whatever it‘s calling itself this year
lemmygrad.ml, hexbear.net, truthsocial.com, x.com, etc
I've had the same path; started out on .social, then moved to .run. Now I'm on fedia.io wondering when I'll have to scout out a fourth.
I highly doubt that Jerry will let you down 😁
Just made an account. I need time to go through and set up my subscriptions.
Where you also on vlemmy.net and iusearch.fyi?
You're like a threadiverse nijū hibakusha.
After I kbin.socials constant issues I moved to Leemy.world and like it a lot better. I miss magazines as opposed to communities, but it's pot-ato po-tato and there don't seem to be any outages.
I actually miss the microblog integration on vanilla kbin, but I don’t think we’ll ever get that back.
I might just finally give up and settle on lemmy. There are a lot of really good apps for it these days.
Same. I had literally just recommended .run a couple of days ago. This is getting really old, honestly.
Fedia.io is managed by an admin which has a long story of managing fediverse services, you should be safe.
Here's hoping it is fine. I had tried to sign up here rather than .run but had issues at that time. Cheers!
Same for me, there was a temporary sidetrek to lemmy land, but like 'bin way more and deleted that account.
Yikes. Always sad / concerning to see an instance (and its admins) just drop off the map w/o warning.
The GH and Matrix accounts disappearing is also telling. The DNS record for kbin.run is no longer found at all, so that indicates the owner deliberately deleted it rather than just shutting off the servers. Had the Github account remained active, I'd suspect something more benign like issues with their registrar,. But with the GH account deleting too, I'm leaning toward some kind of intentional scuttle (don't want to even speculate on why since there's nowhere near sufficient information to even guess).
Not sure what their Matrix handle/homeserver was, but if they hosted it under the same domain, it would make sense for that to disappear too if there were registrar issues. Again, the GH deletion seems to be the telling factor.
Amusingly, this comment from Elevator7009 one week ago seems to have aged like milk: https://lemmy.world/post/18248042 (LW link since the canonical kbin.run one won't work, obv).
Not only did he deleted the domain (records) and his github account. But also I can't find his sponsor pages anymore on buymeacoffee.com or patreon. Meaning he removed everything.
Yeah, I was a member (the only one?) on patreon and all evidence of my membership has vanished. I'm starting to think that self-hosting might be the only real way forward for stability, but I don't know how to replicate the /all/ experience without a swarm of users and their subscriptions adding to my own.
It's showing indeed the limitations of the activitypub protocol. I'm promoting decentralization, so feel free to run your own instance. Just know that it will take some time, effort and most likely some money.
Happily, the costs (server/hypervisor, domain, static IPs, proper firewall) are ones I already needed to spend for work, so the only tricky part will be finding the time and making the effort. Maybe by then the ux issues with low population instances will be sorted lmao.
I would not recommend single user instances in the threadiverse, they just need too many resources just to start out... There are other options available and if you do not trust the people "only" running their servers for 2 years like me and debojnced previously then go to fedia.io their admin has been actively hosting fediverse services for a lot longer
What is your definition of "too many resources"? Because running a Lemmy instance surely takes less server power than something like Mastodon, and you can find managed providers for Lemmy for ~$10/month.
Hell you can self host using yunohost of you want, although its an old version.
Used fedia today, and it looks like they never quite nailed down their 504 problem, so I think I'll give this one a go for a while.
matrix was on matrix.org. Though I doubt it is an intentional takeoff I had a conversation with them just yesterday and there weren't any signs of any of that....
Ah, okay. I looked at their profile, but it didn't list a Matrix username (or at least, that didn't federate to me if there was one).
I'm trying very hard not to speculate (and hoping an explanation eventually comes to light), but it's just weird and concerning to see someone (and their instance) just drop off the map like that.
Yeah, though I am rather worrying than speculating tbh. We both worked on mbin and I liked working with them. So I am just super duper confused 😅 And they were active on GitHub in the last days (and yesterday) so yeah... Dunno
Silly question.
Why?And how much does it cost to run a Lemmy instance that size?
The one reason I don't want to do it is because I'm not interested in the drama side of moderating.
Why do Kbin admins keep disappearing under weird circumstances? Is Kbin made with black voodoo magic? Do cenobites come out of the server box and take them to hell?
It's because coding in PHP makes you want to leave for a tropical beach and never come back to the nightmare.
Yeah that's really really accurate.
It's indeed very sad news. And I'm very sad to see debounced go away like this. I always get along well with him. And I don't know why he's gone so suddenly. 😭
😔
Ok. I have to ask: how many instances will have to go down before the majority of you drop the "you can always hop around to the next one" mentality and start thinking about ways to make the whole ecosystem more mature and professional?
Somebody should consider building a fork that works of bluesky's content addressing scheme, that way communities can effectively be re-homed in full even if the server dies
Is there a solution to make the whole ecosystem mature and professional?
Certainly having everyone on one instance isn't the way to go.
We could have a constellation of smaller service providers, like we do for email nowadays. Everyone talks about Gmail+Outlook having 80% of the market, but we all forget that the tail still exists and that is made of hundreds of independent companies which make a healthy living charging $20-$50/year.
And what's stopping that from happening now?
I assumed, perhaps incorrectly, that servers die because they are difficult to maintain. This is perhaps especially true for kbin/mbin based servers.
I suppose for enough money some might be willing to maintain, but I'm not sure it's that simple.
Mostly, culture. Everyone hates ads and corporate controlled networks, but almost no one wants to pay for a commercial service provider. People say that donations is an acceptable alternative, but no one pays enough for admins and developers to make a living out of this.
I can tell you that if if that I had 10000 paying customers for my commercial offering ($29/year for Lemmy, Mastodon, Matrix and Funkwhale), I'd be able to pay myself a good salary, support the developers (I pledge 20% of Communick's profits to the devs) and hire a couple more people to help me. It is not a lot, and a lot less than Facebook extracts from each user by exploring user data.
I do not blame people for this, but that's because as much as people hate ads and corporate controlled networks, they hate parting with their money *more*, and corporate-controlled, ad-ridden social media is free.
Implement OpenID? Or logging in with web3 (blockchain)? Or maybe account backup on google drive?
Any solution is better than no solution
Is the problem account making or data having persistence/backups?
Or is the issue having an account on service A, service A dieing and then when you create an account on service B you have to start over again, so we need to improve account portability?
I guess I also wonder... Is that a real problem for Lemmy? For Mastodon where you follow users sure, but does anyone care about their Lemmy account?
Ideally both issues should be fixed.
Personally I don't care much about old posts that nobody reads anyway. But my nick, settings, subscriptions, avatar, and block list are important.
So perfect solution should be ability to log in from any instance, not just the one I made my account on.
Lemmy allows to export and import those in one click. Does Mbin also support this?
Feel free to hire the devs?
You can and should fund the developers as much as possible , but I am talking about paying for the work done by the instance admins and moderators.
Oh fair point.
Feel free to hire the admins then!
I am one of the admins. Should I hire myself?
Pros: you get to be your own boss.
Cons: you get to be your own employee.
Kbin consumes another admin :/
Getting sus tbh
Yup, just moved from there to fedia now. Kbins spirit affects all
Safe haven on kbin.earth...landed on.the perfect spot. Insignificant but a cozy planet among the fediverse.
Kbin no run
Kbin do(n)t run
Oof. Worst way to go. I mean, doing so for personal accounts is fine but that's a lot of collateral in form of the users there. People always say to spread out over instances, but then shit like this happens. Most users don't want to run from one instance to another because the admins decided to stop (or due to other issues with them).
I guess that explains the 500s here on Fedia?
The question is when fedia does the same? It's as if these instances were hosted by extremely unstable people.
Jerry has been pretty good at communicating so far. Even back when it was kbin he announced early that they might have to switch to Lemmy because of all the issues, before finding out about mbin and switching to that. Mbin has been a little bumpy too but updates and fixes come in frequently and as a user you can feel the platform changing and evolving too. So I'm not too worried about fedia just vanishing from one day to another.
@Blaze@sopuli.xyz A sad thing is, that even if MBin had account migration implemented, it wouldn't really help, as it just got down without a notice or a warning
Oh indeed
Oh, I created an account there two days ago.
I had just remembered my .run account like a week ago after instance hopping. I had set it up last year in-case blahaj lemmy imploded.
Well damn, another kbin is down.
just wanted to post on the incredibly low chance debounced ever sees this that I hope he's ok and wish him well with whatever happened
So I have backup accounts on fedia.io and piefed.social
But when I left spez's site for the fediverse, I recreated some lost content (while it was still fresh in my head) and added a bunch of new content to kbin.social - AFAIK with ernest MIA and no way to reach an actual admin of kbin.social my new content is now gone.
That was a very discouraging experience. Since then I decided I wouldn't return until I could set up my own single-user instance - as owning and controlling my own instance largely means I always have a copy of my content, no matter what happens elsewhere.
I wish piefed.social (which only fully opened this year in Jan IIRC) had been around earlier. The lead developer of piefed is really helpful and responsive, and created a lot of documentation on how to run your own instance of pyfedi - including how to set up your own at-home instance via something like ngrok. Basically you get a HOWTO guide on how to do this. Compare with the complexity of getting a Kbin instance up and running in the early days...
Piefed is great indeed
What is the name knbin?