I’m having to register to Lemmy directly now, when I’m used to posting from KBin’s instance. But now the errors is getting so bothersome that I can’t even surf around currently on it. The 50x error comes up after everytime I post somewhere, like make a thread.
The current admin is dealing with issues at the moment and can’t always be there, which is unfortunate because it sets up KBin and it’s magazines to be contaminated with bots, spam and other problems.
You should be able to mark this as solved, honestly. There is already a fork that’s been mentioned multiple times here. (MBin). Here’s a list of instances.
Anti Commercial-AI license
Kbin.run is well maintained. Whenever I submit a bug they are on it right away, it’s impressive.
Please don’t take what I’m about to say as individual call-out, but your comment really will go to “reasons software developers should not listen to the users (unless they are paying for the privilege)” file.
You have a developer who started the project by themselves, got reasonably popular, does more than what Lemmy is doing and when they need help to be able to keep going, the reaction from the people is “don’t bother, just move on to this other fork”.
I know this is not your intention, but I can stop picturing a bunch of locusts flying to the next crop.
Ernest actively does not accept any help. If he accepted he couldn’t do it alone and let others help, I expect Mbin probably wouldn’t exist. But he disappears for months at a time and won’t let anyone else help. Family issues is a good reason to step away for a time, family comes first. But he should have formed a team around him to carry the load - he certainly had plenty of offers of help.
The project page is listing 5 names under contributors. He has received a grant from NLNet and seems to be promoting other sponsorship programs. Seems like he is not above asking for help. Quite the opposite, actually. He is basically begging for the “community” to support him financially, but seems that very few (kbin is getting less than $100/month on Patreon and ~$90/month on liberapay) are listening.
How do you “form a team” if there is no meaningful income? I don’t know about him, but I would feel pretty embarrassed to even ask other people to work on something if I am not offering something tangible in return. And to be quite honest, I wouldn’t trust anyone that accepted a pitch that could be summarized as “hey, would you like to come work on this project that is sucking the life out of me, gives a ton of headaches and forces me to deal with a bunch of entitled users?”
Yes sorry, I know there is more complexity than what I implied. I think it came from a position of frustration that Kbin has been DDoSing lemmy instances for months due to some bug causing junk activities to be sent in huge numbers, in addition to Kbin being the primary source of spam for lemmy. I’ll remove my comment as I can’t stand behind it.
I’m not offended. @snownyte@lemmy.world is, from I understand, basically asking the community to help out the main dev of kbin. From what I’ve seen, that main dev doesn’t want to relinquish control of the main instance or allow others to come on. Nor have they shown willingness for similar actions in the code-base.
That’s a completely valid stance. It’s his project, his baby, his time and nobody should be able to force him to take any other action. However, it does come with the consequences observed: bots, unmerged pull requests, slow-moving code, and just general stagnation as the project moves as fast the main dev. As such, IMO there’s no problem recommending a fork that is community-driven (the C4 model is great!).
Hopefully I’m not misunderstanding your comment.
Anti Commercial-AI license
That’s pretty much the idea. I don’t want someone to take over KBin forcefully to make it their image. I just would’ve thought the admin had someone in mind to entrust to keep things should IRL get in his way. Which is looking to be the case. The admin can’t be there for KBin right now and there’s no one there to help maintain and keep it running.
Worst case scenario is the admin’s health worsens and KBin just becomes a husk of itself in due time.