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Dude, where's my Kbin? - Apollo Town

apollo.town Dude, where's my Kbin? - Apollo Town

I’m making this post because I’m shutting down my Kbin instance, kbin.lol, and redirecting it here for an undetermined amount of time. ## But why? Kbin isn’t ready. Not even close. I know the developer, Ernest, has been working his ass off trying to get everything fixed and pushed, and I really valu...

Looks like the admin for kbin.lol has some pretty valid gripes with the current status of Kbin. I have to agree, you can tell the platform is not up to speed at all.

Kbin looks visually great but the backend just isn't there. Check out his statement, it's worth the read.

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43 comments

  • I’ve got a long history in the FOSS community and if I banned everybody I disagreed with it’d just be me, a scratch kernel, and nano.

    This 100%

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  • In addition to the backend, I'm not sold on the terminology used in the front end either, though visually it does look good.

    Why call communities Magazines? Why am I starting a microblog when I press new Post? Why is upvote called Favorite and what does Reduce mean? And what the hell is Boost and how is it different from Favorite?

    Still, the number one issue at the moment for sure is the slow federation and syncing with Lemmy. Communicating across different Lemmy instances is no problem, but Kbin<->Lemmy seems incredibly slow, with threads from Lemmy often lagging many hours behind when viewed from Kbin which makes it impossible to participate in conversations.

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    • Yeah, I know. Some of those terms come from Mastodon (the Twitter alt). In Mastodon, you can boost posts (tweets) which is akin to a retweet (without quoting). And a Favorite is similar to liking a tweet, although Mastodon makes it so that you can see all your favorites in a list, which is nice.

      How those operations function on a Lemmy instance, I have no idea. From what I remember Kbin was supposed to blend these together so you could use your one Kbin account to check out Lemmy communities and Mastodon posts in one spot?

      The whole magazine thing, yeah, just not needed in my opinion - call it communities.

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      • The idea of combining the two isn't necessarily bad, Kbin has some good ideas and I guess that's why it's gotten popular, there are just some baffling stuff too.

        The leftover terminology from Mastodon makes some sense (haven't used that one myself), maybe the founder thought the majority of users would join from there, but the magazine thing just confuses me since they are clearly just communities filled with threads. When I browse single picture meme posts or questions on AskKbin my first thought isn't "ah yes, Articles in a Magazine".

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  • From what I've read about lemmy it's not in much better shape, the backend is not optimized for scaling up and is held together by wishes and prayers.

    On one hand, I feel like there are software devs that would say that about literally any piece of software in production just to feel superior or because of their lack of experience. On the other... they are probably right. These are passion projects done in free time, jury-rigged in any way they could do it just to handle the absurd influx of new users.

    We all knew that this is young tech being developed "live in prod", of course it won't work as flawlessly as something made by a corporation with 2000 employees over the last 10 years. Or you know, be as stable and reliable as Twitter, the biggest social network that even governments use, owned by a multibillionare geniu.... ok that's it, can't do it more😁

    I'm sure these issues will be ironed out eventually. Mastodon is in a pretty stable spot right now and hopefully kbin/lemmy get to a similar state in 6-12 months.

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    • +1!

      Newer uses of the fediverse also don’t realise yet that Lemmy is older then Kbin, years older. Kbin has only really publically existed for a couple months.

      I was here before any surge when there were about 200 users and Ernest followed everyone MySpace Tom style. It’s damn impressive how the site held up even when he had to introduce cloudflare protection temporarily. It was slow, but never crashed completely.

      Some Lemmy instances did go down for a bit, even the bigger ones that didn’t had more synchronising issues then Kbin. I’m not trying to knock Lemmy by any means, but I think this goes to show that Kbin is alright if at a few months old, it can keep up with software that’s been around for several years at this point.

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  • I found the same, tbh.

    I've been on the thrediverse using lotide until now, which is different then lemmy or kbin. There were some federation issues so lotide wasn't federating just as the place was blowing up with more users, so I decided it was time to install one of the new pieces of software.

    I spent 3 days trying to get kbin working and federating, and just wasn't having luck with it. Even now, kbin.social is pretty dodgy about federating, and doesn't federate with a lot of other stuff at all.

    My instances require good federation. That's non-negotiable because otherwise it's just me sitting here talking to myself.

    Ultimately I went with lemmy, which I managed to get up and running quite a bit quicker.

    To be fair to kbin, it's a super new project. lemmy and lotide have been going for years, I hadn't even really heard about kbin 2 months ago. I think it'll get a lot better, but it's going to take time and effort.

    I sucked it up with respect to the lemmy devs politics stuff... Instead of bitching that they're not exactly like me, I'm going to just be thankful to them for creating a platform we can share.

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    • Yes, definitely problems federating, kbin.social is under quite some load and I made a new kbin instance (I'd previously only been testing). It's been up over 2 days and not received a single thread or comment from kbin.social. In the meantime it's filling with content from lemmy instances, like this thread for example.

      But, I'm sticking with kbin for a few reasons. First as you say it's a younger project and things will only get better, and as a software developer maybe I can help with that some. But, also because I like how it looks and prefer it over others.

      I think there's a lot of functionality missing, but it's going to come over time. For people not prepared for this kind of bleeding edge operation I'd certainly not blame them for wanting to use a more established project.

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      • Actually- scratch that. updates from kbin.social are definitely slowed to a crawl right now.

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      • I'm surprised you're having trouble federating with kbin.social- that's always been working for me from my personal instance. I have trouble federating with a few lemmy instances though. Lemmy.ml is still blocking the kbin useragent. And the communities of infosec.pub, sh.itjust.works, sopuli.xyz, among others- cannot be discovered from kbin.

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    • Just a note,

      It was shown a lot of the recent threadiverse federation issues were/are being caused by Lemmy. Major Lemmy instances were/are intentionally or unintentionally (due to a bug in their platform), blocking inbound federation traffic from Kbin and Lotide. While allowing their own outbound to go through.

      The jury is still out on if it was an oversight/issue with their latest release, or something more nefarious on the part of the devs with regards to competition.

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  • Personally I like Kbin better but I'm enjoying both and the fact that I can view posts from both on either platform! It's nice not having to choose in that sense

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  • Kbin has only existed publicly for a little over two months.

    Lemmy has been around for four years.

    It’s rather significant imo that Kbin is on par functionally with Lemmy, and Kbin.social has higher active user counts then all but a few Lemmy instances. Kbin seems to solve issues faster as well in the several weeks I’ve been here anyway.

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  • The best thing to do is start opening pull requests or issues and helping out, where you can :)

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  • I have to agree, you can tell the platform is not up to speed at all.

    It's OSS, you can contribute to improve it. Otherwise just sit tight and wait.

    There's not a multi-million dollar VC investment back these projects, they owe you nothing. You (as in the wider community) contribute to improve it or you wait for the one guy to decide your feature request is worth tackling.

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  • Personally I prefer Kbin to lemmy; as other have said, we must put into account that kbin is much younger that lemmy, but @ernest has been amazing in managing to keep it all running when the users went basically from 0 to 1000 in a matter of hours!

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  • I really like some of what Kbin is doing, but from a purely user standpoint, the federation stuff doesn’t work well enough to be usable.

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  • As a user, I plan to continue sticking with kbin.social for now because it's working well enough. Not perfectly, I can see Federation issues, but I'm comfortable with an imperfect experience in exchange for giving it support.

    I don't actually have a big issue with the Tankie devs behind Lemmy. It's open source, they have no control over it, if they try any funny business they'll be forked away lickety-split. But I think it's vital for an open standard to have more than one independent implementation. That keeps the implementers honest, nobody can just slip in a convenient little "extension" because theirs is the only client using the standard anyway.

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  • I’ve been coming to terms with the politics behind the Lemmy devs myself and I have to say I agree with the sentiment here.

    It’s going to be a long road ahead if we cancel everyone with an opposing viewpoint.

    Ultimately Lemmy remains free and open source. If new, more incriminating allegations show up about the devs, I hope that kbin would’ve made more progress by then. In the mean time, Lemmy works.

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  • I really like some of what Kbin is doing, but from a purely user standpoint, the federation stuff doesn’t work well enough to be usable.

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  • Kbin wasn’t that old and @ernest has been pretty open about everything. Like, they had this set up for a few friends and their friends. Kbin went from a couple hundred to thousands of people in zero time. Kbin gets a bit of space to make something.

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  • Apollo town? Does that have anything to do with the former Apollo app?

    Interesting to say the least, I signed up for lemmy and it has its issues (they may have finally fixed sort by hot). I looked at kbin and saw a much cleaner and at the time active community and wondered if I should move over. Lemmy got pretty active today.

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    • No affiliation to Christian Selig or the Apollo app that I’ve read. I’ve been on a couple of Lemmy instances and Kbin.social for about four weeks now (a couple of days after Christian posted about the API charges) and always found content and activity was much greater on Lemmy. All my Lemmy instances have about the same Active/Top listings (I didn’t use Hot sorting in Reddit and not using it with Lemmy, it’s not how I like to view).

      I was drawn to the interface of Kbin like everyone else, but I quickly realized that the interface was buggy and clunky and not ready for prime time. It very well may perfect everything it is aiming to achieve. It appears they're trying to make it easy for users to interact with Mastodon style servers and Lemmy style servers, and joining the features of both worlds. That sounds pretty cool if it can be done right. But I want my votes to count, I want it to be easy to cross post or boost (these are different) and yes I'd love to interact with Mastodon also but only if those other things work correctly, that's just how I like to get into my threads and conversations while consuming posts.

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  • I started on kbin for my first 2 weeks of the fediverse but I've since migrated mostly to lemmy and I think I'm happier here tbh.

    Excited to see where kbin goes, and really excited to see all of the apps being made for both technologies.

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  • Definitely it’s bad when there are many alternatives with many instances. Community will become fragmented

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  • I've been trying for over a week to delete my account at kbin, and it always says success, but my account is still there. Glad to know I'm not crazy and it's an actual issue.

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    • If you’d still like to delete you can dm Ernest and he’ll sort it out. There’s a known processing backlog.

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