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.
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 Fediverse. So I can probably just remake it on whatever Mbin instance I end up on.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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 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. 😭
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).
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
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...