I started with kbin but left it for lemmy + mastodon. It was not mature enough to handle so many users (which was unexpected by its own creator). Too many issues with bots, the instance itself, and the lack of mobile apps motivated me to move on. It’s sad because it’s creator seemed pretty invested into its project (and I loved the UI, and the ability to get both a Reddit-like and a Twitter-like experience).
Was super invested in it (was considering moderating multiple magazines), as I really like Kbin and the vision of it being an all-in-one microblogging and link aggregator platform in the Fediverse. With there being so many federated platforms serving the same purpose, I like how Kbin sort of went against the fragmentation. Had to leave it for Lemmy just the other day as well. I think that Ernest has created the best alternative to Reddit despite the struggles he’s faced with development and maintaining the instance alongside with personal issues.
mbin looks great but I think I’ll just stay with the more stable option and community…being an early adopter was fun for a year though. I’m still a little iffy about mbin personally. If there’s a mbin/kbin API release I may reconsider.
mbin has had an accessible API for a few months now. You can use Interstellar with for example (not on iOS thuogh)
I’ve moved to fedia.io (mbin)
kbin.social is always down, always spitting our errors/etc.
I really like KBin! I wish Ernest the best with his health, and hope development of the project will continue in the future. In the meantime I have created this new account on fedia.io and will be exploring mbin!
I moved to Mbin purely because kbin.social has been down
I have been on kbin.run (kinda confusing name lol) for awhile now because of the instability of of .social and the added functionality of mbin. For some reason .run’s certificate doesn’t work with my home computer’s browser (Waterfox) so I made a fedia.io account as well.
I’m satisfied with the mobile web interface for m/kbin so I don’t feel a need for a dedicated app.
kbin.run admin here, i’m curious if this cert problem is still happening as i recently loosened up some of my super strict bot killing mechanisms… give it a shot again and DM me if it still doesn’t work so i can try to figure out what’s going on.
as for the name… yea, i should have named it something different. at the time, kbin was the only horse in town and the intent was to help alleviate some traffic from .social before the foundation took over to run it on their cluster… then things fell apart. unfortunately, i can’t rehome it to a new domain because it will break federation of all existing content, accounts, etc.
Thanks for you hard work! I’ll give it a try when I’m home (if I remember to do so lol). The naming makes sense at the time I suppose
I gave up on kbin social months ago when it went down with no idea when it would be working again. I ended up going over to lemmy.world.
Same…
I am still hoping that Ernest is able to recover and get back on his feet. I did really like how Kbin was able to interface with Mastodon and Lemmy.
Ernest did respond a couple weeks ago on codeberg. Looks like he plans to hand the instance over for new management. I have no idea when exactly that will happen.
According to that website, Kbin.Social has >10x more registered users (had? looks like it only counts accounts) than all Mbin servers combined.
At this point people need to stop being surprised - whether he is sick or whatever the cause, this is by no means a rare occurrence for that instance.
I think it is good to point it out though. kbin.social is missing from the fediverse observer, but if you have a look at this: https://mbin.fediverse.observer/list you’ll see that almost all mbin servers have a >98% recent uptime and a >95% uptime over the whole lifetime of the server. Sadly, fedidb does not have an uptime metric
(yes mine is not up there, because it was offline for a week in september last year)
I’m not sure of the accuracy of the user count for kbin, because account deletion requests, at least for kbin.social, are not being processed. <edited>
I believe it, but I already did not trust those numbers for a different reason - e.g. I abandoned my account there six months ago to come to where I am at now, so technically I have an account and yet I’ve been there like 6 times since then and commented or interacted fewer than that.
Still, the total user count represents a “high mark” that it had once reached, and the Mbins collectively still seem far away from that. But good point, b/c how many accounts are e.g. alts or deleted from Mbin successfully but from Kbin that request gets ignored.
“Activity” would be a better measurement. Down below in some of the other replies we looked into that, and I think technically Kbin.Social is still fairly active, more so than the Mbins, but overall the Mbins are obviously in a healthier state with fewer of these insanely long (weeks-long) outages.
Btw, in my link above (for “sick”), Ernst mentioned that:
The care of the instance will also be handed over.
So it looks like things will change at Kbin.Social regardless of his health & life issues.
I hope things turn around.
I for one hope that he goes back to what he seemed to enjoy the most: writing the code. Let someone else handle the admin duties, which he mostly abandoned anyway. We would get the non-Lemmy codebase enhanced, while he would get the fun of chasing his passion:-).
I only look into kbin.social occasionally to see if they finally got their spam problem under control. They were nice maybe a year ago, but now it is a dumpster fire with half the main page being ads for drugs and junk services.
The admin has been having medical issues and has been MIA for months. Last week there was a roumors about him potentially handing over the server but seems nothing come of it.
Welcome to Mbin :)
Happy cake day, and thank you for your work on Mbin!
Ow right! It’s happy cake day for me! Thanks…
Wasnt kbin development abandoned?
Yes but not by choice Ernest has had health problems and has not been able to work on it. The instance is going to be handed over to a new team when he gets the chance.
I’m more or less defaulting to kbin.earth now. It’s a shame to see the original fall apart, but the idea and foundation are being carried on. I hope Ernest is doing alright
