Yeah, It's true. Since Sunday, I've been noting errors that I'm still working on resolving. It doesn't make it easier that it's the post-holiday period, and due to travels and security measures, it's not the easiest task. I'm working to get everything back to normal as soon as possible.
Thanks for putting in all this work, especially over a period that's traditionally vacation time. Make sure you're striking a good work/life balance, if you can get the site basically functional (as it appears to be now) don't sweat the small stuff. :)
Not just me eh, sorry to hear! I had a Jellyfin upgrade go sideways (my fault) once during the holidays and that was bad enough - and all my users live with me! Sorry that you are pulling your hair out, and personally I'm more than content to wait it out until after your vacation.
I'm curious, 2hen you say "on-site work", do you mean you need to travel onsite to do some work for kbin? At a host somewhere? Otherwise, when you say "security measures" for travel, how is that related? Maybe you just mean you are travelling and it is taking up your time...?
@FfaerieOxide me too. I like it, I love the platform, I don't have an issue with the outages, and I like the way Ernest understands the fediverse.
If there's an outage fine, I just go to another fediverse account til kbin.social comes back. We all have other things in our life, sometimes projects have to take a back seat.
Also I have a lot of sympathy for Ernest wanting to retain control. It's his vision, let's let him do it his way.
Edit: the spam seems to be on mags that have Ernest as sole mod, so that might be an easy fix.
@FfaerieOxide yes! Well not officially, but after Arotrios had been gone a long time I applied to mod it, mainly as a sort of caretaker/safe pair of hands so that Arotrios will definitely get it back if he returns.
I don't know why/where Arotrios went. I kind of thought he'd be back by now.
I think a lot of us have had the same thoughts looking around kbin.
We all appreciate the work Ernest has done, but we really need someone to dedicate some time to picking out a team to help him, but it seems like that's not happening for whatever reason. I know there's a few other people in the codeberg, but I believe there was a falling out there. What we really need in addition to that though is just generic admins.
Ernest said in a previous post with some Mbin drama that he's very, very slow to trust people, and that's why he's been slow to give anyone else admin access to the project.
That may have been okay when only a few hundred people were using Kbin, but the project far outgrew what a single person can manage, especially since he's not only the main developer of the backend and frontend of Kbin, but also the only admin, moderator of multiple communities, AND decided to tackle making a Mobile Kbin app since that other one became vaporware. That is WAY too much for a single person to handle and still have any sort of existence offline.
This has been brought to his attention, but as you mentioned, nothing changes, and he continues the cycle of putting incredible load on himself, and then burning out. It's not sustainable, and unfortunately his lack of trust in others, and an unhealthy level of self-reliance, will ultimately keep Kbin from thriving.
Let me preface my response by saying: my answer is kbin specific. It might or might not also apply to mbin since they may have changed things (or kept older features that kbin changed) since they forked. I know a few of the differences between them, but I haven't kept up with most of mbin's specifics.
Also, if anyone stumbles into this in the far future: note that this post is from March 2024. If that seems like a long time ago, check for newer information...
Can searches be made more specific? On Lemmy, you could define whether you wanted to search for communities/magazines, threads, comments, users and urls.
You can search for magazines specifically from the magazine page. The general search searches in microblogs, thread text -- but not the thread title(?), and comments/replies, I think. You can search for exact user profiles as well with the "@ user @ instance" syntax -- e.g. searching for @[email protected] shows a link to your profile as the result. (That also applies to magazines/communties -- e.g. @[email protected] will find both a user called "kbinMeta" and this magazine as search results -- but searching for magazines from the magazine page is probably better for most use cases.) You can sometimes also find the local version of a federated thread if you search for the original post URL. Note that searching for a post on another instance may not always work; if you're copying a link to a thread you found in a comment post and someone linked to their instance's local version of a thread and that isn't the original source it probably won't find it. (I've had decent luck with it in practice though. For the latter problematic case, load the post on the instance and then find the fediverse link which should take you to the original source and then search for that to find it on your instance.)
@piotrsikora@ernest -- FYI searching for this thread by the exact title "Multiple questions regarding Kbin" does not find it currently but searching text like "as a new Kbin/Mbin user" will find it. Is that a bug?
@piotrsikora@ernest -- Searching for a URL that is not a thread causes a 50x error.
Lastly, you can change the result order (newest/controversial/oldest).
You can change newest/top/hot/active etc. for the results on kbin by clicking on the tabs above the search results.
To send toots/tweets, do I have to specify a magazine? I seem to be unable to send a toot without specifying a magazine first, although I only try to adress a mastodon user directly.
Unclassified microblogs (e.g. from Mastodon users) usually end up in random, but I'm not sure how to post them intentionally since I don't use the microblog feature much. Hopefully someone else can chime in with an answer for this.
Is this even the right magazine to ask these questions in? Is there a dedicated kbin support magazine?
It's fine for kbin questions but you might get a better response for details about your specific instance (which runs mbin) on a local magazine like /m/[email protected] maybe? Sorry if that doesn't link correctly; I rarely link anything other than lemmy communities. (EDIT: https://fedia.io/m/fedia )
On Lemmy, users can send each others direct messages. It seems like Kbin/Mbin has no way of displaying those direct messages. Is that correct or is there a way to show direct messages?
DMs do not work between kbin and lemmy as far as I know. I have a lemmy alt linked in my profile in case lemmy users want to DM me.
You should be able to send messages to local users on your instance though by going to a user's profile and clicking "Send Message" on the right side.
Trying to access the send message interface for your account from kbin doesn't work here, so I doubt mbin/kbin DMs work. (@ernest this seems to redirect to login and then immediately to the home view instead of opening the message page or showing an error -- is this a bug?)
Hope that helps!
@piotrsikora@ernest -- this thread did not show up on other instances (e.g. I couldn't see it from my alt on reddthat.com despite being subscribed to this magazine from there as well) when I found it originally. I upvoted it here on kbin.social and now it shows up on reddthat. Is that a federation bug (either on fedia.io's side or on kbin.social's side)?
@piotrsikora -- FYI: I got a lot of 50x errors trying to edit this comment.
Thanks for taking the time for your long message. I tried searching for this topic on my lemmy alt. This topic did not show up on either my fedia account, nor the kbin magazine at first, but does now. One more oddity I noticed is that the mbin UI did not hotlink your mentions, but the lemmy UI did so correctly.
Unclassified microblogs (e.g. from Mastodon users) usually end up in random, but I'm not sure how to post them intentionally since I don't use the microblog feature much. Hopefully someone else can chime in with an answer for this.
I can answer this, go to your own profile, choose add new post (not thread) and then from the "select a magazine" dropdown choose random. Then just use your @ tag like normal if you want to @ someone in the fediverse.
Hi @piotrsikora. Great to see that kbin is responsive again and returning to usability. If possible, could you please give an update on what is going on currently with federation? It looks like some things are getting through (e.g. I can see this thread on reddthat) but threads from most lemmy instances are not showing up in a timely way in /newest still and at a quick glance it looks like communities in my collections are maybe a half day behind -- with many threads from the past week or more missing entirely.
I'm assuming some of that may be on the lemmy side -- 0.19 has a major issue with sequential message distribution as seen with lemmy.world <-> reddthat.com federation (see this bug report and this comment if you're unfamiliar) -- but it'd be best to hear from someone who has access to the infrastructure about what's going on rather than guessing.
In particular, it'd be helpful to know:
What kind of delay should we expect for threads and comments we create here to show up on Lemmy communities?
What kind of delay should we expect for threads and comments other people create on Lemmy/mbin/etc. instances to show up here? (Obviously this may vary from instance to instance, but in general are things cleared up now on the kbin side for receiving new threads quickly?)
Are comment notifications still delayed from local kbin replies -- or has that been fixed with the infrastructure changes?
Are federated upvotes propagating quickly? (It is very discouraging if you post something and it gets no interaction at all -- knowing if there's federation delay in upvotes would help with distinguishing between "no one saw this", "no one liked this", and "people probably saw it and maybe liked it but the response hasn't made it to kbin yet")
Is federation still playing catch up and old missing threads/comments will be backfilled eventually, or have they been dropped to get things back in working order?
Have any major instances defederated with kbin.social during the recent problems?
Also, should we @ you in addition to @ernest if we encounter problems on kbin.social?
@e0qdk
I can only check federation with our mastodon server (pol.social), and now is very quickly (about seconds).
Queue on kbin.social is empty, so everything should work instant. Maybe lemmy.world add some limitation due to problem with kbin.social.
Feel free to add if you encounter some problems with infrastructure ;)
There was a bug with KBin some days ago where it would send huge amounts of federation activities to Lemmy instances which would overload them. To mitigate this, lemmy.world and some other instances had to block kbin.social. I believe the .world admins tried to get in contact with @ernest. You can read some more details here.
I would also suggest that you and Ernest join the Lemmy Admin chat on Matrix where this problem was found and discussed.
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