Hello everyone, benevolent overlord #376465 here!
This wonderful little community of ours has grown a lot since it was started by AKittyCat and gloomchen back in June when Reddit chose to increase its decade-long process of going to hell at Mach 3.
That being said no one can predict the future. At the time kbin seemed like an amazing alternative to Lemmy. More features, better interface, improved functionality with Mastodon, etc etc. The reality now 8-9 months later is that kbin is falling drastically behind. I'm sure everyone has noticed the random 500 errors, the errors when upvoting and/or boosting, the occasional downtime, etc etc. Development seems to have stalled out. Ernest (kbin's dev) has had personal issues (which I won't rag on him for letting get in the way, real life comes before this dumb-ass Internet shit 10 times out of 10) but regardless, an absent dev (especially when there's only one) does not make for a good software experience.
But..this is not just my community: It's yours. So it's time for everyone's favourite activity: Sounding off in the comments!
As things stand we have two basic options:
A: Ride the wave, stay on kbin and deal with it cause life sucks while hoping Ernest comes back.
B: Jump ship and move to another instance with whatever turbulence it could cause.
For A, well nothing changes. Things might get better? Things might get worse? Who knows, roll a die.
For B, we'd be starting fresh with (theoretically) fewer problems, but depending where we go would mean we could lose some features (like if we went to Lemmy, no more microblog and Mastodon integration).
I have set up a SQ backup community a day ago, located on Lemmy.zip (https://lemmy.zip/c/squaredcircle) as it's Federation is fairly wide open which should prevent issues (and from my own experience they don't have much if any issues error-wise like we do here) tho I am not opposed to other instances should people suggest em and they look better (though I love how the .zip community already has 31 subscribers for no reason besides existing lmao).
I'll make two comments below to keep the responses kinda-sorted, and this poll will remain up until approx. March 18th to give time for visibility.
Edit: Our current backup (and possible new home) which I linked above (and again, here) has been unlocked for posting given the heavy weekend we're coming to here, and with kbin's issues seemingly increasing today.
I've subscribed to the .zip backup, and my (virtual) bags are packed and at the door.
I did notice that @Neon_Carnivore's comment on the .zip announcement doesn't appear from lemmy.ml though, 8 hours later. Are we sure that instance is federating any better than kbin.social is, or is lemmy.ml the issue here?
I made this kbin alt just to browse because the delay federating with lemmy got so bad, so maybe it's a partially both kinda fault.
Hey, lemmy.zip admin here - what you're seeing is a side effect of how lemmy works vs some of the stuff we do on lemmy.zip to promote communities using a tool called Lemmy Federate - basically all our communities are federated out to 27 other instances and the comments etc should pull through without issue there (reddthat, feddit uk, midwest.social etc - full list is here (currently [email protected] is at the top) - the other instances (lemmy.ml, lemmy.world, lemm.ee etc) don't actually know about the community because no one from those instances has subscribed, so no information is given to those instances UNTIL someone subscribes or searches it for the first time on that instance, at which point its a blank slate - its the same with users, hence why neon_carnivores comment might not show on other instances - its because they're not aware of them as a user on lemmy.zip yet. It should balance out over time as more instances become aware of the community.
You can see live federation stats for lemmy.zip here.
PS - thats a really terrible explanation from me about federation on lemmy there but tl;dr its how federation on lemmy works - it just takes time until a few users are subscribed from each instance, then its good to go.
ETA - i can see upvotes pulling through properly too now on lemmy.ml as i upvote or downvote on lemmy.zip so federation going forwards should work fine...