What is going on with Kbin
What is going on with Kbin
I almost feel like it's October last year, when I pled for improvement on all fronts regarding the Kbin development strategy. Now it seems development has ceased once again and there hasn't been chat on the matrix channels for over a week. Update: that's two weeks now (including his blog) and over a month of no visible Development.
Update: According to https://fedidb.org/software/kbin there are a grand total of 29 active kbin servers. Of 61,489 users on all instances, 59,962 of these are on kbin.social. To those users I would like to say that should kbin.social fail, there will always be Mbin servers to fall back to.
What is going on?
We can only speculate, based on what has happened in the past. Several mind bending theories can come to mind.
Perhaps Ernest (and whatever team still exists) is continuing development in the background, not publicly sharing his work on codeberg. He may have had enough of all the criticism and wants to do it his way without interference. This may sound a bit far fetched, but he's admitted in the past that he prefers concentrating on coding over communicating with his community.
Other theories could involve something bad involving Ernest personally, let us hope that is not the case. Ernest is a great person, nobody would wish anything bad upon him.
But in reality, speculation doesn't change anything, we can only deal with the situation at hand.
I believe waiting for a new release comes with too many risks in the current setting. Nobody can monitor the code during progress or do any testing for themselves while development is ongoing (assuming it is). If anything, what's coming next? Your guess is as good as mine.
A new version may well break compatibility between Kbin and Mbin. Mbin is trying to stay compatible with Kbin for as long as reasonably possible. However, staying compatible with something that is out of sight and out of one's control is challenging, if not impossible. A break in compatibility would mean there will be no easy way to migrate to Mbin after an upgrade for Kbin users who have patiently waited for one, should they want to.
I would not want the future of my instance to be dependent of such a level of uncertainty, now or in the future.
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Kbin was a fantastic project and its developer deserves all our respect.
Unfortunately Kbin suffered a perfect storm that overwhelmed him: -he was born at the wrong time; indeed: he was born at a very right time! That is, just before migration from Reddit reached its peak
- it was too immature and too good at the same time: users saw how good it was and dived into it en masse
- as if that wasn't enough, even more users flocked to Kbin due to a well-known Fediverse popularizer, blinded by ideological hatred towards the Lemmy developers, who recommended it to everyone as the best alternative to Reddit, saying something lie: immature software like Kbin CAN NEVER be a better alternative than mature software like Lemmy (oh yes, congratulations FediTips: you actively contributed to sinking the Kbin boat!)
- the developer was alone, a very normal circumstance for a project in development; but this led to an absurd overload and a totally destabilizing overexposure!
- finally, the usual dynamic of free software has struck again: herds and herds of ignorant, selfish, resentful people lacking any empathy began to DEMAND improvements, modifications and corrections to a software that (I repeat once again) was still immature, without giving ANYTHING, and when I say NOTHING I mean without financing the project.
I completely understand that the developer went into burnout! The meltdown of lone developers is a very frequent phenomenon in free software... These pressures are almost impossible to bear: to bear them you need to have balls of steel, decent financial resources, many true friends and a pathological level of enthusiasm and self-esteem to resist such strong emotional pressure.
and when I say NOTHING I mean without financing the project.
This is not quite true, the project was being partially financed by external parties
But you are right. And we all know this. Kbin/mbin still is a fantastic project. We all respect Ernest for creating it. The software was immature as you said, a lot of people jumped in and offered their help, including actually making the features they were, as you call it, demanding. He was no longer alone. When things went south, everybody sympathized and several people offered him help and advice in many ways, which he has explicitly refused.
But that was all then, circumstances were far from optimal, indeed. Things are back to normal now, have in fact been for quite a while. This would have been the chance to get things sorted, especially delegating access to the back end of kbin.social, but sadly, nothing has changed
👍🏼