An update regarding the future of m/AskKbin (heading towards Mbin)

Hello everyone!

This is u/TheArstaInventor, I have contributed to many communities as moderator both here on kbin.social and on lemmy instances like lemmy.world (my profile) and lemmy.ml. I have also made guides in the past to help new users migrate from reddit to the fediverse and was also part of the r/RedditAlternatives moderation team, helping several efforts within the community for migration especially during the Reddit API hype (although we all know at some point that had to subside down and organic growth is the long-term key anyways).

It's been a couple of months since I have been inactive as I am a student and I was very busy and didn't really have any time and was tightly packed, leading me to take a few months of time off social media in general, and I have now noticed that several things have happened in the past couple of months while I have been away, and this affects the future of the communities I moderate, including this one, and where I am planning to head my efforts towards in the future moving forward.

1. Kbin: Unfortunately the opposite of what I hoped for, it looks like development have stalled rather than taking off, when I was active a couple of months ago, the development was already slowing down and bots/spams were an issue, and unfortunately looks like things have only gotten worse. I understand and read the thread from Ernest and what he has been dealing with in his life, which has unfortunately negatively impacted the platform and I do hope he is able to turn things around at some point!

2. Lemmy: I wrote a post here on lemmy a while back, opened and ran a few communities there side by side with kbin.social and we have seen some nice growth there, I was honestly not yet decided on which platform to go for, as I was wondering if I should just switch to Lemmy due to the slow down of development with Kbin that was already an issue back then as well.

Now, as a moderator, I have looked at everything, the spam/bot has gotten worse and on all the communities I have moderated at Kbin is filled by spammers, I think at this point I must look elsewhere as I've patiently stayed supportive of this project and been here for a long time, and I am certainly not saying Ernest can't take things uphil from here, but I no longer can move forward blindly based on optimism as the past of Kbin has simply shown a downhill so far and that makes life much more difficult for us mods maintaining and investing time in these communities.

Now about Lemmy, as I mentioned, the experiment was pretty successful, after all Lemmy has always been the biggest and the oldest reddit alternative in the fediverse, despite my long discomfortness with the developers (being tankies) and they're not so clean history due to their beliefs, although that directly does not affect development and certainly isn't the reason/influence of my decision to not invest my time at Lemmy. The main problem for me with Lemmy is that the platform feels stagnant, and the development just doesn't seem fast paced either (for new features and etc, as it's pretty big and mature, adding new features or things would be slower compared to a newer/younger alternative with active developers).

At last we have Mbin, I never gave it serious consideration but even after so long after forking, looking at Mbin's development progress at Github after coming back myself from being inactive, Mbin has been developing actively and there seem to be several contributors working and helping the project out, while Kbin has been mainly/only being carried by Ernest so far, which is also because Mbin allows pull requests that can be merged by any repo maintainer (with merge rights in GitHub) and only one approval on the PR is required from one of the Mbin maintainers, this allows for much easie/more contribution - I really like this open community approach especially with Mbin.

That being said, I have made the tough decision to move forward to Mbin, this community will be archived later and I hope to see all of you continue your engagement that you've made so far in the community there at m/AskMbin which is where we will be heading towards, I will personally be moving to https://thebrainbin.org/, one of the many instances of Mbin (find other Mbin instances here). Although if you want to hold off and don't want to move instances, you absolutely don't have to! This is a change that only affects us moderators and the community itself, all you have to do to continue to be part of the AskKbin community in it's new future direction, is subscribe to our community from your existing instance even if that would be in Kbin or Lemmy, it certainly doesn't have to be mbin! The power of the fediverse!

Again we hope to see you there and if you would like contribute to this new effort and direction for AskKbin -> AskMbin as a moderator, please message me here or at mbin so I can add you as mod in our new community!

Edit: Also wanted to mention, this is just the beginning, I will slowly be moving the rest of my communities to Mbin's thebrainbin.org instance, if you are subscribed to any of my other communities please keep an eye out for a new similar announcement.

Edit 2: We have also opened a discord server! If you are interested in keeping up with my iniatives and show your support, please join my server and stay up to date!