/kbin is certainly not dying, as @fr0g pointed out, work on new features and bug fixes is ongoing. However, it may give the impression that it is, and for that, I take full responsibility and owe you an explanation.
Several factors have contributed to this situation. The first and most significant reason is my family issues, which I must prioritize. I’m doing my best to stabilize the situation as quickly as possible, but not everything is within my control. The second reason is unfortunate financial matters. When Kbin suddenly gained popularity, the project’s maintenance costs far exceeded my initial estimates. While community support still allows for the cluster’s maintenance, I also need to take care of my own livelihood and commitments. Another reason involves spam campaigns and other issues that I need to address behind the scenes. I don’t want to go into specifics right now, but there will come a time when I can share more. My top priority is to resolve all these matters so that I can return to working on Kbin full-time.
I spend every spare moment writing code and reviewing code? from other contributors. It’s a lot of work that goes into development, and I try to verify every accepted pull request and make improvements when I can. It also takes up a lot of time, more than it may seem. I have also delegated some responsibilities and permissions to the Kbin core team (https://codeberg.org/org/Kbin/teams), which has allowed the project to continue to grow, and I am immensely grateful for that. However, I still want to maintain overall control, although over time, we will work on better processes to make it less dependent on me.
I paused updates on kbin.social some time ago until the release of the first version. Hence, the impression that nothing is happening. Kbin is, in fact, developing so rapidly that I wouldn’t be able to respond to potential issues quickly enough, adding to the stress.
I’ve given myself a deadline to resolve all my issues and release the first official version by the end of September. If I can’t meet the deadline, I will step down from leading the project and transfer full rights over the repository and instance to the contributors. Of course, this includes the budget I mentioned earlier, earmarked for instance maintenance.
I feel truly awful about this. I can’t even keep up with threads on Matrix Spaces, notifications here, etc. Right now, the only way to contact me is through the contact form. However, I want to catch up on everything as soon as possible and stabilize the situation. It’s crucial to me, but at the moment, I can’t put it above family matters. I apologize for letting you down, and I appreciate your words of support. If it weren’t for such an amazing community, I might have given up a long time ago.
Take time for yourself, I don’t think anyone’s going to blame you for that. And honestly, I don’t have any issues with the current state of Kbin, there’s a couple bugs here and there but it’s entirely usable otherwise. Finally, I think giving yourself a deadline to resolve personal issues might be counterproductive and make you more stressed than you should be. It sounds like you’re already taking steps to help spread the workload around, I would just keep spending a little bit of time helping out the team do some stuff you can’t do until you’re able to get a better work life balance or something.
I guess I’m trying to say, things are great to me and I imagine you’re getting that unfortunate side effect of only having people who have something to complain about reach out whereas everyone who has everything going well isn’t saying anything. So, in my opinion, you can stay to course (as long as it isn’t killing you mentally) and I don’t think the site is suffering any for it.
Yes, and I feel bad that I haven’t said how great the kbin team are doing. Thanks to everyone, I’m sure it’s not a light load.
I’m just glad they found some time to update us on the current situation!
Hijacking the top comment since I feel like Ernest’s buy me a coffee link should be signposted here:
https://www.buymeacoffee.com/kbinCaffeinated!
Thank you for all your work and I hope everything with the family is well and you’re taking care of yourself!
Thank you for explaining and thank you for the work you’re doing!
Of course you and your family’s wellbeing comes first, take the time you need.You’re good dude. Don’t be too hard on yourself or let silly comments get to ya. This place is awesome and it seems to only be getting better.
Thank you for the transparency about the situation! Taking time to resolve personal problems is not something to apologise over, we’re all thankful for the incredible work you’re doing so we can use Kbin.
Thank you @ernest for all you do and all you have done!
Absolutely do not want to see you run yourself into the ground over kbin matters, your family and your health come first.
I don’t question your judgement, but I think the “step down” bit is a bit extreme, even if you fail to meet the deadline. Worst case, maybe let the community appoint a second-in-command temporarily to get some things moving along while you take a well deserved break?
Agreed, stepping down is a bit heavy handed. There are a lot of moving parts, it’s okay to take time for your self and let others take up the reigns temporarily if you need to. I’ve seen quite a lot of merges on the core recently - so it’s obvious things are moving in the right direction.
So I’m more some bystander, running Lemmy myself, and having serious issues about your handling of the open source licence attribution thing.
But that said, personally I’d prefer not having you set a deadline like that. Especially early stage projects, imo, need focused leadership. Maybe you need to delegate even more, including stepping back a bit and maybe paying someone else part time, but you should still keep control. You created a wonderful alternative to Lemmy, with a very thoughtfully designed Interface. That is not a sign you already need to step back just because things started moving faster than expected.
If I can’t meet the deadline, I will step down from leading the project and transfer full rights over the repository and instance to the contributors.
I respect you entirely but this is a bit dramatic. Not all projects can be on time due to complications and no one is asking you to step down. Please just do what is necessary - you’re doing fantastic!
Looking forward to the first version!
Yeah, there is no need for “final solution” style accountability here. This was a project that a single developer was working on when the stars just happened to align and drive a lot of attention to it at once. A commercially oriented website in the same situation would struggle to deal with it and be forced to take out loans in order to expand staffing and infrastructure capacity.
The phrasing of Ernest’s initial post suggests that there is at least one exploitable vulnerability that spammers are taking advantage of and can’t be openly discussed until the gates are closed. I understand the frustration and optics problem that comes with “easy and important fixes” sliding on the schedule (i.e. the topic of the other thread), but look at it this way:
- Ernest is too slammed with work to be consciously creating more work for himself.
- He needs the spam and bot problem to go away so ASAP so that it stops taking time away from him. This includes the missing moderation tools, spam/bot campaigns that are operating at a scale that those additional tools would have difficulty addressing regardless, and the issues he can’t talk about yet that were hinted at above.
- If he is waiting to push out a fix to problems that would greatly reduce his workload, there are very good reasons for it.
- If he is not able to push out fixes that reduce his workload, it stands to reason that fixes unrelated to them are also sliding.
100%. and therein lies the beauty of open source: if someone thinks they can do a better job, then fork it and move on.
If someone thinks they can do a better job they can go fork themselves!
Just don’t fork their dongle. That does not go over well.
Everybody says that, but that’s not really practical. It would be much better to merge those features into the main project, than to fork it and get stuck maintaining a separate codebase in perpetuity.
Now I will say that if someone thinks they can do a better job, they should sign up for the project and commit their changes to the main project, so all ernest has to do is approve it, rather than write it himself.
oh, i totally agree with your points and i think most of us are already doing that… i was being borderline sarcastic. now, that said, i have no knowledge of what prompted this as a possible resolution by @ernest and it’s none of my business, but i can take an educated guess at the calibre of individual(s) that prompted this as a solution. sometimes you have to be a hard-ass if you want to maintain quality and vision (cough mr torvalds) and @ernest has made it clear he’s too nice. :-)
Indeed, nobody is asking you (Ernest) to step down.
Self care first, my friend. When you are okay then you can worry about others. All the weight doesn’t have to be on your shoulders.
I appreciate what you’ve built so far and the rest can come as it does. It’s not worth running yourself ragged over. I hope things resolve well with your family issues, many thanks and no gripes here. Kbin remains awesome as-is and I’m sure it will only get even better eventually. Every improvement doesn’t have to be today.
You need to find someone else who can help admin this instance and moderate the magazines you’re the only moderator for. I understand that means stepping down as admin at least temporarily as kbin currently doesn’t support multiple admins.
You’re obviously doing everything you can, but there is only so much time in a day and you don’t have enough to do everything at once. You need help with it.
Dude, you’re being quite hard on yourself. You’re not the only one who can write code, you’re not the only one who can review it. It would be fine for you to step back and take a decision making role until everything else has been handled in your life.
Don’t burn out in a few months. Protect your sanity so that you can be there for the long run.
Same. I’m not a kbin local, but even being based in a neutral instance that blocks nothing and nobody, kbin users and content are a huge presence in my ecosystem. Kbin is an important part of the fediverse. Periods of slow growth or even genuine stasis are preferable to unsustainable long term development decisions in the name of immediate results. Better to simmer the sauce now while the pot is small than to have an enormous vat of increasingly unworkable spaghetti in a year and a half.
I’ve got KBIN running in a Hermit webapp and it’s scratching my reddit itch.
No complaints from me with how things are.
❤️
