Be patient! We'll get there eventually.

I see a lot of comments pointing out bugs and saying something along the lines like "they need to fix this ASAP, otherwise... something something".

As a software developer myself (not in the fediverse), I can tell you one thing:

Keep in mind that all of this literally escalated pretty quickly, and no one was prepared for that. What started out as a hobby project of some enthausiasts, quickly turned into a high demand over the course of a few days.

Having hundreds of enthusiasts use a software is different than having thousends of "average" people using it. 100 users won't detect many bugs, and if they do, they're more tolerant since they know it's all volunteering. But thousands of users will detect even more bugs that no one bothered to deal before.

Once the userbase grows and the demands are clear enough, this should be tackled, eventually.

So yeah, hang in there.

Guadin,
@Guadin@k.fe.derate.me avatar

To add: we are not paying (for) anything, we are not the product, all the costs are covered by volunteers. So if a server is a bit wonky or slow, remember that you're not entitled to anything.
And as you said, the software needed to go from 20 to 100 in a blink of an eye. Where they thought they would have time to handle everything gently and in due course needed to be done much faster.
Furthermore, most developers also run an instance (which suddenly needs to be scaled and troubleshot), need to answer questions, moderate, handle PR's on github and solve bugs. All while also having a family and other acticities to attend to.

ernest,
ernest avatar

Thanks for that, it's true, I need to remember especially about that last point. Later, I will write a few words about what was happening behind the scenes during these days. I wasn't there alone. Not anymore ;)

kbin is much older; it was a side project. Recently, I took it more seriously :)

Dadifer,

How can we help besides donations?

Guadin,
@Guadin@k.fe.derate.me avatar

That would be a really great read about the behind the scenes. Looking forward to read it, whenever you have the time (and motivation) to write about it.

NightOwl,

Reminds me of the earlier days of reddit when it felt more like a message board alternative that existed just to exist and just do enough to cover costs. Added more of a desire to help out as opposed to it being seen as the efforts of a billion dollar corporation.

And here it is just regular people hosting and running stuff. It's pretty cool.

nicetriangle,
nicetriangle avatar

deleted_by_author

    •
    ernest,
    ernest avatar

    Thanks, I appreciate it :) Thanks to all of you.

    livus,
    livus avatar

    Thanks to you! You are awesome. But I hope you are getting enough rest!

    reflex,
    reflex avatar

    Thank you @ernest, for giving us somewhere to go.
    Hope you're still having fun working on /kbin after the explosion of traffic.
    You know, given how hobbies turning into work can take all the fun out and all that.

    CrownCrafter,
    @CrownCrafter@lemmy.ml avatar

    Reminder to donate to your home instance, lemmy, kbin or otherwise

    TWeaK,

    Why not donate feddit.uk instead?

    livus,
    livus avatar

    Seems like a random suggestion?

    TWeaK,

    I swear it said this was in feddit.uk when I posted. I think it's that websocket bug, where sometimes part of the information on one tab is loaded from another.

    nicetriangle,
    nicetriangle avatar

    deleted_by_author

    •
    madjo,

    For that reason I went to geddit.social, which is hosted by Stux, who also hosts several Dutch Mastodon instances. I'm also paying him on Patreon.

    sailsperson,
    sailsperson avatar

    Hopefully my experience can help some people see the bright side of going off Reddit.

    To me, Reddit has been a great platform in almost every possible way - except meaningful engagement. At some point, I realized that any somewhat big subreddit that I frequented for news and discussions of topic I'm interested in is plagued by dead-end threads: karma farms through reposts, lame jokes and similarly low-effort content that's breeds equally low-effort comments, and things that don't provoke any sort of discussion in general.

    Joining the protest made me go to difference places, especially forums big and small, where the only real way to engage with the community was to actually reply to what they said. I quickly realized that Reddit has long turned into another brainless scroller akin to Instagram or Twitter, which all may have their place, but that's just not what I joined Reddit for back in the day.

    Now that I've basically kicked the Reddit habit, I'm finally enjoying the Internet again - it's not the same as it was in the 00s, and it will never be, but it's much, much better than going to a single website, owned by a single company, for nearly everything I want to do online.

    Today, I finally have a proper choice for the first time in years. A lot of that choice consists of the fediverse, with different scopes and goals, but some is just basic and mainstream places I'd forgotten because of the convenience that Reddit seemed to bring.

    Today, I'm finally having actual conversations with people in the communities I choose to interact with, rather than just reading through the witty chains of comments.

    I know that Reddit means different things to different people, but to me, it has lost its meaning long ago, and it's only with the protest that I managed to kick the habit of going there for basically nothing. As surprising as it is, the whole thing lead me to enjoy my online life much more, and actually engage with the topics on the old, deeper level of fun, rather than just being exposed to an absurd amount of things, each pretty shallow and uninspired.

    SirD_P,
    SirD_P avatar

    thanks for your view and experience .. It's the same for me .. enjoyment and engagement were definitely lacking whilst on reddit for me too.
    I quite insta for that same reason (brainless scroller) , twitter well cuz Musk 'nuff said.
    been lurking on mastodon and [ matrix ] a while figuring out where to go next but finally feel to have found my home here on kbin so a big thanks to @ernest

    Very_Bad_Janet,

    I'm on IG specifically for certain info. I can get lost in the scrolling there but I don't comment or really engage with anyone. It's just a resource for me. I prefer text driven forums for conversations. So kbin and Tildes have me. Im finding them more satisfying than Reddit for sure.

    fosho,

    i'm not sure how this will fare, but i would often try to participate in a discussion that was more than a few hours old and by then no one was bothering to continue the conversation. no one seemed to want to bother after some very short amount of time which was disheartening. i'm optimistic that the people who have migrated here are higher in sincerity and passion rather than just looking to get early comment karma.

    Very_Bad_Janet,

    Absolutely agree. I've not only created a Kbin account, I also now have a Tildes account, and I'm actually using my Mastodon and Substack accounts. I'm lurking some old sites I hadn't really visited in over a decade (Metafilter, Fark). Im also checking out other forums and microblogs. I'm having real conversations and finding meaningful links (as opposed to reposted TikToks and memes). It really feels like the Internet i used to love.

    livus,
    livus avatar

    I feel this way too.

    Ironically, connecting with others on these non reddit sites is making me ferl more in touch with myself.

    Like, thinking before typing, and having better conversations, but also in terms of thinking more actively about what content I want to engage with.

    GhostMagician,

    I even started going to forums. I didn't find much activity on the fediverse for episode or Manga specific chapters, so I ended up going to Mal to actually see the discussions going on there instead of reddit like I usually did.

    sj_zero,

    I've been on this part of the fediverse for years (via lotide rather than lemmy or kbin, but I've been here), and kbin itself is incredibly new. I'd never heard of it more than about 3 months ago, and I'm constantly on the watch for new stuff because I always believed this part of the fediverse had huge potential.

    Honestly, considering how new it is, kbin is shockingly good. Go back and look at reddit 3 months into development!

    adonis,
    adonis avatar

    Honestly, considering how new it is, kbin is shockingly good.

    Indeed!

    exscape,
    exscape avatar

    I absolutely agree! There are some fairly big issues at the moment, but considering this just started out it's indeed shockingly good.

    My main worry is about the federation issues I'm spotting both on Kbin and Lemmy, such as threads/comments/edits not propagating properly.
    I created a post on lemmy.ml via lemmy.world yesterday (as I couldn't access the community at all via Kbin), and even now 18 hours later I can still see the unedited version (with incorrect information in it) show up on other instances.

    Hopefully this is either just growing pains from being overloaded, but if that's the case, I hope the software will be improved to not simply drop federated data when the sender or receiver is overloaded, but rather queue it up until both sender and receiver can transfer it.

    scamper,

    Missing replies has been a problem across fediverse for a while. There are some ways to mitigate it but they can be resource intensive. For example Akkoma fetches the missing replies when you open up a thread. It contacts the originating server's API (not ActivityPub) and requests the details for the thread. It works pretty well but I'm not sure it would scale for Lemmy/kbin which is going to be designed for huge threads.

    I hope a good solution is figured out and maybe even can be implemented by other software projects across fedi.

    spacedogroy,

    That's kind of how I feel about Lemmy. Given how much traffic has been received over the last few weeks, I'm impressed it continues to work as well as it does. Sure, there are problems, but no one's getting paid for this and federation makes it necessarily more complex to implement.

    Maybe working in webdev my expectations are much lower than they used to be.

    Ni,
    Ni avatar

    I don't know much about kbin or the fediverse's history so this is good to know. I also think kbin is pretty great, very usable, looks nice, teething problems have been minimal!

    oliver,
    @oliver@lemmy.ca avatar

    Corporations with billions in sales operate capitalist arbitrariness? 😎

    Volunteer developers who earn less than the minimum wage in donations and still haven't eliminated bugs after a week? 😡

    mitexleo,
    mitexleo avatar

    This ❤

    MrSebSin,

    Karens, choosing beggars, etc. treat them accordingly and ignore their shit. Thanks for continuing to work on this community!!!

    wr4th4,
    wr4th4 avatar

    I mean it's great to offer feedback. But I agree that anything close to some weird ultimatum on like, two people, for their own pet project is a bit much guys. I know we're all better than that!

    TechnologyClassroom,

    The moral of the story is to support projects that you might want to use in the future even if they are not finished yet before you need them. Mastodon and Lemmy have been around for years. When the mainstream alternative suddenly becomes lame, it isn't an emergency on the devs part.

    You can apply this to most alternatives. Support GIMP, Krita, and Inkscape if you are an artist using Adobe products. Support mixxx, audacity, and lmms if you are a DJ. Support LibreOffice if you use Microsoft Office.

    adonis,
    adonis avatar

    I agree on most of your examples, except GIMP... no... just no! Sorry, the software is acceptable at best, and the devs are resistant to UI/UX improvements/suggestions... so again.. nope

    TechnologyClassroom,

    People did try to improve it with Glimpse and that project closed because... it wasn't supported.

    BiggestPiggest,

    How can we help? Is running an instance helpful? Hire about a donation place for the existing servers?

    Badabinski,

    If you're on kbin or would like to support Ernest, there's always https://www.buymeacoffee.com/kbin

    what_is_a_name,

    Lemmy is open source. If a bug bothers you. Help fix it.

    kreynen,
    kreynen avatar

    So is Kbin. Both projects use the AGPL license, but Kbin is a PHP/Symfony based solution while Lemmy is primarily a Rust backend with a Typescript front end. If someone is going to run an instance or contribute to the code, they are likely going to choose the stack that they are most familiar with.

    With a lot of experience, the Kbin code is very approachable for me... but as other commenters have already said... whatever floats your boat.

    The Kbin and Lemmy projects aren't competing as much with each other as the ActivityPub driven communities are competing with the walled gardens.

    nate3D,

    I also think a lot of people either were not around to experience or simply have forgotten over time how unstable Reddit was in the beginning. This is already a much more feature-rich and stable platform than Reddit was in the beginning; we will get there!

    And now that I’m not doom-scrolling r/all I’ve actually been able to get back to my own personal projects :D

    Timwi,
    Timwi avatar

    I'm a hobby web programmer and I'm completely blown away by how smoothly this site runs, how well it scaled, how full-featured it is despite its youth, and how unbelievably dedicated the developer (ernest) is. I cannot possibly have a single complaint.

    In fact I've often thought about giving back by helping with the development. I'm just a little guy but maybe some little contributions help too. Unfortunately I'm just not very experienced with PHP.

    Flaky_Fish69,
    Flaky_Fish69 avatar

    To be honest, I'm surprised at how quickly kbin/Lemmy/etc stepped up to the challenge. Like. no. they just onboarded how many new people from reddit? and... oh noes...sometimes I had to refresh a few times?

    Just one question... where's the donuts and coffee? I was told there'd be donuts and coffee.

    brownpaperbag,
    brownpaperbag avatar

    I think we're actually buying coffee and donuts for Ernest.

    Flaky_Fish69,
    Flaky_Fish69 avatar

    well... yeah. And they certainly deserve it. I was just, uh, going to make sure it was of the quality donuts. None of the day-old-gas-station donuts. honest.

    wave_walnut,
    wave_walnut avatar

    I want developers to enjoy development. A product created with joy may make user joyful.

    Gamers_Mate,

    The site has made a lot of progress in the time it has been an official project. The only bug I have had so far is nsfw stuff from other instances showing up. I bet this is one of the priorities at the moment.

    adonis,
    adonis avatar

    Actually, I'd love having that bug 😅

    ernest,
    ernest avatar

    Yes, it is.
    https://codeberg.org/Kbin/kbin-core/issues/412

    ulu_mulu,
    @ulu_mulu@lemmy.world avatar

    There are also some bugs that don't manifest when a few users use a software, they do when there's massive load, making things even more complicated.

    I'm not a dev but I work in IT, entitlement in some users is baffling to say the least, especially when it's about stuff people give out for free.

    Very_Bad_Janet,

    We all have to remember that each instance is either brand new or relatively young. I'm on kbin.social, which is run by one dude, @ernest, and before the big Reddit exodus i think kbin.social had something like 30 active users. It's remarkable what he's building here.

    ulu_mulu,
    @ulu_mulu@lemmy.world avatar

    Absolutely! I'm on lemmy.world, there were less than 500 users when I joined 2 weeks ago, now there are 38K, crazy growth, both devs and admins are doing a fantastic job.

    0xpr03,

    another part that I know from personal experience: you made something new, kinda tiny, not 100% there - you probably didn't expect this to really take off (see fediverse in general), so you don't go all the way to fix UX problems or annoying things - because your stuff may not ever be used by more than those few hundred people (which is a lot already for hobby projects), it may even die out in two years

    and then the bomb drops and you have random users trying to use your side project

    imagine linux would get adopted overnight by a few thousand windows users that didn't like the windows 11 migration..

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