VulcanSphere

ernest, 7 months ago

I've already discussed some of the reasons on Matrix, but today, I'll try to briefly explain what's going on here. Due to the increasing popularity of kbin, infrastructure changes, the cost of maintaining instances, and development-related priorities, I wasn't able to deliver the milestones on time, which are crucial for project funding (even though I'm really close to achieving that). I wasn't prepared for this and didn't anticipate such a delay in terms of the savings I allocated for all of this. The servers are still being maintained with the donations that came through buymycoffe, but there are additional costs like living expenses and other obligations. So, I had to take up temporary work to ensure the continued development of the project.

This year has also brought many other unexpected personal problems, as I mentioned earlier. Now, another one has been added to that list – I had to end my marriage and a fifteen-year-long relationship. While it's not a sudden decision, it's never easy, but it has turned out to be more challenging than I anticipated. Not just for me, and this time, I want to dedicate as much time as necessary to conclude the matter properly. I had to learn how to do many things from scratch, set up a new work environment, establish daily routines, and more.

So, why all these deadlines and promises?
It was probably the only way for me to accomplish at least the absolute minimum. There's a lot of my own code waiting for review on my local branches, but it's genuinely hard for me to push myself to it for now. The infrastructure also requires fine-tuning, and Piotr is helping me with that. And the days are passing by very quickly.

However, I'm almost ready to continue on this journey, so you can expect that in the near future, there will be a banner with information and the update date of the instance and release. After that, we will work on avoiding such longer development downtimes in case of my absence.

@a@kbin.social @RealM @Pamasich

e569668, 7 months ago

I don't know of every instance of course, but from the general purpose ones the order of up-to-date from most to least at the time of posting would be something like: kbin.run, fedia.io, kbin.cafe, artemis.camp (specific API branch), kbin.social.

But there's also other considerations. fedia has a double post/comment issue and a low amount of 500s. Artemis has been giving me a lot of 500s, can't upvote anymore (just reloads the page), commenting doesn't always federate. Many instance admins seem to have disappeared since 3 months ago. I'm not sure what life is like on instances I'm not actively using so there might be issues unknown to me.

Edit: the keys that I look for are localization / ui changes. "more" dropdown now has "more from domain" on updated instances. The UI for the sidebar is different, and most recently the footer is differently styled. There's also the federation list of instances page in the footer now.

debounced, 7 months ago (edited 7 months ago)

i update kbin.run to stay in sync with the most recent commit to the dev branch on a regular basis, although the update frequency is much lower now compared to 4 months ago... it's a "bare metal" install (no docker), so i made a very simple shell script to update it. half the time no one notices until they refresh the page or get inadvertently logged out due to a backend cache getting cleared. you're welcome to try it out if you'd like.

(edit): i've migrated kbin.run's codebase to mbin, the security updates alone are enough for me to make this change since kbin's development has stalled significantly. it's a fork of kbin, so 100% compatible (for now).