1y ago

Is Kbin dying? I wanted to address the deleted thread and provide some insight into the current situation.

/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.

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60 comments

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.

60 comments