I started on kbin.social with this account, then moved out to kbin.cafe to try to avoid overloading the flagship instance and help out with decentralization. Then the admin went inactive, so I fled to kbin.run. This is active and I am satisfied, but it is also running Mbin, a fork of Kbin. I’d like to try regular Kbin again, but I don’t want to go to the flagship instance and be yet another person concentrated there, only further centralizing the Fediverse when it was probably supposed to be decentralized. Is there a known instance with an active mod?
I also posted this already to kbinMeta through kbin.run but got very few responses, so I decided to check kbin.social in case something happened with the federation. It didn’t show up when searching by New on kbin.social, so here I am, dragging out the old kbin.social account and posting again.
Since Kbin was still at what Ernest refers to as a proof of concept stage when the project reached peak popularity, and I think at the time (and probably still) it was really not particularly easy to run an instance of. That’s probably part of the reason why so many of the early Kbin instances died off.
According to FediDB, the biggest instances other than kbin.social are Karab.in and Kbin.cafe. Karab.in is run by Ernest who also runs kbin.social - it’s just the Polish instance. As developments are happening fast (see !kbinDevlog), it’s to be expected that instances not run by Ernest lag a little bit behind in development.
It seems the administrator of kbin.cafe is @barista. I’m not sure how actively maintained it is.
Considering the fast pace of development, I think it makes sense for the time being to either use kbin.social or an mbin instance.
I want to say thanks for helping but I sort of feel you ignored the body of my post where I say I fled kbin.cafe for its inactive admin. Just checked now and they are still inactive. On the other hand I have also missed things while reading before. I guess I’ll be staying where I am at until a new Kbin instance opens up ¬_¬ I feel very odd about using Mbin given some of the drama I have seen occur over the split (my admin on kbin.run did not get involved in any of the drama for what it is worth, though), and having gotten no say in the switch, but I also appreciate the decentralization of the Fediverse and refuse to get comfy in the flagship because then I’ll never move and will be part of the problem keeping it centralized. Thanks anyways.
Oh shoot - I read your post, but then I just skimmed it again after checking fedidb and lost track of the context.
I think the point still hold that kbin is not at a point in its development where it makes too much sense for people to open independent kbin instances. By the way I understood it, mbin seeks to patch some of these problems, while the kbin development is focusing on improving the infrastructure on a deeper level. The drama is a bit silly, but I think forking is not always a bad thing and the differences in development between kbin (deep changes to the code base) and mbin (patches to make things work) are enough to justify parallell developments for the time being.
It’s also worth noting that not a single new kbin instance has been created since September this year - I think for now you’re unfortunately not likely to find an actively maintained instance beside the two run by Ernest.
There’s a new server worth checking out now, in connection to the !interstellar app: kbin.earth!
Worth checking out.
