I had some minor turbulence in my private life from which I'm slowly emerging. I have partially stabilized my life situation in various aspects. I hope this will help me smoothly return to old habits, maintain consistency, and keep you updated on what specifically is happening in the project.
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.
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.
Sounds like a lot of personal problems, wish you all the best with them!
Regarding the funding, do you think you can set up an alternative way of donating that accepts other payment options like PayPal? Personally I'm not using a credit card, which is the only payment option one can use on your buymeacoffee.
Oh, it seems to support PayPal only when the recipient uses PayPal as the payment processor. Is what the FAQ says. In which case PayPal is required, not just an option. TIL
The mechanism to delete your account isn't yet working and Ernest needs to manually do a bunch of stuff to make it happen, so it's not so much an "approval" as it is a notification to Ernest that he needs to do something.
As an added bonus, you can also use the https://kbin.social/d/[instance domain here] scheme to block entire domains, if you find that they include content you don't want to see in your feed.
But I get it, without an official API, it's a lot of work to get one going. I just refuse to use Lemmy, so I'm committed on getting a Kbin app ASAP. We're just about to have alpha.1 build ready and it's pretty darn usable.
EDIT: me not going w Lemmy was due to devs. I still think it’s a viable platform for the fediverse, especially with all the instances out there besides theirs (and being open source). Kbin being completely separated just felt like the right choice for me when picking between the two.
I think in part it's that a few Lemmy communities are extremely active / almost spammy and there's no algorithm filtering how much content you get from each place. In the "All" view, most of the content I see comes from the same couple of Lemmy "meme" communities. So it's no wonder most of the content I'm seeing comes from Lemmy when almost all of it comes from two specific communities which are basically meme factories. If I filter those out, there's suddenly a much bigger variety of content from all around and on my "Subscribed" tab I can see plenty of activity from Kbin communities.
[Issue] Another domain with issues when subscribing: @lemm.ee. Also redirects to a 50x error page and subscribing still works for the account despite the error.
This seems to already be implemented and probably coming once Ernest is able to finish the update. You might be able to find other instances that are already featuring this.
Like, I saw strings regarding this when contributing to translations yesterday. Some setting in the sidebar's gear menu to toggle the position.
If you install KES and navigate to the setting Threads > Rearrange post order, you can dynamically change the position of the OP, the comments, the add comment box, and other elements and choose which place you want them to be in descending order. You can direct other questions to our magazine on /m/enhancement as well.
If it's really bugging you, you could put something like this in a GreaseMonkey script:
function move_comment_add() {
let comment_add = document.getElementById("comment-add");
let comments = document.getElementById("comments");
comments.insertAdjacentElement("beforebegin", comment_add);
}
move_comment_add();
Too many posts weren't federating with kbin so I had to make a lemmy account to avoid missing comments from non-kbin communities, so hopefully the federation issues get fixed at some point.
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