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ernest, 1 year 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 @RealM @Pamasich

ryan, 1 year ago

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.

Ernest, please don't be so hard on yourself. Deadlines slip, even for products formally released by companies, and this is more of a hobby frankly. I think what might help is less of a deadline and more of a roadmap - like, here are the major bullet point items we want to target for release by end of 2023, by end of Q1 2024, and sometimes those slip but then the roadmap can be revised.

I've been updating my own kbin instance pretty regularly, every couple of weeks, and I've seen things become more stable over time (less frustrations in upgrading, more features, etc). I'm quite happy with the progress so far. This project has grown so much in such a short time, and the fact that the kbin issues matrix is much quieter than it was speaks to the growing stability of the platform.

As far as kbin.social itself, I would agree with some other folks that you might need more volunteers on the actual instance administration and moderation front.

And as far as spam - email, the original federated messaging platform, still has that problem! Each email provider has to handle it on their own, using increasingly sophisticated methods, and they're still not perfect and it's been decades. Yes, spam is frustrating, but due to the nature of ActivityPub we will always be in an escalating war with spam. It will never be solved, only mitigated for a time.

Anyway, perhaps I've written too much here, but I have a ton of confidence in this project and also in you, and I hope you look back and see how much has been accomplished in a short amount of time, how much kbin.social has grown, and how the amount of other contributors indicates an overall great level of confidence in what you've created.