Also, this appears to be very kbin.social specific at the moment at least. I went around and checked kbin.cafe, kbin.melroy.org, fedia.io; disabled federation on each but all of them had their own domains shown for local posts. It seems only kbin.social is currently stripping domains from new posts made to kbin.social, causing the inability for any kbin.social users to view those posts if they block any domain (to clarify, this affects kbin.social posts FOR kbin.social users. You won't be able to see this issue from a remote instance, as the posts do show as the domain kbin.social over on say, fedia.io. It's only on kbin.social that posts to kbin.social are losing the domain)
Basically, this was fixed in the source code a month ago, but kbin.social itself (the only instance experiencing this issue) doesn't have the fix loaded in yet.
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.
Microblogs and threads are actually different activities. It's not currently possible to migrate them, and I'm unsure of the feasibility of doing so.
To delve into ActivityPub a bit, there are "actors" (like magazines and users) and "activities" (things the actors do). A posted thread is an activity of type "Page", but a posted microblog is an activity of type "Note". They then get stored in the database of whatever instance you are on, apparently as type "Link" as far as I can tell querying my SQL database. Still trying to figure out where microblogs go and how/whether they're different, how different things are stored...
But basically to promote or migrate a microblog to a thread, somehow the actual type of the posting would have to be changed.