@Ernest has pushed an update which allows users to request ownership/moderation of abandoned magazines. Ghost/abandoned magazines were fairly prevalent after the initial wave of hype due to users either squatting magazine names or becoming inactive for other reasons. Now is your chance to get involved, if you were waiting to do...
Instead you left people who trusted you dangling, only sporadically feeding them promises you would never fulfill.
Now, you see, this is the part that I as an uninvolved observer who's just now catching up on the happenings do not get. Promises that were never fullfilled?
How long has or hasn't this actually been an issue? Because from what I can see looking at the codeberg commits, it seems like development stalled for how long, like a month or so?
I totally get not wanting to be left hanging and having some answers and pathway for how contributions can happen. But as you also agree on, I also get real life being more important and getting in the way sometimes. And in that sense, being out of it for a month or so does not exactly seem like an earth-shattering amount, even if it's annoying when it happens to be the project lead and not much can happen.
I just can't help but feel like all of this has been pretty impatient and premature, which also makes it hard for me to really understand the point of the fork, even if I can relate to the basic rationale behind it. But then again, I have no knowledge of the direct going ons and communications between the contributors and the events that led to this. So there might be a lot I'm just not getting.
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.
Today, a technical server malfunction occurred. Unfortunately, it wasn't the planned update yet. The upcoming one will definitely be much shorter ;)...
This week, I've been dealing with cleaning up instances from spam. Several hundred accounts were removed, along with several thousand posts - these were massive operations. It's possible that due to the volume of requests, other federated instances hit rate limits. I see that some of them are still in the queue with a "fail" status. I will gradually resend them after some time. Along with the update of kbin.social and the first release of kbin, new modeartion options will be available, including spam blocking (such as global blocking domains), a new reporting panel for moderators, and improved federation between instances. I will also address abandoned instances and ensure that each one has at least a few active moderators. I know how urgent this issue is, and it's my top priority. I just need a bit more time as Piotr and I are preparing for the update.
To those genuinely interested in moderating (kbin.social)
@Ernest has pushed an update which allows users to request ownership/moderation of abandoned magazines. Ghost/abandoned magazines were fairly prevalent after the initial wave of hype due to users either squatting magazine names or becoming inactive for other reasons. Now is your chance to get involved, if you were waiting to do...
Mbin: A kbin fork that promises to never review PRs before merging them (kbin.social)
Somebody who was previously active on the kbin codeberg repo has left that to make a fork of kbin called mbin....
So, what's the status on the update? (edit: ernest responded) (kbin.social)
I don't want to hurry anyone, just asking what's up, if there's been any trouble or anything....
We're back (kbin.social)
Today, a technical server malfunction occurred. Unfortunately, it wasn't the planned update yet. The upcoming one will definitely be much shorter ;)...
Spam from unmoderated communities/magazines
Both !infosec and !science are being spammed constantly with opioid ads and other non-sense....