Kbin has seen a staggering amount of growth in the past few weeks, and with it a bunch of discussion about issues and bugs.
Constructive criticism will help make kbin even greater, but i wanted to take some time to appreciate how great of an app it has been to use these past few weeks, and to the sole developer @ernest for all the long hours put in to keep things running smoothly.
Keep up the great work!
I don’t think that that really collides with @Otome-chan’s point, which is how much power Ernest has. She’s saying that Ernest can’t really do what spez is doing with Reddit. Spez controls Reddit in a way that Ernest cannot control kbin, or more-broadly, the Fediverse. Spez could simply deny access to Reddit to third party clients.
There are people who are going to be writing guides and packaging the software. There are a number of kbin instances that Ernest does not personally control, not to mention compatible software. The bar will continue to lower, but it is already low enough that if Ernest cannot “turn off” kbin if there are sufficient people who want to use it.
The overwhelming majority of people in the world cannot deploy or maintain an email server either, if you asked them to do so off-the-cuff. But there are many people running email servers around the world, and many people who can and would do so, were the need to arise. No one company “owns” email and can simply deny access to it because of that.
The point is that kbin and lemmy and such operate as email servers have, or Usenet servers, or IRC. The source code to servers is publicly-available and could be forked, if the need arises. Many different organizations run their own servers. And no one person can deny access to the system.
Right. so while the majority of users may struggle due to the technical nature, the reality is that currently there appears to be 75 different kbin instances. meaning if this (1) instance has problems, you can simply move to one of the other 74 instances and keep using kbin as normal. Even if ernest decided to 100% shut down kbin.social, those other instances still exist and he can’t touch them.
Also, @Aesthesiaphilia, it looks like some provider just announced that they’re providing managed kbin instances (like, they set it up, handle updates and such) starting at $10/month.
https://kbin.social/m/kbinMeta/t/131142/We-are-launching-KBIN-fully-managed-service
My guess is that there will be other providers.
That isn’t necessary to achieve what Otome-chan is going for, but will probably bring down the bar for people who want to have full control over their site but don’t want to deal with the technical side or want to only deal with a limited amount of it.
I agree, I was going on a bit of a tangent because people keep saying things like “you can just host your own instance”.