I almost feel like it’s October last year, when I pled for improvement on all fronts regarding the Kbin development strategy. Now it seems development has ceased once again and there hasn’t been chat on the matrix channels for over a week. Update: that’s two weeks now (including his blog) and over a month of no visible Development.
Update: According to https://fedidb.org/software/kbin there are a grand total of 29 active kbin servers. Of 61,489 users on all instances, 59,962 of these are on kbin.social. To those users I would like to say that should kbin.social fail, there will always be Mbin servers to fall back to.
What is going on?
We can only speculate, based on what has happened in the past. Several mind bending theories can come to mind.
Perhaps Ernest (and whatever team still exists) is continuing development in the background, not publicly sharing his work on codeberg. He may have had enough of all the criticism and wants to do it his way without interference. This may sound a bit far fetched, but he’s admitted in the past that he prefers concentrating on coding over communicating with his community.
Other theories could involve something bad involving Ernest personally, let us hope that is not the case. Ernest is a great person, nobody would wish anything bad upon him.
But in reality, speculation doesn’t change anything, we can only deal with the situation at hand.
I believe waiting for a new release comes with too many risks in the current setting. Nobody can monitor the code during progress or do any testing for themselves while development is ongoing (assuming it is). If anything, what’s coming next? Your guess is as good as mine.
A new version may well break compatibility between Kbin and Mbin. Mbin is trying to stay compatible with Kbin for as long as reasonably possible. However, staying compatible with something that is out of sight and out of one’s control is challenging, if not impossible. A break in compatibility would mean there will be no easy way to migrate to Mbin after an upgrade for Kbin users who have patiently waited for one, should they want to.
I would not want the future of my instance to be dependent of such a level of uncertainty, now or in the future.
My point exactly, to instance operators, instead switch to Mbin, now that it’s still possible
According to https://fedidb.org/software/kbin there are a grand total of 29 active kbin servers. Of 61,489 users on all instances, 59,962 of these are on kbin.social. Monthly active users being 4,775/4,938
kbin.social, as you are aware, is owned and run by @earnest.
In other words I am not sure who you are addressing here. >99% of kbin users are on a single server which has little chance of switching to mbin.
Why don’t you just go and enjoy the platform of your choice? This performative misery is so strange.
Correct. I am addressing the admins of those 28 servers
That’s kind of worrying then. I am also addressing them to remember there’s always going to be Mbin servers to fall back to in case kbin.social fails