Currently, on the main instance, people have created 40191 accounts (+214 marked as deleted). I don’t know how many are active because I don’t monitor it, but once again, I greet all of you here :) In recent days, the traffic on the website has been overwhelming. It’s definitely too much for the basic docker-compose setup, primarily designed for development use. I was aware of the possible consequences of the situation happening on Reddit, but I assumed that most people would migrate to one of the Lemmy instances, which already has an established position. I hoped that a few stray enthusiasts would find their way to kbin ;)
The first step was to upscale the VPS to a higher version (66.91EUR). It quickly turned out that it wasn’t enough. I had to enable CF protection just to keep the website responsive, but the response times were still very slow. At this stage, the instance was practically unusable. The next step was a full migration to a dedicated server (100EUR, the current hardware). It can be done relatively quickly, so it resulted in a 5-minute technical break. Despite the much higher parameters, it didn’t get any better. It became clear that the problem didn’t lie there. I’m really frustrated when it comes to server administration. That was the moment when I started looking for help. Or rather, it found me.
A couple days ago I wrote about how kbin qualified for the Fast Forward program. To be honest, I did it out of pure curiosity and completely forgot because a lot was happening during that time. During the biggest fire incident, Hannah ( @haubles ) reached out with a proposal to help. I outlined the situation (in short: the server is dying, I don’t even know what I need, help! ;). She quickly connected us with Vlad ( @vvuksan ) and Renaud ( @renchap ). I was probably too tired because I don’t know if the whole operation lasted 60 minutes or 6 hours, but after a series of precise questions and getting an understanding of the situation, the guys themselves adjusted the entire job. I love working with experts, and it’s not often that you come across individuals so well-versed in the fediverse. Thanks to Hannah’s kindness, we will be staying there a bit longer. Currently, fastly.com handles the caching layer and processes images. Hence those cool moving thumbnails ;)
Things were going well at that point. I could disable Cloudflare protection. Probably thanks to that, many of you are here today, and we got to know each other a bit better :) However, even then, when I tried to enable federation, the server would stop working.
Around the same time, Piotr ( @piotrsikora ), whom I already knew from the Polish fediverse, contacted me. He is the administrator of the Polish Mastodon instance pol.social, operates within the ftdl.pl foundation, and specializes in administering applications with a very similar tech stack. I made the decision to grant him server access. It only took him a few moments, and he came back to me with a few tips that allowed us to enable federation. In the following days, there was more of it, and we managed to reach the current level. I think it’s not too bad.
Nevertheless, managing the instance has taken up about 60% or more of my time so far, which prevents me from fully focusing on current tasks. That’s why I would like to collaborate with Piotr and hand over full care of the server to him. Piotr will also take care of the security side. Now I have to take this much more seriously. We still need to work out the terms of cooperation, but I want you to know the direction I intend to pursue.
We also need to migrate to a new environment because one server will sooner or later become insufficient. This time, I want to be prepared for it. This may be associated with transient issues with the website in the coming days.
The next two updates will still be about project funding (I still can’t believe what happened) and moderation. The following ones will be more technical, with descriptions of changes and what contributors are doing on Codeberg. I would like to be here more often, but not as an admin, just as myself.
Thank you all for this.
P.S. In private messages, I also received numerous offers of help that I didn’t even have a chance to read and respond to. You are the best!
hi all, you can buy ernest a cup of coffee aka give him some cash for his incredibly hard work! https://www.buymeacoffee.com/kbin
Ernest should set up a patreon. I’d pay a monthly sub to him for this great website.
It’s hard ot believe it’s only a month or two old.
I hoped that a few stray enthusiasts would find their way to kbin
They did. “A few” as a portion of the whole, where the whole is much larger than you ever expected it would be.
One thing I have learned in my own technical career is that you can’t do everything. Even if there was enough time in a day for you to do everything, you can’t know everything, at least not sufficiently enough to be most effective. You have to depend on other experts, and delegate to them what you are not qualified to do. This requires a pretty high level of trust, and makes it so that you need to develop people management skills.
Lots of technical people are short on people management skills. I don’t know where you sit on that spectrum, but you may need to consider bringing on an “overseer,” kind of like a project manager, to keep tabs on all of the technical resources involved - yourself included. This will help ensure that concerns are prioritized appropriately, and that communication and messaging about those priorities are consistent and clear.
I’ve been in that kind of position, and I take a bit of pride in my use of words. I’m happy to give any advice you like.
I sense an opportunity here: managed hosting of Fediverse services. I don’t mean a managed host where you can install/run the services. I mean a top-to-bottom setup, management, backup, upgrades, monitoring, etc. so the only thing you need to do is administer the community. I’d love to set up several Fediverse services for my local community, and I know there is an audience that would also love that, but I also know I do not want to invest the time it takes to manage the technical side of that.
Having easier to set up instances would help in relieving the pressure from the more popular current instances. We’re starting to see those hosting options come on line for some of the services, but not fast enough for my liking.
Love it. I’m sure there are some spam-evaluation services up or starting soon that use AI, but that will also soon be important as we become more of a target.
I’ve been thinking recently that machine learning models could be used as a first-line defense for moderation, e.g. identify obvious spam/violations, but also identify borderline cases that require human intervention. So you could reduce the burden on moderators, and perhaps even shield them from some of the more extreme things, although I think those tend to be more image/video which I imagine will be a lot harder to really effectively harness ML for.
Check out Grow Your Own Services. It doesn’t have everything (e.g., kbin, Lemmy, Calckey) but it does offer what I think you’re looking for with a number of the other more popular services.
Thanks! Hadn’t come across that particular site yet. Unfortunately, still the same list of hosts. I’m really looking for Frendica/Mastodon and maybe Pixelfed and Writefreely. So, basically all the ones that aren’t yet available in a turn-key solution.
Like I said, slower than I’d like. But I’m sure we’ll get there.
@bourbonmakesitbetter We’re a small independent “mom & pop” managed hosting provider focused on Mastodon and we’re currently testing out kbin, send us an email at keith[@]thunderhost[.]com with the size of your community and we might be able to assist
Thanks. I need to talk to a few other people first, but my current hypothesis is that Frendica is a better fit. The target audience is “old” (i.e. my age) and really likes Facebook. Some (most?) of them don’t even know what Reddit is. I’ll need to demo kbin for a few people to see if we think the idea has legs.
@bourbonmakesitbetter elest.io provide a service like this kbin should be added in a few days
Something like this already exists for Mastodon (check out masto.host, and there are also a few others). But a service supporting all fediverse softwares would be cool.
@LollerCorleone it’s not online yet, but Chris Trottier is developing spacehost with that purpose iirc.
@haubles @vvuksan @renchap @piotrsikora @ernest @Nougat @bourbonmakesitbetter
Hell yes, ernest. Keep up the momentum, stay humble of your shortcomings, and don’t burn yourself out.
We all love this community you developed, and hopefully we can attract the kinds of people who are as open, humble, courageous, and intelligent as you seem to have gravitating towards you in your personal and professional life.
@ernest @vvuksan @renchap @piotrsikora Thank you, Ernest 💞 we’re so glad we can help and support you, and the project.
It’s cool to see renchap helping out here in addition to his work with mastodon.social! The amount of cross-pollination and coordination within the fediverse is so cool to see.
@MeowdyPardner @haubles fascinating reading comments like this and having to figure out the context for “here” (as I read it via Ivory with my mastodon.social account)
One of the things that will have to evolve in our discourse online in the fediverse is the distributed nature of “here”