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Flippin' eck, Tucker!

I do feel more than a little sympathy for @ernest.

In January he decided to try to build an ActivityPub based messageboard system.

A month ago he decided the code was stable enough that he could release the first alpha version, and stood up kbin.social to demonstrate it.

It attracted quite a few users per day and proved that it might just be an exciting new entry into the Fediverse.

And then Reddit's admins did their thing, and suddenly thousands, millions, tens of millions of users are looking for a new home. And although a few other brave souls have also created kbin instances in the last few days, there's simply not enough capacity to even begin to cope with all the demand.

#kbin #Fediverse #RedditMigration #Reddit

33 comments
Baloo Uriza

@losttourist Meanwhile the Reddit crowd probably rejects this reasonable request...

Flta

@BalooUriza @losttourist I am from Reddit. Kbin can take it’s time. I’ll hangout on Mastodon for now.

Spaceman

@flta

Mastodon isn’t to bad, been on here a few days so I see the potential

J Miller

@losttourist @ernest

I feel like we are just shy of the point where a tech journalist breathlessly profiles founder Kay Bin.

Flippin' eck, Tucker!

@JMMaok @ernest there's a huge opportunity for someone to get Kay Bin and John Mastodon together to see if they want to get their systems to interact with each other. And that Lemmy character. I bet he has some great ideas too.

Tim Chambers

@losttourist @JMMaok @ernest

I love that there is now head cannon linking Kay Bin and John Mastodon. Tabloid like rumors are sure to ensue.

#kbin #mastodon

Cyber Yuki

@tchambers @losttourist @JMMaok @ernest

imagining 80s TV show :thinkhappy:

Starring... Kurt Russell as John Mastodon

Matthew Broderick as Kay Bin

...and Lemmy as itself :blobrat:

Zak8022 :thisisfine:

@flippac @losttourist @JMMaok @ernest I can't stop thinking about how now we just need a "Carl” to go along with Lemmy (Lenny). 🤣

Woods By The Sea

@JMMaok @losttourist @ernest

Fox chyron: "Reddit Attack: Where Is International Terrorist Kay Bin Laden?"

knova
@losttourist @fediversereport @ernest Agreed. The upside: I’ve seen a lot more dev attention to kbin and Lemmy so hopefully issues do get addressed sooner. Not to mention donations have gone up to those projects.
Antti Peltola

@losttourist @ernest
Hopefully #Reddit posters are less shitty than #Twitter posters who don't mind seeing the world burn if they can plug their newest book for the masses.

Jürgen Hubert

@losttourist @ernest I should check if he has a donation bin once the site is online again.

Nicodemus

@losttourist @ernest Sounds like cloud infrastructure is gonna be needed to keep up with the demand. Quick provision some servers and get them out there hosting. Drop in adsense to leverage the traffic to pay for more hosting.

Flippin' eck, Tucker!

@NicodemusB @ernest I believe kbin is already in the cloud (Hetzner) - I think the problem is that Ernest has provisioned the largest capability server they have and it's still not enough.

I'm guessing the current work being done is to enable it be horizontally scaled rather than just vertically.

Nicodemus

@losttourist @ernest That makes sense - I didn't consider that the software itself may not be scalable. It is pretty new on the scene after all.

ティージェーグレェ

@losttourist @ernest

Requirements:
"PHP version: 8.1 or higher
GD or Imagemagick php extension
NGINX / Apache / Caddy
PostgreSQL
Redis (optional)
Mercure (optional)
RabbitMQ (optional)"

I know that @grunfink's snac isn't trying to solve the same thing, but I can't help but wonder if its svelte source in ANSIC might handle a larger influx of usage better given it is doubtlessly a lot more memory and CPU efficient than the above?

Kolmogorov complexity reduction is, generally speaking: a win.

@losttourist @ernest

Requirements:
"PHP version: 8.1 or higher
GD or Imagemagick php extension
NGINX / Apache / Caddy
PostgreSQL
Redis (optional)
Mercure (optional)
RabbitMQ (optional)"

I know that @grunfink's snac isn't trying to solve the same thing, but I can't help but wonder if its svelte source in ANSIC might handle a larger influx of usage better given it is doubtlessly a lot more memory and CPU efficient than the above?

Flippin' eck, Tucker!

@teajaygrey @ernest@kbin.social @grunfink You're probably correct. However my original post was pointing out that until just a few days ago this was a hobbiest project that was running perfectly well on a small virtual server.

In the last couple of days it's been put through probably the most extreme end-user beta-testing process imaginable.

I don't want to put words into @ernest@karab.in's mouth but I expect that tuning for performance and scalability was way, way down on the TODO list compared to getting some of the basic features running. And rewriting the whole thing using a more performant stack - well generally that's something that happens a couple of years into a successful project's lifetime, not a few months after the very first commit!

@teajaygrey @ernest@kbin.social @grunfink You're probably correct. However my original post was pointing out that until just a few days ago this was a hobbiest project that was running perfectly well on a small virtual server.

In the last couple of days it's been put through probably the most extreme end-user beta-testing process imaginable.

ティージェーグレェ

@losttourist Yeah, I seem to recall after the dreaded birdsite migration of Eternal September 2022, event someone (was it @Gargron or @SDF I am forgetting now) spun up a Mastodon instance on some hardware with 72GB of RAM.

Which, is still about half what blade servers had that I was administering circa 2015, but capacity planning for sudden influxes isn't easy, even with budgets and paid ops teams.

It's a lot more challenging with nascent hobby projects.

Maybe we need a new term for the variation of slashdot effect concordent with some surveillance capitalism SaaS implosion? I get the impression, they're only going to continue with more frequency, both because: more people are waking up, and the libre/free open source alternatives are continuing to improve!

@ernest@kbin.social @grunfink @ernest@karab.in

@losttourist Yeah, I seem to recall after the dreaded birdsite migration of Eternal September 2022, event someone (was it @Gargron or @SDF I am forgetting now) spun up a Mastodon instance on some hardware with 72GB of RAM.

Which, is still about half what blade servers had that I was administering circa 2015, but capacity planning for sudden influxes isn't easy, even with budgets and paid ops teams.

newsorpigal

@losttourist @ernest

What's the deal with kbin? lemmy is pretty good and they seem to be scaling ok.

Flippin' eck, Tucker!

@newsorpigal @ernest Lemmy has been around for quite a while and there are many instances of it.

kbin is still in an alpha phase, you can see from the (single) developer's roadmap here kbin.social/m/fediverse/t/511/

>

"Currently, I am at stage 1/2/3."

Where stage 3 is basically "get an alpha release working".

Stage 7 was going to be "Prepare for stable release" and I think he expected to get there maybe around the end of this year.

And then all of a sudden, the whole of Reddit decides to register for an account on his small, very-early prototype server!

@newsorpigal @ernest Lemmy has been around for quite a while and there are many instances of it.

kbin is still in an alpha phase, you can see from the (single) developer's roadmap here kbin.social/m/fediverse/t/511/

>

"Currently, I am at stage 1/2/3."

Where stage 3 is basically "get an alpha release working".

newsorpigal

@losttourist @ernest

I just don't see the point of kbin when lemmy works so well. I guess friendly competition is good for both.

Flippin' eck, Tucker!

@newsorpigal @ernest Quite apart from the ethical issues many people have with Lemmy, I found its user interface really unintuitive, whereas the moment I tried to use kbin it just clicked with me.

newsorpigal

@losttourist @ernest

I'm not an American or live in the Western world, so I guess I don't get the controversy or the drama around Lemmy. The people in Lemmy seems like an ordinary bunch of people.

Flippin' eck, Tucker!

@sabbatical @newsorpigal @ernest I believe the developers, and so the original Lemmy instance, were Stalinist-style Communists and were very quick on the banhammer for anyone criticising their political worldview. In particular banning anyone who took Ukraine's side when the war started last year.

Obviously many good software projects have been developed by people with all sorts of questionable political views, but the Fediverse has a long memory and a lot of other servers distrust all Lemmy instances because of that.

@sabbatical @newsorpigal @ernest I believe the developers, and so the original Lemmy instance, were Stalinist-style Communists and were very quick on the banhammer for anyone criticising their political worldview. In particular banning anyone who took Ukraine's side when the war started last year.

Obviously many good software projects have been developed by people with all sorts of questionable political views, but the Fediverse has a long memory and a lot of other servers distrust all Lemmy instances...

newsorpigal

@losttourist @sabbatical @ernest

That's the beauty of federation, right? If you don't like the moderation, you can just go to another instance.

newsorpigal

@sabbatical @losttourist @ernest

I don't know. People keep saying there is one, but I don't see it.

The Real Grunfink
Does this thing really support ActivityPub? It doesn't even seem to respond to webfinger queries correctly (it returns a bunch of HTML and JS and gives a 403 status. Does it want webfinger queries to be HTTP signed?).

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