ernest
Working on /kbin
https://fedidb.org/software/kbin
- 25 Posts
- 57 Comments
2·10 months agoYou see, I don’t know how I would act now in hindsight. You have to take into consideration that, at the peak, hundreds of people willing to help appeared out of nowhere, people I didn’t know at all. By nature, I am rather distrustful and approach new relationships cautiously - I really need a lot of time to get to know another person well. It’s true that after some time, a certain structure began to take shape, but not everything is always as it seems at first glance - especially when so many strong personalities converge in one place. Perhaps it was a mistake that instead of addressing many things publicly, I tried to solve them in private conversations.
And you’re right, anyone who knows me a bit knows that I have trouble asking for help. Sometimes, I take too much on myself, which is not good in the long run. I’m working on it. But this time was something more. I promised to take care of things, and under normal circumstances, it would probably be easy for me because I have some experience in resolving such situations. But these were not normal circumstances. I realized this too late. I was just overwhelmed by real life. So many problems collapsed on me that I could never have anticipated. These were the worst months of my entire life. I don’t want to write too much about it or make excuses, but at some point, even getting out of bed or eating something became difficult. When I tried to get back to the project, the thought of the backlog and how many people I let down made me feel sick. That’s why I’m really glad to be where I am now. I can only apologize to you and try to fix some mistakes. I need to do it at my own pace. I want to clean up the mess, find my rhythm, and then engage in broader communication with people. I’m still recovering on my own.
What I did was indeed a bit malicious, but I believe it was the only way to achieve the intended effect. The fact that I really like you all should not mean that I will be uncritical of your work. I don’t want you to fully trust everything that comes from me - only in this way can we fully utilize the potential we have in developing the fediverse. Frontend errors are just a trivial matter; they can be quickly found and fixed. However, the situation is completely different when it comes to backend mechanics. Seemingly minor errors when I was developing karab.in made me undo them for weeks. With larger instances, there may not be a second chance. This is not a centralized system, you have to consider others above all. That’s why I am so sensitive to it and have so many doubts about making changes.
It’s not that I want to make things difficult for you. I really care about mbin developing in the right direction. I am curious about what the future will bring. I would like kbin to remain rather ascetic, subtle, and something that you need to learn and understand a bit, rather than having everything handed to you on a platter. Mbin can be a different face, with more features, bolder, and I know that you have many great ideas for it. A simple example is the labels for marking mods/admins/ops that you are currently working on - kbin has it marked in a subtle way with a faint left border outline - you can do it differently, and that’s great. As someone very wise once said, “If it’s not diverse, it’s not the fediverse.”
@melroy I am sure that this is just the beginning of our shared adventure. I hope you won’t hold a grudge against me for long ;) Guys, I deeply regret that we met at this stage of my life, but as I say, all I can do is try to fix my mistakes. Thanks for everything!
Yes, I say this fully aware - there are many things that I have failed at. Much of what I said, I failed to achieve. However, I never wanted to keep people on a leash; I am more of a person who prefers to stay on the sidelines and engage in what brings me the greatest pleasure - coding, just like any other contributor.
Believe me, I tried to delegate tasks, had many private conversations and discussions. Perhaps it wasn’t visible from the outside. However, in that mental state, the last thing I wanted to do was resolve conflicts among adults, and it all started to boil down to that. As @BaldProphet mentioned - “microcosm of the open-source community.”
Moreover, there were too many different visions of the project, ignoring requests, etc. That’s precisely why I decided to temporarily halt development, to secure the future of kbin. It was my decision, and as I mentioned, forking turned out to be the best thing that could happen. As you can see, the differences are not that significant, but it will be easier for all of us - especially since we can always draw inspiration from each other, and I don’t think anyone has a problem with that.
However, I still maintain contact with many people, and sometimes they mention to me the attitude of certain individuals on mbin’s Matrix - it is at least puzzling. In any case, I want to stay away from that and focus on my work with contributors who understand and prefer my approach.
Yeah, that’s true. Real-life stuff was kinda more important for me at the moment than managing the project.
For me, it’s straightforward: I pushed some dev code that wasn’t even a complete feature, and it got approved in your pull request. That’s why I was advocating for everyone to only merged their own PRs in the /kbin repository – so that each person could take responsibility for their own work. I won’t go on about this any further.
Yep, another way is to choose abandoned from the list of magazines, soon it will be more sensibly sorted ;)
I assure you that I didn’t intentionally push incorrect code into the repository. These were my first lines of code in a really long time. I simply got involved in other things that I wanted to finish first, and I noticed the edge case in the meantime, but it wasn’t a priority. I saw that you were syncing and I was hoping to benefit a bit from it once you fixed it. I didn’t expect the review to happen so quickly. By the way, I was genuinely curious about how this project management method works because, you know, I’ve always avoided such an approach. Merloy, you know how much I owe you, and I appreciate what you’ve done for the project, as well as the other Mbin contributors. Our overall visions haven’t always been the same, and I think it’s great that kbin has been forked. You see for yourself how my work looks until the release - there are many things I’ll be refining over time. That’s why I’ve put a hold on all other PRs, and now I want to focus on this.
Oh c’mon, don’t be mad. It’s just a wrong sorting of posts, it’s in an edge case, and seriously it wasn’t intentional. I just wanted to check how such management looks in practice, how many merge accepts are needed, etc. I didn’t mean to do anything wrong that could cause harm. I even push the same code to my instance to facilitate your tests ;)
But you’re right - that’s just my nature. I approach PR with very limited trust, whether they’re mine or from others.
It wasn’t entirely intentional, it was actually my mistake. But I held off on pushing the hotfix for a while. It was a development branch, so these kinds of bugs were permissible - in this case, it just changed the order of related posts, nothing serious. It was quite easy to spot and fix. Slow and cautious acceptance of pull requests, something I spent a lot of time on, was the main accusation from the creators of forks. Hastily accepting them was a problem for me. I personally considered a consensus similar to that, but now I see it doesn’t make sense. Someone needs to take responsibility. Personally, I believe that forks are the best thing that could have happened to the project.
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.
Are you sure you haven’t changed the display mode? :)
Hey, I will try to check it this evening.
Honestly, I’ve been using an alternate account on Mastodon, and until recently, I wasn’t aware that this was such a significant issue on other Lemmy instances until you started to clearly communicate it to me. I’ve temporarily taken a few additional steps to reduce the spam intensity. By the end of September, kbin.social will receive an update that should address the federation issues.
https://kbin.social/m/kbinMeta/t/465872/Spam-from-unmoderated-communities-magazines#entry-comment-2427760
https://kbin.social/m/lemmyworld@lemmy.world/t/466266/Removed-Kbin-social-communities#entry-comment-2428078
The problem is that at this scale and with this infrastructure, hotfixes are no longer as straightforward as they used to be - when I could solve these kinds of issues in a matter of hours.
By the end of September, kbin.social will receive an update that will address some of the issues. For now, I’m banning spam accounts, and registration is disabled. Additionally, external links are marked as “nofollow.” I just want to emphasize that this is not solely a kbin issue - I had to manually remove spam posts from Lemmy instances as well because moderation didn’t federate, which doesn’t happen with, for example, Mastodon.
For now, the admin of your instance can choose to defederate or remove communities, as the admin of lemmy.world did. Once I’ve dealt with the update, I will reach out to other admins and discuss the possibility of restoring valuable posts.
Of course, I’m taking action, and on kbin.social, those posts have been removed, which you can verify. However, for some reason, it doesn’t always federate with Lemmy. It used to work before, but practically after every Lemmy update, there’s something to fix in the code, or it could be related to API limits because some requests receive a “fail” status in the queues. The same applies to spam from Lemmy instances - I had to manually clean up hundreds of posts from other instances because they didn’t always send AP requests, which I verified in the logs.
Do you seriously believe that it’s a matter of individual accounts, and banning a user solves the problem?
92·1 year agoI apologize for causing you trouble. I’m trying to resolve the situation as quickly as possible, but apart from the usual spammers, there have also been organized campaigns where, for an hour on Sunday mornings, our instance was flooded with spam from hundreds of accounts. This, of course, is causing federation issues. I’ve changed my priorities regarding the roadmap, and additional tools will be released soon. I will also ensure additional moderation. I will also get in touch with admins from other instances - my absence was due to personal issues I mentioned recently. Thanks for your understanding, and best regards.
Hey, I addressed this in my previous post. I’m dealing with the issue, but it will take a bit more time. Please have a little more patience.
https://kbin.social/m/kbinMeta/t/465872/Spam-from-unmoderated-communities-magazines#entry-comment-2427760
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.
I’m currently working on solving this problem.