Hi all, so it has been a couple weeks since the initial launch of kbin.run and I’m curious to hear what people’s opinions are and how they like the overall experience here vs. other kbin instances. Generally speaking, I think kbin’s stability has greatly improved since launch as the first turn on was a very haphazard attempt at getting an instance going using very limited documentation to configure all the interconnected services. There are still a couple of hacks in place to keep federation working smoothly, but I do anticipate official code changes in the near future will greatly improve the overall kbin experience.

I honestly don’t know how many people actively utilize kbin.run, but I do see we have 56 registered users (2 pending deletion) as of posting this thread. The primary server that runs the site is hardly breaking a sweat, so tell your friends to join us if they’re looking for a lightly loaded instance.

Also, if you’re searching for a community that seems to be missing in the fediverse, feel free to create a magazine to support it here. I made a few that I’m interested to see gain some momentum, but there’s nothing stopping anyone else from doing the same.

Thanks as always and enjoy!

EDIT: I’ve added the monthly cost breakdown for kbin.run to the FAQ page.

  • Pat@kbin.run
    3·
    1 year ago

    Hey there. Joined up a couple days ago. I decided to migrate here from fedia.io, as they’ve been having a lot of error 500s and have a big issue with duplicate posts and comments. Figured I’d do what I can to reduce load on their server and find another instance and ended up deciding to try out this one.

    Been enjoying my time so far. Stable and zippy experience. One thing I’ve noticed, although not a major issue, is that the microblog feed doesn’t seem to show many posts. Compared to the feeds on kbin.social or fedia.io as examples, sorting by newest, they will show posts from a few seconds ago and many recent things, but here there’s multiple minutes between each post I see when sorting by newest. Is that because this is a smaller server, or is that intentional?

    And just a general question, do you plan on keeping this instance running in the long term? So far the server seems pretty good and it would be nice to see it grow.

    • debounced@kbin.runOP
      2·
      1 year ago

      hi! i’m happy to hear things are working well for you here, i’ll do my best to keep it that way. :-)

      i think the issues you’re describing sound like “normal” federation delays between this instance and the origin instances where the content is being generated. there shouldn’t be any real delay in viewing content that is generated locally other than database transaction times, which are typically super small, but anything that needs to get sucked in from other instances won’t show up until the origin server decides to push it out. federation can also be a super lossy process if things get overloaded, i.e., i’ve seen things backdated from weeks ago that all of a sudden show up here once the origin server decides to sent it again.

      however, this instance/server is hardly being taxed at all… in my limited testing, stuff that is generated here is federated almost immediately. if you find a situation where things aren’t coming thru in a reasonable time, let me know and i’ll investigate it further to verify it’s not something on my end. it’s also entirely possible that the larger instances have more user engagement with federated activity causing more frequent updates than what is currently happening here… so things may speed up the more active this instance becomes.

      my goal is to continue running this instance for as long as possible… mainly because i want to use it (lol), but i also plan to post a detailed “invoice” of how much it costs to run even this small instance just like @ernest did for the mothership’s infrastructure… i’ll either put it under the About or FAQ page, haven’t decided yet. if “we” as a kbin.run community agree that it makes sense to either scale up or scale down, i’m willing to do anything reasonable.

      • Pat@kbin.run
        2·
        1 year ago

        Awesome. I’m excited to see how this instance evolves as the overall threadiverse grows. I’ll be calling this my home in the fediverse for the foreseeable future

  • Nominel@kbin.run
    2·
    1 year ago

    Hello @debounced, I hope you’re going well :)

    I just found the site linked as a Kbin alternative with more updates/fixes. So far it looks great!

    However, I noticed I can’t access some federated communities from the site, like https://kbin.run/m/fountainpens@wayfarershaven.eu . Here’s the Kbin.social view for comparison. This magazine doesn’t show up in the magazine search for Kbin.run, either.

    I checked the federation page and it does look like Kbin.run federates with that instance, but the individual magazines are not loaded. This occurs for a few other instances as well, both Lemmy and Kbin. I’m not quite sure why.

    • debounced@kbin.runOP
      2·
      1 year ago

      hi! i’m doing well and thanks for joining kbin.run - now powered by mbin!

      i just checked out the community you mentioned and as far as i can tell no other registered user on kbin.run has previously searched for that specific magazine (until now)… and I’m also seeing timeouts and/or errors when I try to browse the origin server at https://wayfarershaven.eu/c/fountainpens. if the origin server is having difficulties or is being too slow, kbin/mbin will sometimes give up and retry later to pull in federated content. be aware that you won’t get any of the prior threads/posts as of the date the community gets federated, so you’ll only see new content once the federation is successful. hopefully that makes sense, but you might want to retry later once the origin server stops throwing errors.

      • Nominel@kbin.run
        2·
        1 year ago

        Thank you for writing back so quickly!

        It looks like it’s all working now, and I can access each magazine by typing its full name into https://kbin.run/search.

        I am getting the same odd redirect behaviour mentioned here, but that’s pretty harmless.

        • debounced@kbin.runOP
          2·
          1 year ago

          Glad to hear it resolved itself!

          I created a GitHub issue for that redirect bug since I think it’s related to this being a “bare metal” install and not docker as I can’t seem to replicate the issue in my docker dev environment, but I haven’t spent too much time digging into it. We’ll see if someone else solves it before I do, but I think it might be a Nginx config issue with the recent API addition… TBD.

          • Nominel@kbin.run
            2·
            1 year ago

            Thank you very much! I subscribed to a few more communities and haven’t seen the bug since.