Hi everyone, it seems that we have quite a gathering here, and many of you I haven’t had the chance to greet yet :) As some of you may know, /kbin is still in its early stages of development. Every day, improvements and new features are being worked on. Unfortunately, this may result in occasional short downtimes. However, the recent changes should address the issue of logging out after a break. Soon, I’m also planning a slightly bigger environment update, which might involve a slightly longer downtime.
However, it will be worth the wait because it will bring a few changes:
- Swapping favorites and boosts, meaning it will work similarly to Lemmy instances. Based on your feedback, I’ve decided it doesn’t make sense to complicate it further.
- Improved communication with some instances (get sign request).
- Italian language (@ambitras) and Japanese language ( @dannekrose ) (I’d like to link your profiles in the project’s readme if possible. Let me know where the link should lead).
- And it seems that German language is also incoming :O (https://translate.codeberg.org/projects/kbin/#languages)
- Ability to mark content in Hebrew language.
- New PWA icons.
- I also plan to move thumbnails to external storage and switch to queue-based generation. This will significantly speed up the website.
- In the meantime, you can catch up on what’s happening in /m/kbinDesign ( @cody ) or try the BetterKbin plugin ( @FediExt ) - your feedback will be appreciated.
Thanks to everyone for your contributions. The most beautiful thing is that it all comes naturally, from word to word. I feel like we’re on the good side of the Internet ;) I’ve also prepared a short guide on how to set up your own instance - I’ll be gradually improving it. /kbin works quite well as a small community.
I’ll be partially absent as I need to focus on these tasks, so please mention me in posts if something important happens. And I also need to catch my breath a bit. Like other admins, the recent time has taken its toll on me. I feel like I’ve been to a four-day beach party ;p Once everything settles down, I will definitely return to your questions and comments.
Finally, I would like to thank @NGIZero #NLnet for their support. Thanks to them, we have reached this stage.
@dannekrose Wow, I see that you managed to set up your own instance. Are you familiar with PHP/Symfony? How would you rate the difficulty of this process?
@ernest@kbin.social I did!
I am not very familiar with PHP nor Symfony. I set up a PixelFed instance from scratch as well and that uses PHP Larval and that experience did help some, but I’m not a PHP developer at all.
As for the experience, after I got everything set up, I can see where the lack of documentation caused me to get stuck, but if I were to try again right now while using my experience as a guide, I can imagine a “relatively” straightforward set of steps to set up.
The only piece that I’m still not 100% clear on are what are the optimal configuration values for the JWT tokens (.env only mentions one token, but mercure’s Caddyfile mentions both a publisher and subscriber), and which daemons should be run under which accounts. There are a lot of pieces:
php8.2-fpm
nginx
postgresql
mercure
redis
…etc
Also, setting up the worker threads via supervisord was unexpected and only mentioned in that other issue raised on codeberg.
I’ve done my share of documentation in the past and have thought about editing the wiki, but due to work at the moment I didn’t have the time to record all my steps down in detail for this deployment.
I do hope to have some time soon, though and might try to take a look at the wiki and do a “test” deploy again.
My personal preference, though, is to not use Docker so I also understand that can add a LOT of complications.
I’m happy to share anything specific if you like as well about the experience. I used it as a learning experience and … I did learn a lot for sure.
Thank you again!