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.
Unfortunately someone just tried to use my bank account the other day, so I'm waiting for a new card to come in, but I got this bookmarked for when I do. I think it's worth the cost of a cup of coffee every now and then.
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.
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.
Same song, new instruments, that's all. Just brace for the ads and the monetization. Be ready to be a customer rather than a user, or be ready to move on.
You know, I'm honestly not very concerned about that. As long as it's not money or energy I have to expend, I'm fine with whatever needs to happen, including the 'move on' option.
The Fediverse needs to get a handle on advertising and revenue, and what's considered acceptable and not acceptable. It's easier to do this now than after a bunch of bad actors have shown up and ruined things. My initial idea: a standard API that provides the contract between the service and its users. It would include things such as how, where and when advertising is used in that instance, whether you can opt-out, and how to do so, operating costs, revenue sources and relative amounts, etc. This API could be leveraged to aggregate lists of instances that end users could then sort and filter to find those that meet with their individual values. It could also become part of the standard UI so that users could easily locate where to support the operator of various instances, instead of relying on posting messages and hoping somebody knows where to donate (and that they are providing the true information).
Yes, I do realize there's a bit of a "herding cats" aspect to this. And there are those who are just completely opposed to any sort of "monetization" at all, but to me that's just an argument in favour of making it as transparent and discoverable as possible.
I receive support from the people here, and I also want to clearly communicate and report expenses. I feel a sense of responsibility. Many magazines have been abandoned, and that also needs to be addressed.
I have some magazines already. Just saying, I will take care of it and contribute a lot. But better moderation tools are soon needed. I can't even delete someone's posts in my magazines. I feel useless :v. I contribute a lot to lemmynsfw.com as of now
I've said it before — I'm not sure if you have it roadmapped, but I'd be really happy to contribute $5-25 on a monthly basis using Patreon/Open Collective to help pay for ongoing development and infrastructure costs. I really love what you've built here, and I'm super excited to see where it will go.
Drat! That's super disappointing. I don't know why they rejected your application, since you seem like their target demographic (FOSS developer running a community-funded alternative to a proprietary platform). Some gentle community outreach might get them to reconsider, but I'd also be worried about people being jerks.
Well, it's monthly coffees for now! I'll make sure I have something in my calendar.
Don't listen to the naysayers. The vast majority of us are appreciative of what you're doing here, and thankful for the work you've done so far. 600+ donations to back that up! We're happy to help contribute specifically because we're not the product.
Or spin up your own instance. Pay the $6/month it'll cost you, and never worry about ads and admins exploiting you for profit. You always have an out here.
Plus, it's not actually that expensive. Centralized services have a problem because not only do they need to cover hosting costs, but also development costs, moderating costs, and then they need to answer to shareholders and provide a return on investment. Here, everything's being done by volunteers. Development, hosting, etc. None of it is being done for profit, by businesses.
Look at it this way. If there are, say, 30k active users on the server, and hosting costs are 100 Eur/month, then it just takes 20 people donating 5 Eur/month to keep things going. And if every server has similar costs and similar benefactors, then this space is golden.
Costs, of course, will be higher over time, but there are ways to share them. Media sharing is already a thing, and if more media shares crop up, costs can be kept pretty low and people with resources and a love of community can keep things going indefinitely.
You just have to trust a small fraction of users to actually support not being the product.
Yeah, don't even get me started about all the ads on Wikipedia. /s Servers cost money. Money has to come from somewhere, that doesn't mean ad dollars, but likely donations/grants. Moderation is a given for any public space because people could start posting CP, and I don't think anyone wants that.
Infrastructure costs money. Communities need to remove bad actors. These are just facts of life.
Communities require continual investment. This is as true online, as it is for in-person communities, so it's important for people to donate when and if they can, if they find value in a community. The key thing is, a community needing to be invested in is very different from needing, or wanting, to turn a profit. In fact, community and profit-seeking are kind of mutually exclusive.
The profit motive inevitably strangles the community.
There are no free lunches. You want a nice platform? You've gotta pay for it somehow. You want a platform not filled with spam? You gotta keep it clean somehow. Funding and moderation. I really hope that kbin can survive off of donations, and I have already financially contributed fairly heavily in pursuit of that. Ernest is doing the right thing by communicating about these issues early, and often. Part of why Reddit got so fucked up was that there was no community engagement when it came to raising money. That's the nature of all for-profit platforms IMO.
This is where federated, FOSS platforms can do better.
I haven't looked too closely at how kbin is architected yet, but would it benefit from horizontal scaling? I do full-time development of tooling to administrate very large k8s clusters for a company that you've probably interacted with today without knowing it. Not sure if k8s is the right orchestration system for you, but I'd be more than happy to provide some input on a potential migration to k8s (if kbin is a good fit there). I know there's a community on Matrix as well — I'll try to reach out there too, although it may be a bit.
If the post is anything to go by it's using the included "mostly for dev work only, mostly" docker-compose files. It would absolutely be able to be scaled out since at it's core it's just a webapp with workers. The app is already configured to use Redis for session storage so should be able to go super wide.
Only limitation is how performant you could make your postgres cluster.
I was thinking the same thing. Shouldn't this be one of the cases where k8s shines with a horizontal autoscaler? Wouldn't want to manage your own k8s though, so I imagine managed k8s is the best option. If it's the cheapest option is another question.
@Babinski do you know if there are other horizontal autoscaling options besides k8s?
I'm not familiar with the architecture of the app (nor where it's hosted), but if it happens to be on AWS then you should be able to spin up an ECS cluster (especially since it's already containerized) and load balance it that way with an ALB configured during setup. Imo that would be the fastest way to do it (again, assuming this is on AWS)
This is some dedicated effort here to keep this going, but is anyone not worried that there is basically one guy with all the keys to this thing? Dont want to sound too doomerish but if Ernest disappears tomorrow, wouldn't that be the end of kbin?
This is just one instance. The code is open and can be forked. That's why if I happen to get hit by a bus tomorrow, Piotr will have the keys to the server room ;)
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