ernest

joined 2 years ago
[–] ernest@kbin.social 19 points 2 years ago (40 children)

When it comes to /kbin as a platform, the federation of downvotes will certainly work and will be configurable per instance. Today, I started the initial work on implementing new ActivityPub services from scratch. This is a good time to start a discussion on how it should work on kbin.social - to your points, I would also add:

  • Downvote federation only applies to remote threads from other instances, without affecting local therads
[–] ernest@kbin.social 11 points 2 years ago (6 children)

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[–] ernest@kbin.social 6 points 2 years ago (18 children)

I'm just wondering about 'spoiler alert' - what is it exactly? I haven't delved into Lemmy's code for a long time.

[–] ernest@kbin.social 21 points 2 years ago (19 children)

These points are not a priority, but relatively easy to achieve. They will gradually appear on the instance in between working on significant things. It's worth following https://kbin.social/m/kbinDevlog

[–] ernest@kbin.social 6 points 2 years ago (1 children)
[–] ernest@kbin.social 26 points 2 years ago (1 children)

The aggregate view is in preparation still.

[–] ernest@kbin.social 15 points 2 years ago (1 children)

Oh, come on, I'm not that sensitive ;-) Constructive criticism helps me set goals, prioritize tasks on my board, and broaden my horizons when it comes to the overall experience with the platform. I really appreciate that. The fact is that Lemmy had a lot more time. I remember when they started federation tests, I was writing my first line of code. Some things just need time to mature. For me, it's not a race. I simply have a clear goal that I'm determined to achieve - to create a solid, accessible platform that others can benefit from and enjoy. Who knows, maybe it'll become the best in the entire fediverse someday ;-) Now, after the break, I'll be working on federation but also on customizing the feed to tailor it as much as possible to individual needs. Cheers!

[–] ernest@kbin.social 18 points 2 years ago (3 children)

I understand the issue, the changes in the federation /kbin that will occur in the coming weeks / months will make the magazines much more visible in the broader fediverse. This could be a complete gamechanger.

[–] ernest@kbin.social 2 points 2 years ago

I will verify it thoroughly tomorrow, and if there is any issue on the /kbin side, I will have some free time to fix it. I'm almost certain that it used to work correctly in the past.

[–] ernest@kbin.social 7 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (3 children)

dms don't work across instances or software, but either way it's not working

not implemented yet.

But it seems to me that there shouldn't be any issues with the visibility of microblog posts:
https://kbin.social/m/fanfiction/p/3211163/Drew-fanart-of-a-schrodinger-s-PMD-fancomic-The-Stars-Shrine
https://szmer.info/post/1401139

[–] ernest@kbin.social 5 points 2 years ago (1 children)

@ContentConsumer9999 That is indeed the plan, but I want to do it properly on the new codebase.

[–] ernest@kbin.social 2 points 2 years ago (1 children)

Thanks for pointing it out.

 

Hi, in this and probably the next week, I will be working on these tasks:

Today, I will be slightly less available as I am in the final stages of taking care of all the formalities, and I also had to handle a few personal matters. Starting tomorrow, I will be back at full capacity again. When this succeeds, in the next releases, I will focus more on frontend and accessibility.

#kbinMeta

 

I wrote the first line of code for /kbin on January 14, 2021. Around this time, I started working remotely and decided that the time I used to spend commuting to the office would be devoted to /kbin. Throughout this entire period, /kbin has been a hobby project that I developed in my free time. It was also when Lemmy started federating. The full history is available on GitHub. The Polish instance - or rather its prototype - was created on 2021-09-08.

By the end of 2022, I decided to take this a bit more seriously. The work that had brought me much satisfaction began to tire me out - anyone who's experienced burnout likely knows what I'm talking about. I needed a breather and a sense of doing things my way. I had some savings put aside, so I could work on this full-time. The amount of code might not reflect this, but it's only a small part of the things that need attention in such a project ;)

I don't know if it had any impact, but on January 4, 2023, I received information that the project had qualified for the NGI0 Entrust program. I had applied for funding a few months earlier. Currently, I have outlined my milestones in the Roadmap. The plan was to gradually complete each stage (after finishing one of them, I can apply for a funds release). However, due to the situation and how /kbin has developed in recent weeks, I had to completely change my priorities. As a result, I have started each stage, but none is polished enough for me to honestly apply for a payout. I'll need to address this promptly.

The fact that I could take certain steps amidst all this confusion is solely thanks to your support. The kindness I've encountered here will be remembered for a lifetime :) My buymeacoffee account currently has 818 supporters, who have donated $11,320. This is a lot of money, and for a while, I'll be able to sleep peacefully, not worrying about maintaining kbin.social.

Nevertheless, this money is meant for project development. Every expense will be documented in monthly reports. If necessary, I can also provide insight into the invoices. Things have been so heated recently that I consider the spending over the past months to be a failure. Most of the costs need to go to S3+Cloudfront, where costs due to the traffic increased from $2-3 per month to $1,000. This is about half a year of basic servers in the current stack. But in hindsight - so much has happened that faster migration was impossible. However, this has certainly accelerated the process.

None of this would have been possible without the contributors and project guardians, and without Piotr, with whom we spent many hours and sleepless nights trying to stabilize the situation and bring it to its current state. This time we're much better prepared for potential surprises. I hadn't set the terms of collaboration before and I admit, I had some concerns when we arranged a call to discuss this. However, it turned out that within the foundation, Piotr introduced a "Pay what you can" financing model, whether it's $1 or $100 a month. As I mentioned earlier, this is a huge relief for me and we started from scratch regarding security matters.

Many of you asked me about the possibility of recurring support. I wasn't entirely convinced, especially since the current account balance should maintain the instance. However, I think it would be irresponsible of me not to consider it. /kbin has grown to a level where I can't foresee everything that will happen. It would be great if we could cover monthly costs with Patreon / Liberapay. All funds from Buy Me a Coffee will be transferred to this pool, but from now on, I'll treat it as buying me a coffee... or a beer... literally ;)

For me, this also means maintaining critical zones for the project. I see this as a long-distance run, so I've decided to allocate:

$100 monthly - donation to Piotr's foundation "Fundacja Technologie dla Ludzi" - I really encourage you to support it, they're really doing a lot for the fediverse.
$24 monthly - donation to Codeberg - a great ecosystem for free projects. We've been making quite a buzz there recently.

I also want to support contributors and creators around /kbin as much as possible - but I'll do this privately, and for now, I can only afford symbolic amounts.

|                                                   |            |              |   $  |
| ------------------------------------------------- | ---------- | ------------ | ---- |
| Hetzner Jun 2, 2023                               | €131.63    | one-time     | 145  |
| Hetzner Jul 2, 2023                               | €246.74    | one-time     | 271  |
| OVH 24 cze 2023                                   | 2246.66 zł | 6 months     | 553  |
| OVH 1 lip 2023                                    | 904.63 zł  | monthly      | 223  |
| OVH domains                                       | 116.43 zł  | annually     | 30   |
| AWS (S3+Cloudfront) July 3, 2023                  | $1079.21   | one-time     | 1080 |
| AWS current                                       | $320.45    | one-time     | 321  |
| Mailgun 2023-07-02                                | $49.76     | one-time     | 50   |
| Testing enviroments, demo instances, landing page | $130       | monthly      | 130  |
| FTDL                                              | $100       | monthly      | 100  |
| Codeberg                                          | 95.33 zł   | monthly      | 24   |
| Yubico 2x YubiKey 5C NFC Jun 22, 2023             | €135.30    | one-time     | 149  |
| Accounting and legal advice                       | $100       | one-time (?) | 50   |
| Taxes in Poland                                   | ???        |              |      |

Thank you once again for that. I will respond to your questions, but it may be delayed as I have a few important tasks I want to focus on. Soon we will also write more about the cluster and the conclusions we have drawn from creating infrastructure with Piotr. Then it will be time for the first release of /kbin.

0
Bicycle (ciechanow.ski)
 

There is something delightful about riding a bicycle. Once mastered, the simple action of pedaling to move forward and turning the handlebars to steer makes bike riding an effortless activity.

 

Hi there, in the upcoming kbin releases, I will be describing the changes along with author tags, but for now, you can check out what's happening here: https://codeberg.org/Kbin/kbin-core/activity, as well as my personal feed: https://ernest.dev

Today, two test instances will be created where we will be looking for bugs for some time, and then the changes will be rolled out to kbin.social and hopefully other instances as well :)

I want to accept as many pull requests as possible, currently, there are still 50 open ones. I'm also following your posts and adding new things to the to-do list.

Have a nice day!

 

We're experiencing massive delays on the queues today. We're actively working on a solution, and I think we're getting really close. Just wanted to let you know ;)

#kbinMeta

 

We have a slight delay in the queues, but I need to balance smooth website performance and federations for now.

#kbinMeta

 

Currently, on the main instance, people have created 40191 accounts (+214 marked as deleted). I don't know how many are active because I don't monitor it, but once again, I greet all of you here :) In recent days, the traffic on the website has been overwhelming. It's definitely too much for the basic docker-compose setup, primarily designed for development use. I was aware of the possible consequences of the situation happening on Reddit, but I assumed that most people would migrate to one of the Lemmy instances, which already has an established position. I hoped that a few stray enthusiasts would find their way to kbin ;)

The first step was to upscale the VPS to a higher version (66.91EUR). It quickly turned out that it wasn't enough. I had to enable CF protection just to keep the website responsive, but the response times were still very slow. At this stage, the instance was practically unusable. The next step was a full migration to a dedicated server (100EUR, the current hardware). It can be done relatively quickly, so it resulted in a 5-minute technical break. Despite the much higher parameters, it didn't get any better. It became clear that the problem didn't lie there. I'm really frustrated when it comes to server administration. That was the moment when I started looking for help. Or rather, it found me.

A couple days ago I wrote about how kbin qualified for the Fast Forward program. To be honest, I did it out of pure curiosity and completely forgot because a lot was happening during that time. During the biggest fire incident, Hannah ( @haubles ) reached out with a proposal to help. I outlined the situation (in short: the server is dying, I don't even know what I need, help! ;). She quickly connected us with Vlad ( @vvuksan ) and Renaud ( @renchap ). I was probably too tired because I don't know if the whole operation lasted 60 minutes or 6 hours, but after a series of precise questions and getting an understanding of the situation, the guys themselves adjusted the entire job. I love working with experts, and it's not often that you come across individuals so well-versed in the fediverse. Thanks to Hannah's kindness, we will be staying there a bit longer. Currently, fastly.com handles the caching layer and processes images. Hence those cool moving thumbnails ;)

Things were going well at that point. I could disable Cloudflare protection. Probably thanks to that, many of you are here today, and we got to know each other a bit better :) However, even then, when I tried to enable federation, the server would stop working.

Around the same time, Piotr ( @piotrsikora ), whom I already knew from the Polish fediverse, contacted me. He is the administrator of the Polish Mastodon instance pol.social, operates within the ftdl.pl foundation, and specializes in administering applications with a very similar tech stack. I made the decision to grant him server access. It only took him a few moments, and he came back to me with a few tips that allowed us to enable federation. In the following days, there was more of it, and we managed to reach the current level. I think it's not too bad.

Nevertheless, managing the instance has taken up about 60% or more of my time so far, which prevents me from fully focusing on current tasks. That's why I would like to collaborate with Piotr and hand over full care of the server to him. Piotr will also take care of the security side. Now I have to take this much more seriously. We still need to work out the terms of cooperation, but I want you to know the direction I intend to pursue.

We also need to migrate to a new environment because one server will sooner or later become insufficient. This time, I want to be prepared for it. This may be associated with transient issues with the website in the coming days.

The next two updates will still be about project funding (I still can't believe what happened) and moderation. The following ones will be more technical, with descriptions of changes and what contributors are doing on Codeberg. I would like to be here more often, but not as an admin, just as myself.

Thank you all for this.

P.S. In private messages, I also received numerous offers of help that I didn't even have a chance to read and respond to. You are the best!

 

Hey, I'll try to handle the abandoned magazines / transfers as quickly as possible. However, I need to automate this process because there are too many requests.

#kbinMeta

 

Codeberg is experiencing stability issues today. I love this place, the entire ecosystem that helped me integrate repository functionality with Matrix chat room, translations, and everything in the spirit of Free and Open Software. Lately, we've been making a lot of noise there. Today, I decided to provide a small support, and I sincerely encourage everyone to chip in a few cents for the guys, they are doing an excellent job and also /kbin is a system of interconnected vessels ;)

https://liberapay.com/codeberg/donate
https://blog.codeberg.org/the-hardest-scaling-issue.html

 

Oh man, it's the first time in my life I'm going to a meeting with friends with a laptop in my backpack. Give me a call if you need a server restart or smth ;-)

#kbin #kbinMeta

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