Like many others, when the reddit APIcalypse happened, I moved to the fediverse. Like many, I wasn’t sure what it really consisted of, how it worked, or what instance to move to. Eventually I decided to sign up with kbin.social. Ernest was welcoming, the instance was friendly with a nice mix of topics, the community was great, having access to both threadiverse and microblogs was great, and I loved it.

And then Ernest started having health issues and the instance became unstable. Eventually I moved to fedia/mbin, which I enjoy a lot, but I just haven’t quite felt that same sense of belonging - I don’t know, maybe the new job just kept me away a bit too much, or I’m getting old, or just been through too many changes. But I’ve kept kbin on my launch page, and sometimes I find myself a bit wistful for it.

I poked at the internet, and the kbin.social domain expires in a few days, on 10 September, which I suppose will be a formal end to the project. In memory of kbin, I’d like thank Ernest: wherever you are, I hope you are well and enjoying your life. Thank you for the concepts behind and your work on kbin; I love the bridging of the microblogs and threadiverse. And thank you for making the transition to the fediverse less confusing to this old redditor. I wish you the best in life, and thank you again.

  • hono4kami@piefed.socialEnglish
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    12 days ago

    I just hope he’s doing well. I would also like to say thank you for developing Kbin, and for maintaining kbin.social for as long as you could.

  • GeekFTW@lemmy.zipEnglish
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    13 days ago

    Same sentiments here. Started off on kbin.social, had to move shop to lemmy.zip which is where I still am but I’ve kept checking the bookmark every couple months to see if was still resolving.

    • nomy@lemmy.zipEnglish
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      12 days ago

      Same, moved to kbin then hopped around some after it went into limbo. Ended up on .zip and appreciate its kind of hand-off, user-deals with it, federation/blocking.

      RIP kbin you were a real one and I hope all your devs (Ernest) future projects go well.

      • GeekFTW@lemmy.zipEnglish
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        12 days ago

        Yeah thats why I ended up on .zip

        I was running squaredcircle on kbin, so I wanted to find an instance with the least federation issues (outside of the obvious like csam and such) so users wouldn’t have problems accessing us, .zip was pretty much perfect across the board with the userbase, still there today!

  • themadcodger@kbin.earth
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    13 days ago

    Same! I was one of the early migrants just before the mass migration, having seen the writing on the wall and having already joined Mastodon. It was a great time initially, a bit of “you’re new? okay, I’ve figured a few things out, try this”. We caught Ernest by surprise because he was only making a proof of concept to offer an alternative to Lemmy. And then we showed up in droves. But he did his best, and while it was bumpy, it was still an overall great experience, much like the early days of Reddit, pre-Digg.

    I still like the kbin-style instances over Lemmy, but yeah, it’s not quite the same any more. That said, still preferable to Reddit these days.

    Thank you, Ernest. Hope you’re recovering wherever you are.

    • tofu@lemmy.nocturnal.gardenEnglish
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      13 days ago

      Yeah I think I’ve seen some recent commits on his GitHub profile as well. He seems to be “back”, just not on kbin.

      I hosted my own kbin instance for a while as it seemed interesting, but admittedly I never really got into it. Still a cool approach, just not for me.

  • FaceDeer@fedia.io
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    13 days ago

    I, too, started out on kbin and ended up migrating to an mbin instance. I sent Ernest some money via that Koffi thing he had and I don’t regret it - I hope he found the funds useful, whatever it is that happened to him in the end. He kicked off an alternative to Lemmy and that’s super important for a distributed decentralized system like the Fediverse, you can’t have just one client for it.