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!

  • Nougat@kbin.social
    4·
    1 year ago

    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.

    • bourbonmakesitbetter@kbin.social
      2·
      1 year ago

      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.

      • letsroll@kbin.social
        1·
        1 year ago

        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.

        • bourbonmakesitbetter@kbin.social
          0·
          1 year ago

          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.

          • grahamsz@kbin.social
            1·
            1 year ago

            Obviously that’s a tried and tested model with email, but i’m not sure there’s a great way to implement that on federated servers without keeping the model fine tuning pretty secret. Any spam detection AI model that’s public can simply be used to train better spam.

            My past experience with this sort of thing suggests it’s probably better to focus on identifying some kind of humanness score. Since kbin instances are responsible for moderating their own user population (I believe) that means they could quite easily keep a good running score of how viable an account is. Some of that could be ML that picks up on both the information content and uniqueness of a post, but you can also infer a good amount by how much interaction it gets with other users who also have good scores.

            There’s also some interesting stuff in the upvote structure. If you draw a directed graph of who-upvotes-who then spammers and trolls tend to form much more distinct islands than regular users do.

      • keith@kbin.buzz
        1·
        1 year ago

        @bourbonmakesitbetter We’re a small independent “mom & pop” managed hosting provider focused on Mastodon and we’re currently testing out kbin, send us an email at keith[@]thunderhost[.]com with the size of your community and we might be able to assist

  • Badabinski@kbin.social
    2·
    1 year ago

    Hey @Ernest and @piotrsikora,

    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.

    • VerifiablyMrWonka@kbin.social
      2·
      1 year ago

      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.

    • Piotr Sikora@pol.social
      2·
      1 year ago

      Hi @Badabinski

      K8S is one of option, but we decided to use some mix of bare-metal and docker swarm.

      Almost everything is prepare to grow horizontally. Only (like always) problem is in database, and also we want to have flexible software that run on big cluster and small node without changes in code.

      Give us few days, and after that we will show something ;)

      @haubles @vvuksan @renchap @ernest

  • huskola@kbin.social
    1·
    1 year ago

    Keep notes. This will make a great documentary some day!

    I am not well versed with the way all this works so this might be a stupid question: Is there one central server in one location for this site? Could outside, remote server space be used to share the work?

  • MeowdyPardner@kbin.social
    1·
    1 year ago

    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.

  • Calcharger@kbin.social
    0·
    1 year ago

    I’m so confused. We only have 3500 accounts on Kbin? So we are miles and miles less than Lemmy?
    edit No, I just need coffee

  • babelspace@kbin.social
    0·
    1 year ago

    I had a feeling that the silence over the last few days was a sign that a huge amount of work was happening behind the scenes. I also think you’re doing an excellent job of communicating with us. Thank you for all your effort that’s allowed this community to grow.

    • NotTheOnlyGamer@kbin.social
      0·
      1 year ago

      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.

      • ernest@kbin.socialOP
        0·
        1 year ago

        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.

        • NewBorn@kbin.social
          0·
          1 year ago

          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

        • Badabinski@kbin.social
          0·
          1 year ago

          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.

          • ernest@kbin.socialOP
            1·
            1 year ago

            I tried with Open Collective, but my application was rejected. I will try again at some point in the future.