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
    73·
    2 years 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
      21·
      2 years 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
        7·
        2 years 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
          3·
          2 years 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.

        • bourbonmakesitbetter@kbin.social
          4·
          2 years ago

          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.

      • keith@kbin.buzz
        3·
        2 years 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

        • bourbonmakesitbetter@kbin.social
          1·
          2 years ago

          Thanks. I need to talk to a few other people first, but my current hypothesis is that Frendica is a better fit. The target audience is “old” (i.e. my age) and really likes Facebook. Some (most?) of them don’t even know what Reddit is. I’ll need to demo kbin for a few people to see if we think the idea has legs.

      • LollerCorleone@kbin.social
        2·
        2 years ago

        Something like this already exists for Mastodon (check out masto.host, and there are also a few others). But a service supporting all fediverse softwares would be cool.

  • BaroqueInMind@kbin.social
    57·
    2 years ago

    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.

  • MeowdyPardner@kbin.social
    41·
    2 years 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.

    • Shannon Clark@mastodon.social
      2·
      2 years ago

      @MeowdyPardner @haubles fascinating reading comments like this and having to figure out the context for “here” (as I read it via Ivory with my mastodon.social account)

      One of the things that will have to evolve in our discourse online in the fediverse is the distributed nature of “here”

  • nicetriangle@kbin.social
    39·
    2 years ago

    This must be one of those HOLY SHIT MY LIFE TOOK A LEFT TURN moments for you.

    Hang in there! Glad you’re getting help, and excited to see where things go.

    • ReCursing@kbin.social
      11·
      2 years ago

      Sometimes the world is divided into before and after. For Earnest this must be one of those moments

  • Badabinski@kbin.social
    23·
    2 years 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
      19·
      2 years 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
      14·
      2 years 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

    • bumbly@readit.buzz
      4·
      2 years ago

      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?

      • Badabinski@kbin.social
        2·
        2 years ago

        As @BiggestBulb said, most cloud providers have container platforms that support horizontal scaling, although generally not as elegantly as k8s (imo, others may disagree). Also totally agree about managed providers. EKS, AKS, and GKE weren’t suitable for what we use k8s for (very large shared clusters) until recently, so we’ve been administrating our own custom k8s distro. The managed stuff has gotten a lot better, and I’d definitely recommend that for running kbin. Running k8s yourself is hard, etcd is an evil bastard. I’ve had plenty of chances to see what works and what doesn’t in my role, however. There are some development/deployment patterns that are robust, and there are many that are not.

      • BiggestBulb@kbin.social
        1·
        2 years ago

        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)

  • trent@kbin.social
    18·
    2 years ago

    Thank you ernest… and fastly… and welcome aboard Piotr!

    OSPs make me so happy :)

  • Calcharger@kbin.social
    10·
    2 years 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

  • Sausage@kbin.social
    10·
    2 years ago

    Thanks for the update. Sounds like you’re having an “exciting” time. You’ve done a great job so far and I hope that the additional help you are receiving means that you might be able to take some time off in the near future, for your own sake.

    Edit: buy Ernest a coffee for those able to contribute