I’d like to help out with decentralization, with users not all gathering in one place, so I don’t want to go to kbin.social or fedia.io. I did look at fedidb.org and the list of instances there, but it doesn’t tell me if the admin is active. I could just visit every instance listed there and check the admin’s profile for activity, but I figure putting this message out and seeing who replies is a pretty good test of which kbin instances have an active admin that takes me less time.
EDIT: Also saw this from Ernest, he’s eventually going to make sure abandoned instances have admins, so that’s good news.
Can I ask which instance seemed like it’s been abandoned?
It could be a secondary account, but I would guess that it’s the one they currently belong to?
@kbin.cafekbin.cafe
If you click my profile, you can see both my username and the instance I come from!
Just a question. Be civil
I thought I had a friendly tone and was being nice. I really did not intend to come off as aggressive. Rereading this I see how it can come off sarcastic and condescending instead of the friendly informational tone I was going for. Sorry.
he’s eventually going to make sure abandoned instances have admins
I think he meant magazines on kbin.social in this context. I don’t think he has any way to control another instance and change who runs it, besides a kindly worded letter.
I do try to keep track of kbin instances and how up to date they are and their admins, but I can’t really advertise in their place. One thing I’ve kind of been thinking about is it’d be nice if nodeinfo had information next to current user count of like: desired user count, max user count. Otherwise you have no idea what an instance admin is hoping for, whether it’s just their personal instance or they’re willing to support tens of thousands of users. Without that I don’t want to send people to x instance and suddenly the admin being in for a surprise. But I just looked up nodeinfo and it looks like there’s plenty of worms in that can about it being too complex already, so maybe I’ll avoid opening my mouth about it… for now.
Based on what I’ve heard from kbin instance admins (especially jerry, the owner of fedia.io, where I usually post from when not dealing with errors), it’s not an easy thing to keep running in its current state. I imagine if you instance hop sub-100 user kbin instances many of them will end up shutting down or having inactive owners.
For example, feddit.online is kbin instance #6 by user count (yet it’s still <100!) and has announced they’re shutting down in a couple of months: https://feddit.online/m/feddit/t/66403/SERVER-GOING-AWAY-ON-NOV-26th
To have a stable instance experience without going with a large instance you might have better luck with another AP platform as your home base, whether Lemmy or something else entirely.
