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.
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.