Since Kbin was still at what Ernest refers to as a proof of concept stage when the project reached peak popularity, and I think at the time (and probably still) it was really not particularly easy to run an instance of. That's probably part of the reason why so many of the early Kbin instances died off.
According to FediDB, the biggest instances other than kbin.social are Karab.in and Kbin.cafe. Karab.in is run by Ernest who also runs kbin.social - it's just the Polish instance. As developments are happening fast (see !kbinDevlog), it's to be expected that instances not run by Ernest lag a little bit behind in development.
It seems the administrator of kbin.cafe is @barista. I'm not sure how actively maintained it is.
Considering the fast pace of development, I think it makes sense for the time being to either use kbin.social or an mbin instance.
I want to say thanks for helping but I sort of feel you ignored the body of my post where I say I fled kbin.cafe for its inactive admin. Just checked now and they are still inactive. On the other hand I have also missed things while reading before. I guess I'll be staying where I am at until a new Kbin instance opens up ¬_¬ I feel very odd about using Mbin given some of the drama I have seen occur over the split (my admin on kbin.run did not get involved in any of the drama for what it is worth, though), and having gotten no say in the switch, but I also appreciate the decentralization of the Fediverse and refuse to get comfy in the flagship because then I'll never move and will be part of the problem keeping it centralized. Thanks anyways.
Oh shoot - I read your post, but then I just skimmed it again after checking fedidb and lost track of the context.
I think the point still hold that kbin is not at a point in its development where it makes too much sense for people to open independent kbin instances. By the way I understood it, mbin seeks to patch some of these problems, while the kbin development is focusing on improving the infrastructure on a deeper level. The drama is a bit silly, but I think forking is not always a bad thing and the differences in development between kbin (deep changes to the code base) and mbin (patches to make things work) are enough to justify parallell developments for the time being.
It's also worth noting that not a single new kbin instance has been created since September this year - I think for now you're unfortunately not likely to find an actively maintained instance beside the two run by Ernest.
Not the first time I saw snow as I grew up on the Scottish Highlands and have had it since a baby, but I do remember someone else’s. My parents had a guest house and I remember one Christmas eve day around the living room with my family on Christmas Eve when it starts dumping snow, “nice, it’ll be a white Christmas” we all thought.
Then we heard a bunch of noise coming from the front car park, we peak out the curtains to see a family staying with us from somewhere is Africa, I can’t recall where but it was obviously their first time seeing snow, they were so excited, running outside on their pyjamas at 2300.
They were making snowballs, rolling around in the snow trying to make snow angels and on their hands and knees making snowmen.
My family just watched and chuckled as those outside slowly realised how cold and wet snow is. Within minutes the whole family was drenched and shivering and running back inside.
But for them it was a magical moment, makes me smile thinking back to it.
I would go with something along the lines of: “it’s called responsibility, Friend. I have my own finances to consider, and I am not responsible for the bookkeeping of this establishment. There is no drink minimum. Let the bar’s business be theirs, mine be mine, and yours be your own.”
To go one step further, ask a server in front of them if it’s ok if you hang out and don’t drink, if I’m with a group. They will say “yes, that’s fine”.
I went to Austria for skying, flew to Innsbruck and two days later caught the train to go to the ski resort.
That train was basically an intercity train (which even stopped at the little town from where a pretty regular commuter could be caught to the little ski resort) … which just so happen to be coming from some city in Switzerland and would end in some city in Germany.
So I sit down in one of those places with 2x2 seats and a table in the middle. A couple of guys also seat down there and eventually we starting chatting.
It turns one of those guys was an Italian surf promoter, who had actually been to my country (Portugal) as part of surf events in Ericeira (big surf place nowadays thanks to the almost unique massive tube waves it gets at certain times in the year).
The guy did not spoke Portuguese but could speak several other languages. We ended up having a one hour or so conversation and as my German was a bit so-so (and, let’s be honest, because it just felt cool to do so), we ended up doing with in the several languages we had in common - German, Spanish, Italian, English and French - just sort of jumping from language to language as we couldn’t remember a word in one so used a different one or because the 3rd guy only spoke English and German so we had to switch to one of those when including him.
Coming from a very peripheral country in Europe - Portugal borders only Spain, and if you travel about 1000km in Spain, you get to the only other country it has a land border with, France, and then it takes another 1000km or so of France to get to the rest of Europe - the whole “absolutelly regular train that just happens to cross 3 countries” and casually chatting with somebody and using various languages when they happen to be convenient, thing was the first time I really felt a hint of what it is to just normally be European in Europe.
Fun stories like this remind me why my country (UK) just never feels connected to Europe. We’ve got this amazing continent on our doorstep but the poor state of our language education prevents many from feeling comfortable to explore it. I would love to share a story like this.
Yeah, I was living in the UK at the time and in that sense it feels almost as peripheral when it comes to Europe as Portugal.
Living in the UK actually made this feeling in that train in Austria more intense for me because I was actually living in an European country other than my homeland but it still didn’t feel much closer to the rest of Europe than in Portugal, though I did jump on the Eurotunnel Express once in London for a couple of days in Paris, which was nice and is definitelly beyond what can be done in Portugal (were international train connections abroad are so bad that for example Lisbon - Barcellona is at least half a day, probably more).
Then again there is a little extra distancing in the UK because English being the lingua franca of this age, Britons can seldom speak any other language, and it’s not at all the same thing when you’re somewhere to use it as it is being able to speak the same language as the locals. (Mind you, I suspect I wouldn’t get the same feeling in Eastern Europe as in that experience in Austria, simply because I cannot speak any language at all from those language branches, except for Romanian which is a Latin language so I can more easilly guess the meaning of words).
@ThatOneKirbyMain2568 we have to preemptively defederate with any corporation! The fediverse must always stay small and never improve other companies. The vision is for open technology that few can use, right? I'm just worried that if Flipboard helps make the fediverse more appealing by providing more content for our users, that they can pull a fast one and defederate from us later, and then all of our users will leave and go to Flipboard instead! The only way to prevent that from happening is to make sure they never hear about Flipboard in the first place. Please reference any arguments used for defederating from Meta if you need more "sky is falling" arguments to whip you into a frenzy of senseless fear.
I was on a high school trip to Poland in the 90’s. It was an eight day trip through the country, including a couple of days of kayaking. Our school was definitely on a tight budget to make this trip work, so we spend our nights in a bunch of cheap hotels and camping grounds.
One luxury that we were always missing out on was decent toilet paper. The only toilet paper supplied was this single ply stuff with the same texture as sanding paper. So when we were out for an evening in Warsaw I visited a five star hotel to enjoy some quality bathroom time. This was several days in and I really wanted to enjoy using a toilet in a heated and clean environment. And it was so nice! No smells, no cold drafts and the toilet paper! So soft! I was in heaven :)
As luck would have it, the bathroom stall had a whole stack of these magically soft toilet rolls. On an impulse I stuffed all of them (around six if I remember correctly) under my coat and smuggled them out of the hotel. Back at the camp I shared them with the rest of my classmates, bringing back a little bit of luxury in our dreary little place. Never been that popular in my life :)
If you take a look at their CEOs fediverse acct, you'll see he's pretty caught up in the mastodon hype. He's coming at the whole thing from the perspective of mastodon being the platform, instead of the weird disjointed fediverse. People have tried explaining things he's not understanding fully, and he kinda brushes it off. I think even in a decentralized network, there are some ppl who still need some centralized platform to focus in on.
As far as the staff are concerned If the place is packed then I think it’s a tad dickish to repeatedly not get anything. It’s there’s still lots of free space then it’s no big deal.
WRT to your other buddies you are taking a bit of a privilege, if all the other people you were going with were also unwilling to buy anything then you would run into trouble wouldn’t you. Pointing out someone isn’t buying is imo much much ruder though.
Although personally dropping a fiver every 2 weeks to avoid interpersonal conflict seems like a pretty good deal. Ultimately how your other friends view it and the social standing of the complainer matter a lot. If the hobby has shared supplies I would make extra sure that you are contributing your fair share there.
If the place is packed it still wouldn’t change anything for the business. It’s not like OP’s spot at the table would be occupied by a random patron, it’d be an empty chair at the table that OP’s friends are sitting at. But yeah I can’t imagine being that frugal and still going to bars. I would either invite everybody to go some place free (the park when it’s nice out, my place if it’s close enough) or indeed just buy a drink every now and then.
If most other people didn’t buy anything, they probably wouldn’t choose to hang out at a bar, and there wouldn’t be a problem. As it stands, OP isn’t hurting anyone, and anything they’re “taking” by being there and not buying is likely negligible.
Based on the staff never having an issue with it, it sounds like in OP’s case that they’re not taking a seat in a packed place, either.
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