/kbin is certainly not dying, as @fr0g pointed out, work on new features and bug fixes is ongoing. However, it may give the impression that it is, and for that, I take full responsibility and owe you an explanation.
Several factors have contributed to this situation. The first and most significant reason is my family issues, which I must prioritize. I'm doing my best to stabilize the situation as quickly as possible, but not everything is within my control. The second reason is unfortunate financial matters. When Kbin suddenly gained popularity, the project's maintenance costs far exceeded my initial estimates. While community support still allows for the cluster's maintenance, I also need to take care of my own livelihood and commitments. Another reason involves spam campaigns and other issues that I need to address behind the scenes. I don't want to go into specifics right now, but there will come a time when I can share more. My top priority is to resolve all these matters so that I can return to working on Kbin full-time.
I spend every spare moment writing code and reviewing code? from other contributors. It's a lot of work that goes into development, and I try to verify every accepted pull request and make improvements when I can. It also takes up a lot of time, more than it may seem. I have also delegated some responsibilities and permissions to the Kbin core team (https://codeberg.org/org/Kbin/teams), which has allowed the project to continue to grow, and I am immensely grateful for that. However, I still want to maintain overall control, although over time, we will work on better processes to make it less dependent on me.
I paused updates on kbin.social some time ago until the release of the first version. Hence, the impression that nothing is happening. Kbin is, in fact, developing so rapidly that I wouldn't be able to respond to potential issues quickly enough, adding to the stress.
I've given myself a deadline to resolve all my issues and release the first official version by the end of September. If I can't meet the deadline, I will step down from leading the project and transfer full rights over the repository and instance to the contributors. Of course, this includes the budget I mentioned earlier, earmarked for instance maintenance.
I feel truly awful about this. I can't even keep up with threads on Matrix Spaces, notifications here, etc. Right now, the only way to contact me is through the contact form. However, I want to catch up on everything as soon as possible and stabilize the situation. It's crucial to me, but at the moment, I can't put it above family matters. I apologize for letting you down, and I appreciate your words of support. If it weren't for such an amazing community, I might have given up a long time ago.
Ernest, please don't be so hard on yourself. Deadlines slip, even for products formally released by companies, and this is more of a hobby frankly. I think what might help is less of a deadline and more of a roadmap - like, here are the major bullet point items we want to target for release by end of 2023, by end of Q1 2024, and sometimes those slip but then the roadmap can be revised.
I've been updating my own kbin instance pretty regularly, every couple of weeks, and I've seen things become more stable over time (less frustrations in upgrading, more features, etc). I'm quite happy with the progress so far. This project has grown so much in such a short time, and the fact that the kbin issues matrix is much quieter than it was speaks to the growing stability of the platform.
As far as kbin.social itself, I would agree with some other folks that you might need more volunteers on the actual instance administration and moderation front.
And as far as spam - email, the original federated messaging platform, still has that problem! Each email provider has to handle it on their own, using increasingly sophisticated methods, and they're still not perfect and it's been decades. Yes, spam is frustrating, but due to the nature of ActivityPub we will always be in an escalating war with spam. It will never be solved, only mitigated for a time.
Anyway, perhaps I've written too much here, but I have a ton of confidence in this project and also in you, and I hope you look back and see how much has been accomplished in a short amount of time, how much kbin.social has grown, and how the amount of other contributors indicates an overall great level of confidence in what you've created.