Yip, Sublinks.

I'm not sure how far along they are, I don't think I've seen a sublinks instance in the wild. Their demo seems to be running the Lemmy frontend still, if I'm understanding things right. But it's basically a community project to build lemmy but in java instead of rust and they have a lot more moderation tools. It's what Beehaw are planning to migrate to, but I think it might not be ready yet.

I don't think anyone really knows. It's the single person issue, that Ernest was the only person to have access to do anything. It seems something is personally wrong for him, maybe unwell, maybe something else, but no one hears from him for months. The flagship kbin instance run by Ernest, https://kbin.social/, has had an error and hasn't worked for months.

To my knowledge, this is the last anyone has heard from him:

I have been away from home for a long time now and do not have all accesses. I will try to restore access in the coming days. The care of the instance will also be handed over.

That was 5 months ago.

It's clear something is very wrong, but because Ernest is the only one with access that means no one can help. Mbin forked Kbin and have been actively developing Mbin. Many, if not most of the sites called "kbin" are now running Mbin.