Mbin is a decentralized content aggregator, voting, discussion and microblogging platform running on the fediverse network. It can communicate with many other ActivityPub services, including Kbin, Mastodon, Lemmy, Pleroma, Peertube. It is an open source alternative to other link aggregator services like Reddit. The initiative aims to promote a free and open internet.
Mbin is focused on what the community wants, pull requests can be merged by any repo owner (with merge rights in GitHub). Discussions take place on Matrix then consensus has to be reached by the community. If approved by the community, only one approval on the PR is required by one of the Mbin maintainers. It's built entirely on trust.
It seems it's claim to fame is being more open and accepting of community changes and improvements. It can install as either bare metal/VM or as a Docker container.
Although anyone can install it and self-host it, their project page also contains a link to various instances that already exist and which anyone can register on.
See https://github.com/MbinOrg/mbin
#technology #opensource #Fediverse #linkaggregator #decentralised
Honest question: what's the reason to make a fork instead of contributing do kbin itself?
Melroy, lead dev, is the kind of person that if you don't take his "advice", he goes "fine, my way or the highway!". He used to be a part of Lemmy dev supposedly. Then he was part of kbin dev. Then he tried to just make his own instance. Then when that didn't work he started Mbin(which, if you haven't realized, is named after him - Melroy Bin). Dude is pathologically egotistical.
Hi there, mbin dev member here. I do not know melroy personally, but I have never gotten the vibe that he is egotistical or wants to make the project his own. Never heard that he contributed to Lemmy...
Btw. we do not have a lead dev. He is the repo owner though
The core problem I had with kbin was that Ernest is just the kind of person who likes to work alone and in his own ways. That is just not a good fit for a project that gets contributions from the community (which I think he is not interested in). For example: I implemented a subscription panel in June/July 2023 and it got no reply from ernest for months. Then he replied once with the things he wanted changed and I did, then no reply anymore. I think it is still not implemented, but I lost intered. After I opened a PR about adding the same code to mbin I got some replies, answered them, changed the stuff that was complained about and voilá it got approved... It is just not encouraging to contribute to a project where your changes get accepted after a year if you're lucky. Mbin is just more open to people contributing.
But yeah the start was rocky as can be seen here: https://kbin.social/m/fediverse/t/610675
Oh, thanks for showing the other side! Like always, things are not just black and white.
I have never heard about Melroy before, but I was scared by the last comment. It's nice to hear that there are nice people working on this branch :)
Saw somewhere it was said the kbin side was going too slowly and not accepting some commits that their community gave. Some wanted to move quicker with newer features and enhancements.
My understanding of the situation is that Ernest, the main developer behind Kbin, thinks of the current Kbin as a proof of concept, and he is doing profound rewriting of the codebase to better fit his vision of how it should be working.
Meanwhile, other people wanted to contribute to Kevin directly, developing a better product on top of what Ernest considers to be too shaky foundations. So he's not all that interested in pursuing that part of the development before he is happy with the core.
This also leads to a dynamic where he still has his own vision for the project and it goes through him, whereas other contributors want to make it their own more and develop something different.
It's hard to see how to make everyone happy here without forking. Hopefully both projects can still gain from each other in the future: Mbin can benefit from the rewritten codebase of Kbin, and Kbin can implement features from Mbin after seeing that they are good and work well. In either case, the continued development as separate projects is probably not all that bad.
That makes sense!
For my basic knowledge working side by side with a lot of devs, I totally agree with the way Ernest thinks. It's essential for a product that's growing up to have a solid core that will not need to be rewrote in the near future.
But also, as an user, I keep wishing we could see more features, like the API for mobile apps.
I mean, besides what Ernest and Melroy thinks that's the right way, there's also what the users need, what the users want and what the project needs to escalate (new features vs core rewriting). And probably there's not a right answer for that.
Yeah, I think it became a bit of an impossible solution the second Ernest's proof of concept suddenly attracted a whole bunch of users and attention after the Reddit exodus. Kbin was clearly not ready, and I admire him for staying on course with the development after that despite pressures.
That said, users are not wrong to want easy to implement features asap. So I personally think the fork makes a lot of sense, though everyone could do without the occasional bad faith from some of the people involved.