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what happened to kbin? (lemmy.world)

submitted 5 months ago by RedSquadCampFollower@lemmy.world to c/fediverse@lemmy.world

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Is the kbin project completely dead?

the repo has nothing going on

the kbin.social website partly loads with error

did it just evaporate? or what?

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[-] originalucifer@moist.catsweat.com 128 points 5 months ago

the original developer mentioned handing off the site/project to other people due to personal issues but that was like a month ago.

this is part of the reason it was forked to mbin. the risk of a project being managed by a single person instead of a community is very real.

it seems dead, but i like to remember there would be no mbin without kbin

[-] wildncrazyguy138@fedia.io 13 points 5 months ago

True that, I just took a look at the FAQ and it still references kbin.

Question, how do we donate to this project?

[-] BentiGorlich@gehirneimer.de 20 points 5 months ago

We do not have a "project fund" or something like that. Some of us have donation sites to keep the servers running:

mine: https://liberapay.com/BentiGorlich
@debounced@kbin.run https://kbin.run/about
@melroy@kbin.melroy.org https://melroy.org/thanks.html

My opinion: I do not want to get paid to develop mbin. That creates an obligation and turns it into something like a job. I already have a job and intend to keep it, additionally I don't want to take the fun out of developing mbin. To commit to it full time or apply for grants or anything would currently be a big mistake I think

[-] Ludrol@szmer.info 6 points 5 months ago

I do not want to get paid to develop mbin.

In couple of years you will burn out doing this for free. Not getting paid opens up the project for another Jia Tan to come along and smuggle malware.

There was recent talk by Rockstar Programmer Dylan Beattie that highlighted this problem. His website https://freeasinweekend.org/ and YT talk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vzYqxo13I1U

You don't need to go 100% job or 100% mbin. You could theoretically go for less hours (like Fridays off) to work on mbin.

[-] BentiGorlich@gehirneimer.de 10 points 5 months ago

Maybe in the future. Currently so few people are using mbin that I doubt it would be any substantial amount. It also creates a lot more work when doing your taxes. So yeah if mbin gets a user base like lemmy currently has this would be another story. But it does not and it does not look like we will be there any time soon

[-] jwr1@kbin.earth 12 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago)

I don't think there is a way to donate (monetarily) directly to Mbin, at least not at the moment.

The second best thing might would be to donate to server admins, which a lot of them actually are Mbin developers anyway.

[-] originalucifer@moist.catsweat.com 8 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago)

depends on what kind of contribution you would like to make. i think they're mostly looking for development, testing and documentation help.

there are some great links from the main github; https://github.com/MbinOrg/mbin including the matrix channels

[-] celeste@kbin.earth 96 points 5 months ago

https://codeberg.org/Kbin/kbin-core/issues/1383#issuecomment-1999046

The guy in charge was having medical and personal issues. And doesn't seem to have access to everything at the moment. It's a bummer, and I hope things get better for him, but that's how projects like this go sometimes.

[-] sabreW4K3@lazysoci.al 65 points 5 months ago

I think most of the kbin instances switched to mbin

[-] Chozo@fedia.io 56 points 5 months ago

Ernest, the lead dev for Kbin, has had a lot of big events happen in his life recently, so he has a tendency to just kinda disappear for weeks/months at a time while the project gets put on hold. He'll usually come back, announce new plans for development, maybe push out a few updates, and then inevitably go radio silent again.

I believe he's got a few people assisting him now, but development has definitely slowed to the point of becoming concerning. I think it might be time for the Mbin team to start getting a little more free with the fork.

[-] originalucifer@moist.catsweat.com 15 points 5 months ago

I think it might be time for the Mbin team to start getting a little more free with the fork.

eh? what do you mean?

[-] Chozo@fedia.io 30 points 5 months ago

I believe that currently, Mbin isn't making any drastic changes, and relying mostly on Kbin's existing code as its base. As far as I'm aware, the Mbin team are mostly just doing maintenance-level development; fixing things as they break and making optimizations, but not so much in the way of developing new features. Mbin is currently just basically a copy of Kbin, without much distinguishing the two.

Since Kbin doesn't seem to be moving much at all, I think it might be a good idea for Mbin to start flexing their own muscles a bit, and making it into its own separate project. Otherwise, having a copy of a stale project just leaves you with two stale projects.

[-] BentiGorlich@gehirneimer.de 23 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago)

Mbin isn't making any drastic changes

UI wise, that one is definitely true

and relying mostly on Kbin's existing code as its base

This one most certainly not. We actually stopped porting kbin code a few months into the project, because it just was too much work and it was obvious that Ernest didn't want us to. So everything which changed on mbin in the about 8-10 months since, was purely our own work. Of course the basis will always be kbin, but the form will most likely change

We've been keeping the UI mostly as is, because we all like it, however on the backend site of it a lot has changed. The biggest problems kbin had were compatibility wise (federation) and scaling wise. These were the points where we made huge changes. The federation compatibility has improved a lot (yes there is still a lot to do) and scaling/performance has also improved a ton.

The biggest UI changes we made are:

new filter designs that work for threads as well as microblogs
a subscription panel
a usable instance wide modlog
a cake day display
and more stuff that I am forgetting at the moment (it's been a while since I looked at kbin and I am mostly a backend dev)

The backend changes we improved are (imo) more impactful:

(next release) direct messages are federating
(next release) pins federate
deleting users federate
magazine descriptions are federating correctly
mods federate
reports federate
incoming likes are working
the "hot" sort actually makes sense with lemmy content because it also looks at upvotes and not just at boosts
completely redone the hashtag system so it scales at all
completely redone the background worker system so it scales better (partly next release)

And these are only the changes I could think of in 5 minutes. We likely changed a lot more things, which I just forgot.

[-] Chozo@fedia.io 4 points 5 months ago

Holy shit, that's awesome! Thanks for sharing!

[-] melroy@kbin.melroy.org 4 points 5 months ago

Yes indeed, we made a lot of changes under the hood!

[-] Blaze@sopuli.xyz 4 points 5 months ago

Thanks for the insights!

[-] originalucifer@moist.catsweat.com 19 points 5 months ago

youre not wrong, they spent a lot of time refactoring things, and still are.

that said, the list of changes in the last several versions is very long, and the code base is no longer trivially similar. looking through the waiting prs, there are a lot of interesting bits like extending microblog AP connectivity (tag handling).

the mbin guys have been pumping out releases steadily since the fork, including implementing managed documentation and version numbering. it has well exceeded kbin at this stage.

theyre prepping for a 1.7 release soon. when was the last kbin update? to me, theres only one stale project here.

[-] Chozo@fedia.io 8 points 5 months ago

Thanks for the insight! I'm not super familiar with how the development cycle goes, so my thoughts are coming from the standpoint of a user experiencing both platforms. I'm sure that a lot of the back-end stuff has probably had a lot of improvements, but the end-user experience between Kbin and Mbin are still largely identical, I feel.

I was gonna load up Kbin to try to do a live comparison but, uh... Yeah, who knows when that'll be possible again lol

[-] moon@lemmy.cafe 4 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago)

So it basically failed the bus factor

Hopefully mbin becomes more resilient, or if Lemmy just gets some nice rewrites.

[-] cabbage@piefed.social 3 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago)

I'm using both Mbin and Piefed and I'm loving both! It's absolutely not looking bleak. :)

[-] RedSquadCampFollower@lemmy.world 2 points 5 months ago

it might be time for the Mbin team to start getting a little more free with the fork.

the impression i had of mbin was very "anything goes" did that not end up being how things shaped up??

[-] originalucifer@moist.catsweat.com 11 points 5 months ago

its a community. anyone can generate a pr, code it up and it gets discussed. so far there has been no crazy drama about what to include or not.. no one has proffered any incompatible ideas. its been quite pleasant

its all public though, in the matrix or github channels

[-] BentiGorlich@gehirneimer.de 6 points 5 months ago

That was the message that was pushed out when @melroy@kbin.melroy.org started the fork, because a lot of people were not particularly fond of the way he did it. We were trash talked a lot in the first months and obviously (and sadly) that kinda stuck on a lot of people.

[-] melroy@kbin.melroy.org 5 points 5 months ago

I did the fork in the best way I could think of. Including a very detailed Collective Code Construction Contract for contributors: https://github.com/MbinOrg/mbin/blob/main/C4.md

[-] PlasticExistence@lemmy.world 3 points 5 months ago

I'll never fully understand why humans are so quick to judge and offer non-constructive criticism on someone else's creative work. It seems like the least knowledge are most often the loudest in this regard.

[-] cabbage@piefed.social 4 points 4 months ago

Communication is difficult, especially over text, and emotions can get strong as there is a lot of work involved. Software developers are not always the greatest diplomats. Well-intended constructive feedback is often read as criticism, and situations escalate. And for whatever reason people love picking sides.

At least Mbin seems like a healthy project now, and since Kbin.social went down for good it's hard to argue a fork wasn't needed. Hopefully Ernest is alive and recovering well - he did us all a huge service by creating Kbin and making it open source.

[-] PlasticExistence@lemmy.world 2 points 4 months ago

Agreed. Diplomacy is not a skill that many people practice, and even when they do misunderstandings happen over text too easily.

[-] bacon_saber@fedia.io 18 points 5 months ago

Maybe helpful to some people who land on this thread: current list of mbin instances

[-] Fitik@fedia.io 18 points 5 months ago

Mbin also got a join site

https://joinmbin.org/

[-] jwr1@kbin.earth 9 points 5 months ago

Hey, thanks for linking that. I actually made that from scratch within the past month. It has dedicated Servers, Apps, and Releases pages, and also a home screen for info about Mbin. The home page needs a lot of work though, so if anyone here is good at UI design and would like to help, feel free to comment.

[-] bacon_saber@fedia.io 5 points 5 months ago

Oh nice!

[-] secret300@lemmy.sdf.org 1 points 4 months ago

does mbin federate with lemmy nicely?

[-] OpenStars@discuss.online 9 points 5 months ago

Pretty much, as others have explained here. I wanted to add that in addition to its fork Mbin there is also the Sublinks project to make a new implementation of the ActivityPub protocol and thus surf the Fediverse independent of Lemmy. https://sublinks.org/ (link to GitHub there too)

[-] ProdigalFrog@slrpnk.net 7 points 5 months ago

Piefed is another Lemmy compatible alternative that looks quite promising: https://piefed.social/

[-] OpenStars@discuss.online 5 points 5 months ago

Thank you, I keep mixing it up with Pixelfed in my mind and forget that it exists:-).

It looks both really primitive (e.g. comment from Rima about lack of moderation tools) yet also extremely sophisticated at the same time. Like for me the upper right hand menu bar disappears entirely in dark mode (Android Firefox) - it seems still fully functional but I could not see it to know to click under most conditions - but those category arrangements and how they improve discoverability, it just makes so much sense!

Wow, now I'm as excited about this project as about Sublinks:-).

[-] ProdigalFrog@slrpnk.net 4 points 5 months ago

Yes, those image layouts are fantastic for art communities! It definitely still has a lot of rough edges, UI wise.

I think he's made some good strides with the mod tools, as seen here: https://piefed.social/post/167045

I'm glad we have a couple promising alternatives, and it'll be exciting to see how they evolve differently ^^

[-] OpenStars@discuss.online 5 points 5 months ago

Oh wow, community wikis with version history even - that's fantastic.

Best of all though seems to be that it is in a language that people actually use - no disrespect to Rust bc it's arguably the best, certainly the hottest language right now, but it definitely seems to be limiting progress that so few people are willing to learn it.

[-] cabbage@piefed.social 4 points 4 months ago

I think it's also worth highlighting how PieFed interactions with other fediverse services. Both a.gup.pe groups and PeerTube channels integrate super well, and you can follow them like any other community.

In practice, this means that content from technology content creators posted on PeerTube will appear directly within the technology topic; videos posted to flipboard.video are pushed directly to the fediverse topic. Discussions and upvotes are, of course, federated directly to PeerTube.

As I love the potential of PeerTube but find it lacking in discoverability, this is something I really love.

[-] OpenStars@discuss.online 3 points 4 months ago

I am glad to see this level of interactivity. At the same time, I hope it doesn't try to do too much at once - like trying to be all things to all people holding it back too much from moving forward in any one lane, if that makes sense?

On the other hand, the developer can do whatever they want, so I totally get working on the exciting stuff, especially if they (unlike Ernst) are amenable to allowing others to flesh in the details for the stuff that they enjoy less.

Wow, the more I learn about it, the more exciting it seems!? Thanks for sharing that.:-)

[-] RedSquadCampFollower@lemmy.world 2 points 4 months ago

a.gup.pe groups

Guppe groups look like regular users you can interact with using your existing account on any ActivityPub service, but they automatically share anything you send them with all of their followers.

Follow a group on @a.gup.pe to join that group

Mention a group on @a.gup.pe to share a post with everyone in the group

New groups are created on demand, just search for or mention @YourGroupNameHere@a.gup.pe and it will show up

Visit a @a.gup.pe group profile to see the group history

is this like a hashtag?

[-] cabbage@piefed.social 2 points 4 months ago

I guess the main difference is that once you tag a.gup.pe, your post gets relayed to all followers of the group - independent of whether they are already federated with you. So kind of like hashtags, but it allows content to travel further.