this post was submitted on 09 Jan 2024
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Mbin is a fork of kbin: a decentralized content aggregator running on the Fediverse network (lemmy.ml)
submitted 10 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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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

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[–] [email protected] 25 points 10 months ago (3 children)

Honest question: what's the reason to make a fork instead of contributing do kbin itself?

[–] [email protected] 27 points 10 months ago (2 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 36 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) (1 children)

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://gehirneimer.de/m/[email protected]/t/124092/Mbin-A-kbin-fork-that-promises-to-never-review-PRs

[–] [email protected] 9 points 10 months ago

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 :)

[–] [email protected] 13 points 10 months ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 22 points 10 months ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 10 months ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 10 months ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 10 months ago (1 children)

some notes:

  • exposes reputation/karma points in profiles ( i know some lemmy users are looking for this)
  • does not federate downvotes (maybe someday!)
  • i would recommend >=8GB of ram (4 is just too close to minimum)
  • processing sensitive to external instances.. lemmy.ml knocked me over for a minute when it came back up due to my low processing resources.

https://moist.catsweat.com

[–] [email protected] 6 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) (1 children)

I don’t think karma should ever be visible for any reason and downvotes should be disabled. But I know that is not a very popular opinion. “Karma” should only be in the background, and for the purposes of moderation/admin needs (such as thresholds). Downvotes invariably become disagree buttons, and net karma doesn’t really mean anything other than someone has been on a long time.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 10 months ago (1 children)

yes! perfect example of how there is no one-size-fits-all.

many instances will and many will not. you do you.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago)

Yeah I think that’s definitely something beehaw gets right. It noticeably alters the tone of conversations when people can’t just downvote everything they don’t like. Kbin’s making votes public I think helps somewhat though.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 10 months ago (2 children)

What are the key differences? How is it more open?

[–] [email protected] 6 points 10 months ago

kbin had not been accepting some commits and apparently were moving quite slowly with newer features. So, this is more like a dev version type implementation. It is more "open" to changes and commits apparently. Not more "open" as in open-source.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 10 months ago

I think they meant the paragraph above it.

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.

Instead of kbin which is basically just one guy.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 10 months ago

What happened to Lbin?

[–] [email protected] 5 points 10 months ago (3 children)

The big question…

Do any of the apps work with it? I’m using Voyager right now, and this is a dealbreaker for me if it doesn’t. (I’m assuming the answer is no, but I thought I would ask.)

[–] [email protected] 2 points 10 months ago

There Matrix discussion forum may be best place to ask - https://matrix.to/#/#mbin:melroy.org

[–] [email protected] 1 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Both kbin and mbin function very well as progressive web apps, and shouldn't /require/ a discreet app like, imo, lemmy does.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 10 months ago

Gotcha. I'm not a huge fan of PWAs when it comes to Lemmy/kbin/mbin, but I'm willing to give it a try.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Feel like the *bin and the *key have a lot of cool features, but way too many forks to have a understandable product. It's pitty

[–] [email protected] 14 points 10 months ago (2 children)

It’s one of my main concerns with the fediverse, that tech people’s (and people generally) inclination to not work together and instead do their own thing will be detrimental on the whole.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 10 months ago (2 children)

I mean, everyone’s using activity pub protocol tho. I think when activity pub starts getting fragmented is when it’s time to worry.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago)

Yeah, this is what I was about to write. As long as they can all talk to each other, who cares? They used to be like a dozen popular email clients. It didn’t really create any issues (for the end user at least)

[–] [email protected] 4 points 10 months ago

The issue is quality. 2 mediocre platforms is worse than 1 decent platform.

Over on mastodon, for example, there's official mastodon ... and then there's a few forks of mastodon (eg glitch and hometown), pleroma and its fork akkoma, misskey and its forks sharkey, and firefish, and then forks of firefish, iceshrimp and catodon.

And yet there's a good amount of conversation about how more platform diversity is needed to compete with mastodon. None of the above mentioned alternatives are especially stable, or perceived to be stable (firefish for instance was very popular in 2023 but has literally burnt to the ground with the main dev just abandoning it and the main instance), and so instance admins tend to be wary about running them and so they don't get popular.

If half of the devs working on alternatives just banded together to make a compelling and stable and committed "alternative", the fediverse would be in a better position.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 10 months ago (2 children)

Which is EXACTLY this. Melroy(Mbin dev), was a Lemmy dev that was "ignored", then he was a kbin dev who was... "ignored". But then he ran his own instance, which was again, ignored. So then he started Mbin, which of course he named after himself(Melroy Bin). In between each of these attempts, he'd go to numerous communities and post long rants trying to call out the other devs about how terrible everyone else was and how no one is listening to his brilliance and he's the One True Savior of the fediverse.

Dude is pathologically egotistical and is exactly the kind of person I don't want admining anything.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 10 months ago

Then its great he has his own Fediverse with hookers and blackjack.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 10 months ago

Presuming your story is true (I don't know either way) ... yes, a place the fediverse attracts that kind of behaviour (as well as a few others that just aren't worth getting caught up in and relying on). And starting a fork is, unfortunately (as forks can be awesome things), a tell-tail sign.

Many are inclined to mock of be unhappy about how seriously the head of Mastodon takes himself (and how dominant his platform is)

he calls him the CEO of mastoodn, it's actually a registered non-profit company, he openly considers himself the BDFL (beneficent dictator for life)

but he's been at it since 2016, is committed, creates an appearance of stability and is the only one that's got the whole fediverse thing working on a significant scale, whatever flaws he and his project might have. All of the hacking culture and sentiment can only take a project so far ... as it ultimately needs people and users to be successful.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 10 months ago

One great instance of Mbin I've been on is kbin.run. So far, very stable and no complaints

[–] [email protected] 2 points 10 months ago (1 children)

I just tried signing up at fedia.io, and I got the response "429 Too Many Requests". It doesn't inspire confidence that I can't sign up for the largest and most popular (and represented in the screenshot above) instance.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 10 months ago (1 children)

That was the instance I signed up at, about 10 mins before I posted this link. Lemmy also went down in the last day, so nothing is bulletproof. But the site is working as I'm browsing and commenting right now.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Okay, I'll give it a few and try again.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 10 months ago (1 children)

And you shouldn't choose an instance just because it is "the largest" ;-) A big problem from which the fediverse suffers at the moment

[–] [email protected] 3 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Yeah, I definitely understand, which is why I moved off of lemmy.world. But the other mbin instances are really small in terms of members, so that makes me nervous that they aren't going to be around long term. I get it, there's no guarantee with any instance, but one that has a miniscule number of users makes me gun shy.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Well I can promise that my 2 instances will be around for a while :D That would be https://thebrainbin.org (English, stable) and https://gehirneimer.de (German, uses with some of the latest commits for testing)

[–] [email protected] 2 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago)

Thanks for the offer, but I don’t think Kbin/mbin is for me. I signed up for a smaller mbin instance to give it a try. I realized that I would have to manually move all my communities over (which is too many to do), and that some of the ones I follow and are active in aren’t federated with mbin.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 10 months ago (3 children)

I don't get the pull request part. does that mean each instance does not control who they federate with???

[–] [email protected] 7 points 10 months ago

No, the pull requests are to do with submissions of source code to the core project. The project owner has to review and accept those changes for them to happen (or not).

[–] [email protected] 4 points 10 months ago (1 children)

It's git terminology which boils down to that anyone can contribute to the source code if the community approves the changes made.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 10 months ago

thanks

[–] [email protected] 2 points 10 months ago (1 children)

That just refers to the source code. How instances operate is a separate thing.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 10 months ago

oh that makes sense. I was worried for a min.