It's kind of interesting to watch in open source which projects survive and which get forked and essentially made irrelevant. It basically becomes a referendum on the vision of the original individual or team and how well they're serving the collective user base. If they aren't accepting PR's and competently managing development, they'll likely be forked. So I'm glad to see that folks are making progress with mbin and I can't help thinking that its entire existence is probably due to individuals not being able to agree on a roadmap for the platform. If anybody has any info on any drama that led to this, I'd be curious to read about it.
this post was submitted on 30 Oct 2023
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Hello! I had the same question and I've got a perspective from one fellow contiributor: Matrix thread. (There'll probably be an error when you first open it: join the room with your account and try my link once more.)
Ootl, what was wrong with kbin that led to the fork? I thought Ernest had quite a bit of support from the community
Ernest has some big life stuff going on right now (you can check out his posts if you really need to know), and hasn't been able to review/merge in PRs for kbin lately. Furthermore, kbin.social doesn't even have the latest changes that are merged in, so the community fork mbin was made by @melroy, one of the most prolific contributors to kbin.
Thank you for providing some context for this. It kind of sounds like a fork might not have been necessary if Ernest was willing to make @melroy a maintainer. Do you know if there's any philosophical reason he wasn't willing to do that? Real life stuff comes and goes, but it seems silly to halt the "official" project that others are relying on and still wanting to improve upon and thereby force a fork. As it stands right now, it sounds like it will be awkward for Ernest to come back in and try to restart work on kbin and will be increasingly awkward the more that mbin progresses, becomes the standard, and the code bases diverge.
Despite being maintainer of Kbin (incl. several others), we wasn't allowed to merge other PR changes except my own or changes that Ernest didn't like (eg. GUI pull requests were reverted again). Then when development slowly became to a halt, I didn't want the project to die. I didn't saw any other solution than to fork the project. Not only that, we also didn't like some changes from the past, which Mbin also rolled-back (like only show local magazines in the random sectors in the sidebar).
The fork by the community for the community also allows us to do multiple things from the start: 1. No single maintainer anymore. 2. Introducing a C4 contract: https://rfc.zeromq.org/spec/44/ 3. More transparency and giving all contributors owner rights on all platforms incl but not limited by GitHub, Weblate and Matrix. Allowing multiple people to become fully responsible for the project. Having discussions about contents, when we as a community agree on changes PRs can be merged after 1 owner approval. Various instances now moved to Mbin (like https://fedia.io/ ), because they saw hope again. As stated earlier, we also moved to GitHub now and to the hosted weblate.org instance. Currently the development is booming, because it's not getting reversed and slowed down.
We had ~150 PRs in a only 2 weeks time (Kbin has this number over a year not a week or two). The amount of improvements in the code, bug fixes, GUI, docker setup, documentation and security fixes as well as various features are impressive. Mbin is not about me, it's about the community now.
See also: https://kbin.melroy.org/m/updates/t/55330/Mbin-is-born-Fork-of-kbin
Wondering why a move from Codeberg (non-profit, free software, self-hostable) to Github (propietary software, Microsoft)? Seems like Codeberg would be more aligned to the project's values.
I agree but the reason was simple. Codeberg.org had too many down time issues. I and the community was impacted by the codeberg issues on almost a weekly basis. Hence the reason to move. I could also go to gitlab, but to keep reusing the Forgejo runners, github has the same workflow syntax. Anyhow, it's also not up to me anymore. If the community decides to move to another git server I'm also fine with that. But I doubt the community wants to move back to codeberg.
In retrospective, it's a practical decision to move away from downtimes, especially seeing as development is so rapid now.
We might do a mirror to Codeberg to avoid a complete dependency on GitHub, while accepting PRs on the side. Priorities tell us to postpone this idea in favor of long-awaited changes and fixes, though! 😉
I was trying to setup multiple mirrors for myself as well, but both Codeberg and even sr.ht (sourcehut) makes it hard to just setup a simple mirror.. Why do they make it so hard? I now just went for GitLab instead (https://gitlab.melroy.org/melroy/mbin which is now a mirror at least). But even then, it required GitLab Premium to have a repo pull mirror, luckily I have my solution for that: https://blog.melroy.org/2021/gitlab-pull-from-remote-repo/
I've been tossing around CI pipelines for my work just for mirroring because of the patch work of support that repos have right now ...
Speaking for myself, I greatly appreciate the fact that it was moved to Github because 99% of all open source projects I've ever wanted to contribute to in the past have all been on Github. Kbin (and alexapy, on gitlab) have been the only exceptions.
And that's not even mentioning my work also uses Github for our internal repos.
Speaking purely selfishly, it's simply more convenient to be able to manage and track my time and contributions all in a single place, and I can't imagine I'm alone. I'm looking forward to seeing Codeberg's long-term goals of federation see fruit, but for right now it was simply an obnoxious extra hurdle.
Thank you for laying it all out there. It sounds like you're doing it the right way 🙂
I only know a bit of the story. I don't think Ernest has done anything wrong, per se, but I don't think he was prepared for the Reddit migration. He put in a ton of time and work and seems to have gotten burned out. It's still missing some pretty basic features.
For instance, I know kbin doesn't have api support, so apps like Artemis are unable to plug in and use it effectively. It sounds like mbin is already further along on that front.
I think the original vision of kbin sounds really cool. It's basically a tighter integration with Mastadon while maintaining a more reddit-like feel and foundation.
I'll be curious to see where it goes in the future and wish all the developers well. For now, it looks like mbin is the path forward.
don't know what the background story is, just ran across the fork and figured I'd share it
that seems like a pretty sensible reason, open source working as intended
Yea this is the power of open-source indeed. See also my response to "stu" a little down below in this same thread.
@melroy @yogthos @wahming @SamXavia (et al.) Thank you for the explanation! While I'm not a kbin user myself (I just have a Lemmy account), I'm still glad (as a threadiverse and fediverse user) there are people keeping the project going and developing it. I can definitely understand the sudden influx of reddit users being quite a shock for maintainers, so it's heartening to see the platform survive and continue onwards, thanks to the magic of being open-source.
I'm very excited for mbin. I hope it continues to gain traction. I'd love to see it get support with Artemis, the iOS app.
Mbin's API is 100% compatible with kbin as of today, so @hariette should have little to no issues pointing Artemis at Mbin instances.
Cool to see it's getting traction, already 14 instances!
we're making it super easy for any existing kbin instance to migrate to Mbin, just a matter of pointing git at the new repo, pull, and update as usual.
That's great, well done!
A fun story: I was curating my magazine on Melroy's instance and didn't butt heads with any regression when he switched from Kbin to Mbin. Nice to see priorities set straight on migration!
Does anybody know if there are significant differences in moderation or the federation of moderation actions? One of the few things keeping me from switching to kbin.
We're busy fixing the cascading problems in PostgreSQL design, allowing the removal of magazines, something that is still not available for some reason. After that, the mbin community will most likely further improve the moderation system. Regarding federating, we do already support all ActivityPub types (incl Services, which are bot accounts).