what happened to kbin?

OpenStars , 11 minutes 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. sublinks.org (link to GitHub there too)

Blaze , 1 hour ago

!AskMbin

Chozo , 1 hour 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 , 1 hour 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 , 1 hour 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.

originalucifer , 59 minutes 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 , 37 minutes 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

RedSquadCampFollower OP , 1 hour 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 , 56 minutes 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

originalucifer , 1 hour 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 , 47 minutes ago

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

Question, how do we donate to this project?

originalucifer , 29 minutes 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

jwr1 , 27 minutes ago (edited 20 minutes 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.

sabreW4K3 , 2 hours ago

I think most of the kbin instances switched to mbin