In the past months development of Kbin slowly came to a halt, development was bottlenecked by a single maintainer. I have tried several times to start a discussion about the way of working and trying to address the problems and to come up with a plan to keep development doing and more importantly keep contributors happy!

Despite all of this; no response on Matrix and nothing has really changed at Kbin. I saw the project slowly dying over the past months, and I couldn’t let this happen. That’s why I decided to fork the project called Mbin. I wanted to avoid a fork initially, but I didn’t saw any way out.

Mbin is community-focused fork, build upon trust and embracing the Collective Code Construction Contract (C4).

Despite the fact I’m the creator of Mbin, I am NOT the only maintainer, several contributors already have owner rights on the GitHub organization as well as on the Matrix Space and Weblate. We are all maintainers, we peer-review each other’s code and are allowed to merge pull requests from other external contributors and our own. The community of Mbin will now decide what will be picked-up and resolved, what will be merged or not. The community is in charge. And I am “just” another contributor, following the C4 rules.

Mbin development has been accelerated tremendously over just one week time. With tons of improvements in GUI, backend, security and documentation. We have great internal discussions and a friendly community. We work as a team, sharing knowledge and helping each other out. We review and test our code changes together, we all feel responsible. I think all this is the real reason why I created the fork; it’s about the people and about empowerment.

Various instances already migrated towards Mbin, see: https://fedidb.org/software/mbin. Mbin is backwards compatible with kbin, so migration should be straight forward and easy.

Success story: Jerry almost gave up fedia.io, if it weren’t for Mbin, we would already have lost a big federated instance (I genuinely didn’t know he was about to give up). Luckily the fork gave him hope. And hopefully I gave everybody hope again.

  • TheVillageGuy@kbin.melroy.org
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    1 year ago

    You did the best thing imaginable for Kbin, given the circumstances. Almost everybody was waiting for something to happen. Not everybody was as outspoken about it as I was, but the vibe was evident.

  • Ignacio@kbin.social
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    1 year ago

    Good news. Although I’m satisfied so far with Kbin, it’s true that development was slowed, or stopped. It’s still too soon, but maybe I’ll consider to migrate over there. I’m too lazy.

  • melroy@kbin.melroy.orgOPM
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    1 year ago

    I only wanted to add the following, this is my personal opinion: Even if Kbin suddenly is also changing to C4 WoW, the damage is already done. My trust is gone. My planning is not to merge anymore personally.

    • fishos@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      The community of Mbin will now decide what will be picked-up and resolved, what will be merged or not.

      From your own post up there buddy. Can’t even keep the lie straight for 5 minutes. Your entire attitude has always been “my way or I go”. “I didn’t get what I wanted from the kbin team, so I tried to join the most popular instance and control that. They didn’t want me so I made my own instance. But that wasn’t enough so I made my own fork. But trust me guys, I can listen! Although here’s my opinion on why I will never work with these people anymore so their work, even if it matches mine exactly, will never be good enough and I’ll still want to exclude them. But we’re a team this time guys! I swear!”

      • melroy@kbin.melroy.orgOPM
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        4 months ago

        I never joined any other instance? I only run my own kbin instance from day 1 which is kbin.melroy.org. Not sure what you talking about.

        But yes I was not pleased how the kbin team was not allowed to merge PRs. Everything needed to go via Ernest. But I only started the fork after kbin halted development.

  • melroy@kbin.melroy.orgOPM
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    1 year ago

    I’m really impressed what we already achieved so far with our Mbin community, we did tons of GUI changes, bug fixes, introducing new features, improved Docker setup and documentation for both developers and instance owners alike. It’s very impressive. I want to thank you all! I see this a beginning of a new journey.

    Luckily, I think I’m no longer needed to setup the project. I will finish the C4 specification pull request, but apart from that I’m now “just” another contributor to Mbin. It’s nice to see that everyone now feels more responsible for the project and hopefully more empowered.

  • fishos@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    Oh look, it’s the guy who wanted to be the super hero developer who solves everything and everyone worships. But all the projects you’ve joined have “excluded” you. And then you post long rants about how “no one knows what they’re doing and if they really wanted to progress, they’d listen to ME!”. And now decide “screw you all, I’m building my own fork! With blackjack and hookers!”

    Yeah, hard pass.