cross-posted from: https://discuss.tchncs.de/post/4735963
Learned about this fork from a post about a potential shutdown of Fedia.io, a Kbin instance.
https://lemmy.world/post/6797580
As you can see in the comments, https://kbin.run/ already moved to Mbin.
Interesting to see if that can help with the development of new features compared to kbin being managed mostly by the main developer.
Is it me or the description leaves something to be desired? What is it that sets mbin apart from kbin, wasn’t kbin developed by “the community” in the first place?
The general issue of Kbin is that most of the development has to be approved by the main contributor of the project.
This fork is meant to be easier to contribute to. Let’s see how it evolves.
It makes sense to approve things and keep navigating in one direction. What was the original problem?
The problem with kbin is that the project maintainer was leaving PRs to rot for months. Even things like PRs to update dependencies for security patches weren’t getting updated. The community-based one looks to resolve that by running by simple consensus.
I’m not sure I agree that’s a good idea, giving full governance to the community like that, but since Kbin’s development has slowed, and the app itself has proven itself to be less-than-desireable to maintain, this is a good chance at finding new direction.
Thanks for the explanation. Since KBin is more fragmented and does not build up enough steam for further development, it’s maybe a better option to move to Lemmy at this point.
Also need to factor in the codebase of Lemmy. Kbin is based on the Symfony framework so the barrier to entry is going to be lower, hopefully getting more people interested in contributing.
It’s still a pretty bleeding edge project, running PHP 8.3 and Symfony 6, so that’s nice at least
I wouldn’t necessarily agree on that, but Lemmy is a more mature code-base which is a boon for sure in Lemmy’s favour. Kbin’s only been in development since Janaury 2021, with the canonical instance being as new as June 2023. Meanwhile Lemmy’s been in development since February 2019, with the canonical instance opening up in May 2019.
Even if you check the last week of commits;
Kbin's had 1
while Lemmy's had 1.2 per day
To be upfront with my biases though, I prefer Lemmy just for the UI and UX. I find Kbin difficult and slow to navigate in comparison, and frankly, I find many of the least tolerable people on Lemmy to be from Kbin. Obviously this doesn’t include you, but my perception nevertheless influences my biases.
Lemmy is also kind of struggling to get contributors onboard due to Rust not being that popular for Web.
Maybe mbin will become a viable equivalent just by having more contributors. Let’s see
I wonder if a platform that’s using more enterprise-y components would make things easier to onboard contribs? Java/Kotlin in Spring Boot w/React?
With the right contribution guidelines and solid PR pipelines to ensure code quality, it seems like pretty much any engineer could hop in and start developing. Especially if local resources like containers could be leveraged to allow rapid development.
That could work. I’m always surprised that with 30k monthly active users, most of them tech people, there’s not a few Java dev who started a project
Thanks, I understand now
what are the feature/performance differences that would necessitate me upgrading today?
You can have a look at the post linked in the OP. The Fedia admin had issues running Kbin, which mbin seems to have addressed
It’s a good move I feel. The original velocity on kbin has been lost over the past few months as the main owner struggles to get his own personal stuff organized. I’m pretty happy with this fork, the idea being that everyone will be about to contribute and perhaps these changes will eventually be brought back into kbin if they’re open to it.
