Somebody who was previously active on the kbin codeberg repo has left that to make a fork of kbin called mbin.
repo: https://github.com/MbinOrg/mbin
In the readme it says:
Important: Mbin is focused on what the community wants, pull requests can be merged by any repo member. Discussions take place on Matrix then consensus has to be reached by the community. If approved by the community, no additional reviews are required on the PR. It’s built entirely on trust.
As a person who hangs around in repos but isn’t a developer that sounds totally insane. Couldn’t someone easily slip malicious, or just bad, code in? Like you could just describe one cool feature but make a PR of something totally different. Obviously that could happen to any project at any time but my understanding of “code review” is to at least have some due diligence.
I don’t think I would want to use any kind of software with a dev structure like this. Is it a normal way of doing stuff?
Is there something I’m missing that explains how this is not wildly irresponsible?
As for “consensus” every generation must read the classic The Tyranny of Stuctureless. Written about the feminist movement but its wisdom applies to all movements with libertarian (in the positive sense) tendencies. Those who do not are condemned to a life of drama, not liberation.
Yeah, that’s true. Real-life stuff was kinda more important for me at the moment than managing the project.
For me, it’s straightforward: I pushed some dev code that wasn’t even a complete feature, and it got approved in your pull request. That’s why I was advocating for everyone to only merged their own PRs in the /kbin repository – so that each person could take responsibility for their own work. I won’t go on about this any further.
As it should be, always, for everybody, you won’t ever hear me judge you on that, so please don’t try to make me look bad by implicitly suggesting I am.
What you failed to do however is delegate, even temporarily, your responsibilities to people you trust. Instead you left people who trusted you dangling, only sporadically feeding them promises you would never fulfill. It seems keeping them on a leash was kinda more important to you than securing the future of kbin.
I hope I’ll never have to mention this again, so you’ll never have to. Which would imply that you’ll have come to terms and lived up to your promises, both recent ones and from the past.
Yes, I say this fully aware - there are many things that I have failed at. Much of what I said, I failed to achieve. However, I never wanted to keep people on a leash; I am more of a person who prefers to stay on the sidelines and engage in what brings me the greatest pleasure - coding, just like any other contributor.
Believe me, I tried to delegate tasks, had many private conversations and discussions. Perhaps it wasn’t visible from the outside. However, in that mental state, the last thing I wanted to do was resolve conflicts among adults, and it all started to boil down to that. As @BaldProphet mentioned - “microcosm of the open-source community.”
Moreover, there were too many different visions of the project, ignoring requests, etc. That’s precisely why I decided to temporarily halt development, to secure the future of kbin. It was my decision, and as I mentioned, forking turned out to be the best thing that could happen. As you can see, the differences are not that significant, but it will be easier for all of us - especially since we can always draw inspiration from each other, and I don’t think anyone has a problem with that.
However, I still maintain contact with many people, and sometimes they mention to me the attitude of certain individuals on mbin’s Matrix - it is at least puzzling. In any case, I want to stay away from that and focus on my work with contributors who understand and prefer my approach.
Despite the fork. I hope we can learn from each other indeed. That will only benefit both of us.
Although we merge into main it’s not a release, we use GitHub/Docker tags to mark releases. And use semantic versioning if needed for minor and patch releases.
Thank you for your in depth, genuine, reply
I am sorry but I’m having a hard time believing you when you say that you were seriously trying to delegate, as not a single soul ever said anything which would remotely confirm this. I believe you had conversations, but they ultimately didn’t result in anything in this context.
I am not sure how to interpret this as there were no conflicts that I’m aware of that needed resolving during your absence, everybody was just waiting
There’s nothing wrong with being like that, there are other people willing to do things like resolving issues. Like me. I realize I appeared out of nowhere. As a new instance owner it took a while for me to notice, but when the situation became clear to me I was ready to jump in and help, just like all the other people who had offered their help (before me).
You’ve basically just admitted that you were either incapable of or unwilling to engage in structural problem solving and management of the kbin project. That’s fine, but you should have reached out and informed the community as soon as you became aware of this.
Yes, forking can have positive side effects and perhaps having two versions in development synchronously can merit more than one. This however was not the proper way to achieve this and using it as an excuse to justify your behavior and inaction is unjust.
However, it is not too late. You can still do the right thing by starting delegation now, by clearly assigning multiple people to all essential tasks, and giving multiple people complete control of kbin.social, so that, should a similar situation occur in the future, you and the community will confidently know that the project will not grind to a halt again.
Then seek a constructive dialog with the mbin community and we can make the project, in it’s current for, work. Together.
If you feel uncomfortable with or are have trouble doing any of this, as you’ve clearly indicated you’d rather spend your time on coding, you are always welcome to ask me for advice.
Never hesitate to ask for help.
You see, I don’t know how I would act now in hindsight. You have to take into consideration that, at the peak, hundreds of people willing to help appeared out of nowhere, people I didn’t know at all. By nature, I am rather distrustful and approach new relationships cautiously - I really need a lot of time to get to know another person well. It’s true that after some time, a certain structure began to take shape, but not everything is always as it seems at first glance - especially when so many strong personalities converge in one place. Perhaps it was a mistake that instead of addressing many things publicly, I tried to solve them in private conversations.
And you’re right, anyone who knows me a bit knows that I have trouble asking for help. Sometimes, I take too much on myself, which is not good in the long run. I’m working on it. But this time was something more. I promised to take care of things, and under normal circumstances, it would probably be easy for me because I have some experience in resolving such situations. But these were not normal circumstances. I realized this too late. I was just overwhelmed by real life. So many problems collapsed on me that I could never have anticipated. These were the worst months of my entire life. I don’t want to write too much about it or make excuses, but at some point, even getting out of bed or eating something became difficult. When I tried to get back to the project, the thought of the backlog and how many people I let down made me feel sick. That’s why I’m really glad to be where I am now. I can only apologize to you and try to fix some mistakes. I need to do it at my own pace. I want to clean up the mess, find my rhythm, and then engage in broader communication with people. I’m still recovering on my own.
What I did was indeed a bit malicious, but I believe it was the only way to achieve the intended effect. The fact that I really like you all should not mean that I will be uncritical of your work. I don’t want you to fully trust everything that comes from me - only in this way can we fully utilize the potential we have in developing the fediverse. Frontend errors are just a trivial matter; they can be quickly found and fixed. However, the situation is completely different when it comes to backend mechanics. Seemingly minor errors when I was developing karab.in made me undo them for weeks. With larger instances, there may not be a second chance. This is not a centralized system, you have to consider others above all. That’s why I am so sensitive to it and have so many doubts about making changes.
It’s not that I want to make things difficult for you. I really care about mbin developing in the right direction. I am curious about what the future will bring. I would like kbin to remain rather ascetic, subtle, and something that you need to learn and understand a bit, rather than having everything handed to you on a platter. Mbin can be a different face, with more features, bolder, and I know that you have many great ideas for it. A simple example is the labels for marking mods/admins/ops that you are currently working on - kbin has it marked in a subtle way with a faint left border outline - you can do it differently, and that’s great. As someone very wise once said, “If it’s not diverse, it’s not the fediverse.”
@melroy I am sure that this is just the beginning of our shared adventure. I hope you won’t hold a grudge against me for long ;) Guys, I deeply regret that we met at this stage of my life, but as I say, all I can do is try to fix my mistakes. Thanks for everything!
deleted by creator
OP here. I was intending for this thread to be about the mbin fork and its governance, not about kbin. But I guess I kinda got answers to my questions (in so much as they exist) and then some.
I have no particular relationship/loyalty to ernest or to kbin. Like a lot of people, I just got here. I may or may not stick around.
I myself am a person who tends to become intensely excited by new projects. I can come in with lots of ideas and energy feeling like I will be comitted for a long time. But can then loose interest just as quickly. (It’s taken a lot of times around the block to learn that.) So I understand why a maintainer of an open source project would have reticence to bring me, or someone like me, into their project in a position of authority without enough time (months -> years) to prove the comitment and to demonstrate competance. In fact I would regard it as poor judgement to just accept a ton of input like that. Just accepting whoever is offering energy can really lead to a lot of problems. I’ve been on both sides of those problems!
I started this thread to ask questions about mbin because I’d never seen an open source projects described like this. The mbin folks came in not really to provide answers to those questions, but to make insults on how they perceive ernest’s personality and moral charecteristics. These based on vague but petty sounding grievances. None of these posts do much to reccomend the project to me. Sounds like waa waa waa babies. If the main grievance is they weren’t allowed authority on kbin main, then I agree with that judgment based on the posts here.
Hopefully everyone simmers down. Maybe mbin can define itself in a less reactionary way in the weeks and months to come.
@radek @cacheson @TheVillageGuy @BaldProphet @melroy @ernest
Well then. I don’t know what happened here. I was asked about this situation so I linked here, to find, to my surprise, that my final comment is missing.
This is a month ago now and I don’t want to continue the thread, but also do not like my comments going missing. So here is my response to the above
I understand your response, if I would stumble across this just new I'd respond the same. This situation had been going on for months and this was in fact the first time ever that Ernest has properly responded to a message, anywhere, from anyone, since he went silent. So I took this opportunity to ask questions and get answers from him. A lot of people had already given up or lost interest, but I wanted to know for sure. I was undecided up to now, but have always expressed my serious doubts about whether a person like him is suitable as a leader of a project like this. Not because of his personality, I am sure he's an awesome guy, but because of his lack of professionalism when things go wrong. Don't get me wrong, I felt very sorry for him all along, he was in a terrible position, no doubt about that and as I've said before I fully sympathize with him. But he should not have dragged the project and its community down with him. I'm glad he's climbing back up again and with him his loyal supporters. What this entire roller-coaster ride, including this thread, has demonstrated to me over the past few months is, sadly, that should something go wrong again, it will very likely happen in the exact same way. That for me removes all doubt; I conclude that he is not a suitable leader. I am sorry to say it but it's the way it is. There is no grievance, but if this all sounds like waa waa babies to you I can fully understand. People were not pleased by the bad code being planted so that kind of set the tone and I understand I sounded like I was trying to make him sound bad. Everything I've said to and/or asked about him is based on reality, however. It makes sense to me it came across as reactionary, but it's done now. A lot was cleared up for me, all doubt has been removed. Let's all move on with whichever version we prefer and make this great project better than everYou know you come across as incredibly toxic, yes?
At this point you are just evidencing that Ernest’s judgement was spot on.
Now, you see, this is the part that I as an uninvolved observer who’s just now catching up on the happenings do not get. Promises that were never fullfilled?
How long has or hasn’t this actually been an issue? Because from what I can see looking at the codeberg commits, it seems like development stalled for how long, like a month or so?
I totally get not wanting to be left hanging and having some answers and pathway for how contributions can happen. But as you also agree on, I also get real life being more important and getting in the way sometimes. And in that sense, being out of it for a month or so does not exactly seem like an earth-shattering amount, even if it’s annoying when it happens to be the project lead and not much can happen.
I just can’t help but feel like all of this has been pretty impatient and premature, which also makes it hard for me to really understand the point of the fork, even if I can relate to the basic rationale behind it. But then again, I have no knowledge of the direct going ons and communications between the contributors and the events that led to this. So there might be a lot I’m just not getting.
@fr0g I am in substantial agreement with you after reading all this back n forth.
Possibly becausE - you kkkw, urgent real-life stuff got in the way