Mbin instances

RmDebArc_5@sh.itjust.works to Fediverse@lemmy.world – 63 points –

Quick question, I’m looking to make an Mbin account and just wanted to ask if there is any lemmy.ml type of situation to be aware of.

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When I created the Mbin fork, I got a lot of hate without any reason. The reason the fork was created was simply because the kbin development was stopping their development. And the project was a bit trapped by a single maintainer. Hence also the reason I introduced C4 spec: https://github.com/MbinOrg/mbin/blob/main/C4.md.

Since C4 spec is in place, I'm not the only maintainer. Multiple people have full rights of the project. But I'm also tired about all the sh*ttalk about us.

If you have any follow-up questions to me personally (I can only speak on my own behalf). Just post them below my comment.

It seems there are always people on the internet who spread negativity about those who actually create things. Best you can do is ignore them.

Apparently so. And I don't even get paid to do development. I also have a full-time job at the same time. So Mbin development takes a lot time and effort. And people don't see that.

I just checked out your website, you have a lot of active projects, impressive! I only work on Lemmy, fulltime, but yet there is way too much work.

I got a lot of hate without any reason.

I never really got it either, thank you for your work!

There's a list on the Mbin's website, I'm surprised it wasn't mentioned yet

https://joinmbin.org/servers

I can recommend these instances:

  • fedia.io (It's the biggest one, so it would be better to avoid for the decentralization)
  • kbin.earth
  • thebrainbit.org

The later two are run by mbin devs so they should be pretty good

Additionaly there's !AskMbin@fedia.io magazine, so you can ask questions there instead.

Somebody needed to share it 🤭

Alternatively, setup your own instance is my best advice. If you have some technical skills to setup one. That would help decentralizing the most of course. If you need to help. We are happy to help.

Is there a still a concern for self hosters of public instances regarding CSAM content? And if so, any guidance on how to mitigate it?

I am very interested in self hosting, but I am worried of its legal repercussions, especially since I am an immigrant in the country where I live and afraid to get in any legal trouble.

The EFF had a handy explainer a couple of years ago on basically that subject:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2022/12/user-generated-content-and-fediverse-legal-primer

Child Sexual Abuse Material (CSAM): Service providers are required to report any CSAM on their servers to the CyberTipline operated by the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC), a private, nonprofit organization established by the U.S. Congress, and can be criminally prosecuted for knowingly facilitating its distribution. NCMEC shares those reports with law enforcement. However, you are not required to affirmatively monitor your instance for CSAM.

By my understanding, you don't have to setup proactive monitoring for CSAM being federated in, but if you specifically spot CSAM or it is reported to you then you are legally obligated to report it

As a slight side note, that really only directly applies to people in the US.

Other countries have different requirements around what you're required to do, and some are stricter and some are uh, not as strict.

I would not risk it if you're at risk of getting kicked out or something, especially if your host country is stricter on that type of content. Just join one of the existing instances and subscribe to whatever Lemmy communities you want to see federated with it.

@matcha_addict @melroy It's not possible to stop every instance of a user posting illegal content. What's important is that you have a clear policy, and a moderation team that consistently and proactively enforces that policy.

I'm personally the whole moderation team. That is how it is sometimes.

As long as you report the content and act fast if such kind of material is on your site. Also you can disable account registration, so it only you and maybe some friends you know that have an account.

Last but not least, you can also block domains in Mbin. I blocked some domains I just do not want to federate with!

::: spoiler NSFW site Like lemmynsfw (dot) com. :::

And yes you can add that in the admin panel yourself.

Even if I disable account registration, I may still be liable if somehow the content ended up on my instance due to federation right? Or is that not a concern?

Well.. the answer is always yes. But you can mitigate the problem further by not only disable account registration but also check the setting "Force users to login before they can access any content".

So in the end, that means that nobody can see any content without logging in. And since you are the only account, only you can see the federated content.

Have to say, I get that this is unpaid and great volunteering, but that website has pretty bad contrast. Sorry.

I'm the one who made the website. Do you think if we just brightened the outlines around the ui elements that that would help with the contrast?

To me, it looks fine, but if changing something made it better for other people, I'm all for it.

I feel like dark theme is often tricky on different monitors - If the font is too heavy it'll look awful, if it's too light it might look bad on low resolution displays. Combined with different colour contrasts on different screens, and it gets really difficult to know what people will end up seeing.

The headline - "MBIN SERVERS" - looks great on my 4K monitor, but slightly less good on a worse one. The same goes for the text stating that "Also view servers on FediDB and Fediverse Observer", but it's not so bad for the white text. The hyperlinks, however, might suffer from a lack of contrast with the background (a slightly too dark blue) combined with very thin text on low resolution monitors.

I guess brighter hyperlinks could also benefit the names of instances.

It's not something I ever noticed myself when using the site, but keeping it in the back of my head while looking at it I can see why some might have some problems with it. :)

yeh I agree, the hyperlinks needs more contrast. And also on the homepage the sub-title "A federated content aggregator, voting, discussion and microblogging platform (By the community, for the community)", can also have more contrast.

I also believe the text (especially headings maybe) can use a more bolder text. @jwr1@kbin.earth Try to set font-weight of 400 on the .font-extralight CSS class instead of 200.

@Aatube@kbin.melroy.org if you want to share your problems in more details, please help us out you can join the issue chat on Matrix if you like. And ideally share some screenshots if that would help to explain the problem. Another approach is to create an issue at GitHub (which does require a GitHub account): https://github.com/MbinOrg/mbin-website/issues/new

Or explain the situation here in this thread in more detail is also possible, but that is up to you.

I'm using fedia.io and it's very stable. Nice after the instability of kbin.social and kbin.run. although I could be bad luck and causing the devs to run.

@jerry@fedia.io is helping us a lot! And the Mbin devs are in close contact with him to keep the server up and running as stable as possible. Both parties are trying to respond quickly. And we all appreciate that a lot! I can't thank Jerry and the Mbin community enough for this.

Great job guys. I love using it.

It really is great and we’re very lucky to have the mbin team that we do. I sincerely appreciate them, as should everyone on fedia.io and the other mbin instances.

Hey, so I noticed that the layout on fedia.io is great on my tablet, and my pc, but on my cell phone it's garbage.

Is that a fedia.io issue I should let Jerry know about? Or is it an mbin issue that I should show you?

It's most like a Mbin thing. But if you want to give constructive feedback, please let us know via our chat or issue ticket. And show the issues you have with screenshots.

Try to avoid making an account on one of the main instances (fedia.io, kbin.earth, etc.). List of Mbin instances: https://fedidb.org/software/mbin https://joinmbin.org/servers

I disagree. Mbin is so small at this point that going to fedia.io isn't even an issue.

As users pour in, over the millions, then they'll spread out. But for now, it's kind of like worrying that the town is getting too crowded because a 5th house was built, and the other town only has 2 houses.

Hey! Not in my back yard!

BACK yard??? Brother, you don't even WANT to know what happened in your FRONT yard!!!

Seriously though, trying to understand a detail about how this all works (anyone free to answer). Does each additional user to a smaller instance indirectly help flesh out the available content on that user's instance?

As in, more total users -> more total community/magazine subs by those users --> more federated content becomes visible to the instance's newest joiners after that?

Unless I'm misunderstanding how it works. If that's correct, then the benefit of each additional user would be most visible the fewer the instance's current users, and then eventually level out as more users join and the most popular remote communities/magazines are subbed by local users.

I mention this because I've occasionally browsed other instances during brief outages on my home instance. At those times I noticed that while the default feeds (not logged in) across instances looked mostly the same, some of the smaller ones were missing some fun/interesting magazines that the others were showing.

P.S. I don't think this was due to defederations but who knows.

When you filter the servers to open registration and up-to-date/not-abandoned, there's actually a really limited selection of Mbin servers left (5 total). So I don't think decentralization matters to much in this case. Those servers include: fedia.io, kbin.earth, kbin.melroy.org, moist.catsweat.com, and thebrainbin.org. There's also gehirneimer.de for German language.

You can see the full list here: joinmbin.org/servers

Welcome! kbin.melroy.org is the biggest one that I've seen that isn't blocked on my school network. It's run by one of the maintainers (hmmm, m-bin, melroybin?) and uses the latest stable release if that's a plus for you.

To the best of my knowledge, there is no political situation.

yes kbin.melroy.org (sorry about the kbin subdomain name, but changing the domain name will cause federation issues...) is indeed from me (Melroy). And since I wasn't creative the m in Mbin stands indeed for Melroy. Which is my first name. I was also a very active contributor of /kbin on Codeberg before the fork.

Disclaimer: Anyways, since I'm also developing, I sometimes do test some patches or run the latest greatest bleeding edge version from the main branch. Just saying :). Which might not always be the most stable haha. BUT!! You can you run & test the latest features, that is for sure. Haha.

What exactly happened for the name to be changed from Kbin to Mbin? I missed that plot point.

Like people already mentioned below, a fork was created after kbin development halted. And the project maintainer was absent but at the same time didn't delegated the work fully. Hence the creation of the fork: Mbin.

I wasn't creative, so the M in Mbin stands for my name: Melroy. xd

Mbin is a fork of Kbin. A lot of users have moved from Kbin instances to Mbin, as the Kbin dev has had some personal life issues that have interfered with his ability to reliably work on the project.

Mbin is a community fork of Kbin. Even while Kbin was still a thing it was already much faster in making changes & additions than Kbin and by now Kbin & Kbin.social is basically dead.

This is indeed all true. Mbin is named after Melroy (I know, I wasn't creative). And by introducing the C4 spec, I made sure the project isn't in hands by a single maintainer and multiple people are already and can become full maintainers of the Mbin project. Hence the reason I also describe it as: "By community, for the community".

We welcome any developer to join us and help if you would like to contribute (in any way or form you like). You can find us at Matrix chat.

Mbin is a fork that was startend to add some stuff the original Kbin dev didn't like. These days it seems Kbin is dead though, so basically Mbin is the new Kbin.

I'm quite sensitive to Tankies and seen some other Lemmy instances that seem problematic but I have not noticed any mbin instances standing out in any way. But all mbin instances combined are just a few thousand users at best, so it might just be too few users to even make an impact if there was a specific Tankie instance.

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From before Kbin shut down, I was hearing a lot of talk of the Mbin devs being dickheads and spamming around the site.

I don’t think they’re genocide denying authies like the Lemmy devs, but the mbin team isn’t great either.

Why not look into something like PieFed?

but the mbin team isn’t great either.

i keep seeing this without anything to back it up.

do you have anything to back it up?

Yes, thank you.. Can somebody back it up? And thank you of being part of our community originalucifer.

I am part of the mbin team and I am really tired of hearing shittalking about us without any reason. Nobody has any reason to call us anything but passionate.

When melroy started the fork, really weird accusations were thrown around without being based on anything...

I'm part of the Mbin team (and created the fork), why are you calling us dickheads? You don't even know the dev team. You don't even know me.

If you want to join Mbin you can just join a Mbin server. If you want to join the community and help out, join the Matrix chat. I don't understand where all the fuzz is about.

@BentiGorlich@gehirneimer.de is also part of the Mbin team (thank you!), and he is also tired about all the negative talking about us, without any foundation of truth.

I’ve had quite a lot of experience in interacting with the mbin team and I can definitely say they are kind and compassionate people who have a passion for this project and have shown nothing but helpfulness and grace to me and many other people.

Wait, when have I ever denied any genocide?

It's more targeted towards Dessalines: https://sh.itjust.works/post/8419342

Don't shoot the messenger, just remembered seeing this post a while back

I haven't seen that community before. Some people have way too much time on their hands to keep posting about things they dislike. But at least it proves that censorship on Lemmy is impossible, when not even us developers can do it.

At least there is that, indeed...

On a completely unrelated topic, I see that lemmy.ml is now running 0.19.6-beta, do you have any estimation for the release of 0.19.6?

Not sure, I just got back to work this week and need to catch up with everything.

Wait, when have I ever denied any genocide?

I don't have receipts handy for that right now, though the company you keep does say something about you.

I do have you on your weird transphobic conspiracy theory, though.

Big words from someone who posts anonymously, and who never contributed anything positive to the internet.

Ah yes, I sure am making any effort whatsoever to conceal my identity? Weird dodge there, guy.

At this point even someone as ideologically blinded as you should be able to see that the presence of you and your tankie friends is a liability to the project. Why do you think OP is looking to avoid a "lemmy.ml type of situation"?

Ah yes Im a liability to Lemmy which wouldnt even exist without my work. Troll harder kiddo.

I'm not saying that the work you've previously done should be undone. Ideally you would abandon your shitty politics instead of your development work, but I assume that's out of the question.

From the perspective of those trying to advocate for people to actually use lemmy, the instances that you run, lemmy.ml and lemmygrad, are a serious problem. Together with hexbear, they're the "missing stairs" of the threadiverse. We're constantly having to tell people "Yeah, it's understandable that you don't want to associate with tankies, but it's really not so bad if you just block those three instances, and don't mind that two of them are run by the lead developers of lemmy". You walking away would be a net benefit at this point.

You walking away would be a net benefit at this point.

It's not that obvious.

Who would take over Lemmy development? Mbin and Piefed are getting there, but still far from catching up (Piefed has no API so no apps, Mbin only has one app)

Lemmy is still missing some impactful features which might really make it a 1:1 Reddit alternative

  • multicommunities
  • Post flairs, which could then be filtered

In a scenario where we are only left with Mbin and Piefed, we would probably have to wait another year to get to where we are now with Lemmy.

You walking away would be a net benefit at this point.

It’s not that obvious.

At the very least, we're at the point where the counterargument to mine is merely damning with faint praise.

I haven't tried Mbin, and as a Piefed user I agree that it's not there yet. I'm not suggesting that they should replace Lemmy as the backbone software of the threadiverse. However, Lemmy will continue to run in the absence of active development.

I expect Sublinks to eventually overtake Lemmy since it's being designed as a drop-in replacement, in a language better suited to web development than Rust. The dev team also aren't pathological authoritarians, as far as I know. If development on Lemmy were to stop, the threadiverse community's attention and resources would significantly shift towards Sublinks, which would benefit us all in the long run.

I’m not suggesting that they should replace Lemmy as the backbone software of the threadiverse.

Interesting, because that's what I could see happening once they catch up. Unfortunately that's not for now.

I expect Sublinks to eventually overtake Lemmy since it’s being designed as a drop-in replacement, in a language better suited to web development than Rust.

Sublinks was announced in January 2024. We're in September, and the 0.1 version still isn't going to be released any time soon: https://github.com/orgs/sublinks/projects/1/views/6

I was hopeful for Sublinks as well at the beginning, but it seems like it's not going to be the one replacement a lot of people were waiting for.

At this point in time, I think Piefed has the highest chances at becoming a 1:1 Lemmy alternative. Development has been fast. Maybe in 6 months or a year it can really reach feature parity.

Fair enough, I hadn't been keeping track of their pace of development. Doesn't look super active.

I'm operating under the assumption that for a while the bulk of new user growth will happen on the existing larger instances, which are all running Lemmy, rather than Piefed or Mbin instances growing faster than them. I think that'll remain true even once Piefed and Mbin are more featureful than Lemmy, unless the gap is really significant.

If that turns out to be true, then for Lemmy to no longer be the dominant software, the existing big instances would need to switch, which wouldn't be a trivial task. Piefed or Mbin could add the ability to migrate an existing Lemmy database, but I assume that it would be overall easier and less risky for them to move to a Lemmy clone than to a different system.

Yes, that's also the big issue: migration.

While, to be fair, if LW moves to lemmy.world to piefed.world as the main site and keeps LW alive for archiving purposes, it should be okay. Discussions don't go over for that long anyway.

No defense, then? Lemmy is just intended as a delivery vector for shitty politics, shackled to the rotting corpse of the USSR?

Wait, when have I ever denied any genocide?

I'm sorry, that's hilarious. It's so odd, so absurd I can't help but laugh.

I've disagreements of my own, but all I want is to put them aside for a bit because this sentence deserves appreciation.

Not an mbin dev, but I do hang out in the matrix channel (because their app support is amazing).

I've brought up mbin a few times in various threads. I don't like to advertise as such, but if someone wants to know what my setup is, or is otherwise interested in self-hosting, I absolutely offer it as a suggestion.

After kbin.social died, and I didn't want to restart somewhere else just to have it die too, so I opted to self-host.

Why mbin rather than PieFed? For me, I started using it because it does threads and microbloging, and I didn't want to run two servers (and Mastodon install is a pain in the ass). I continue to endorse it because they keep fixing the problems I have with it, and they aren't jerks about bug reports. And they actually respond in chat (unlike the dead SearXNG chat).

I haven't seen any spamming (other than my own), so if you're gonna shit on them, maybe come up with some examples. As for their temperament, they've always been helpful, responsive, and pleasant to communicate with (as least with me).

One of main reasons I want to try Mbin is having lemmy style and mastodon style content in one place and afaik piefed doesn’t offer that

Counter opinion: mbin and the devs are fine.

There's a couple of people here who won't stop hopping into every thread about anything to talk about the things they make/businesses they run/etc.

Feels more like they're just a little too enthusiastic over their shit than actual shitheads, but that's just me.

Agreed. It's quite telling that despite all the asking, no one has been yet able to pinpoint a single issue on the mbin devs.

The most generous interpretation is that it's just a half-remembered thing of discontent from folks who didn't want kbin to get replaced (before it was known that kbin was dead).

Yeah I would definitely skip out on Mastodon and Lemmy directly. They're fine as a temporary visit but long term nah.

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