I almost feel like it’s October last year, when I pled for improvement on all fronts regarding the Kbin development strategy. Now it seems development has ceased once again and there hasn’t been chat on the matrix channels for over a week. Update: that’s two weeks now (including his blog) and over a month of no visible Development.
Update: According to https://fedidb.org/software/kbin there are a grand total of 29 active kbin servers. Of 61,489 users on all instances, 59,962 of these are on kbin.social. To those users I would like to say that should kbin.social fail, there will always be Mbin servers to fall back to.
What is going on?
We can only speculate, based on what has happened in the past. Several mind bending theories can come to mind.
Perhaps Ernest (and whatever team still exists) is continuing development in the background, not publicly sharing his work on codeberg. He may have had enough of all the criticism and wants to do it his way without interference. This may sound a bit far fetched, but he’s admitted in the past that he prefers concentrating on coding over communicating with his community.
Other theories could involve something bad involving Ernest personally, let us hope that is not the case. Ernest is a great person, nobody would wish anything bad upon him.
But in reality, speculation doesn’t change anything, we can only deal with the situation at hand.
I believe waiting for a new release comes with too many risks in the current setting. Nobody can monitor the code during progress or do any testing for themselves while development is ongoing (assuming it is). If anything, what’s coming next? Your guess is as good as mine.
A new version may well break compatibility between Kbin and Mbin. Mbin is trying to stay compatible with Kbin for as long as reasonably possible. However, staying compatible with something that is out of sight and out of one’s control is challenging, if not impossible. A break in compatibility would mean there will be no easy way to migrate to Mbin after an upgrade for Kbin users who have patiently waited for one, should they want to.
I would not want the future of my instance to be dependent of such a level of uncertainty, now or in the future.
Well, as you stated, nobody knows.
I am more hopeful with Mbin than Kbin for now. I just hope that Ernest is doing fine.
Ernest is still posting devlogs:
Yeah and actually posted 3 days ago explaining a bit about what’s going on.
It’s also not a huge mystery that what is essentially a one-man hobby project will slow down development in some periods, and speed up in others. I’m sticking with Kbin.social because I’m happy with the experience here despite some rough edges, but of course there are other platforms better suited for people who are unhappy about being beta testers of slowly developing software.
(For anyone interested, Fedia.io is the largest mbin instance!)
Absolutely and that’s totally fine. Ernest however had a lot of his community members believe that they were part of the project, but this turned out not quite to be the case. I fell for that as well, when I joined it seemed like a crowded project with several enthusiastic developers. Not judging, but if I’d known it was a one man project at the time I would not have chosen for kbin for rimworld.gallery
I’m not too familiar with the drama but any time I visit kbin.social there’s some error or outage going on. Also the documentation is pretty lackluster, developing 3rd party tools for kbin is pretty much impossible.
Mbin looks way more promising, if anything because of the better docs, new features and community-driven direction it’s taking. I hope most kbin users jump ship.
Best of luck to Ernest, but whatever is going on in his life as long as kbin depends on him entirely it seems like kbin will never take off. The second kbin skyrocketed he should have worked on spreading out responsibility with like minded devs.
He did though. And honestly the website has come very far in a short period of time, I really don’t understand the concerns and whining in this thread…
From codeberg-
Core Team
- ernest
- szsz
- cooperaj
- rideranton
- AnonymousLlama
https://codeberg.org/org/Kbin/teams
Design Team
- cody
That’s great, assuming they’re all contributing. If that’s the case however, I can only assume it’s being done behind the scenes, essentially deviating from the open source nature of the project
Why do you assume that? Why is your way of open source the right way?
All open source projects are run by a small team of people reviewing and accepting, rejecting, and prioritizing work. What part of this project’s methodology bothers you?
If Mbin wants to keep compatibility, Maybe another fork should be considered. The new fork could go on to faster development while Mbin stays behind.
