Mbin is a decentralized content aggregator, voting, discussion and microblogging platform running on the fediverse network. It can communicate with many other ActivityPub services, including Kbin, Mastodon, Lemmy, Pleroma, Peertube. It is an open source alternative to other link aggregator services like Reddit. The initiative aims to promote a free and open internet.
Mbin is focused on what the community wants, pull requests can be merged by any repo owner (with merge rights in GitHub). Discussions take place on Matrix then consensus has to be reached by the community. If approved by the community, only one approval on the PR is required by one of the Mbin maintainers. It’s built entirely on trust.
It seems it’s claim to fame is being more open and accepting of community changes and improvements. It can install as either bare metal/VM or as a Docker container.
Although anyone can install it and self-host it, their project page also contains a link to various instances that already exist and which anyone can register on.
See https://github.com/MbinOrg/mbin
#technology #opensource #Fediverse #linkaggregator #decentralised
It’s one of my main concerns with the fediverse, that tech people’s (and people generally) inclination to not work together and instead do their own thing will be detrimental on the whole.
I mean, everyone’s using activity pub protocol tho. I think when activity pub starts getting fragmented is when it’s time to worry.
Yeah, this is what I was about to write. As long as they can all talk to each other, who cares? They used to be like a dozen popular email clients. It didn’t really create any issues (for the end user at least)
The issue is quality. 2 mediocre platforms is worse than 1 decent platform.
Over on mastodon, for example, there’s official mastodon … and then there’s a few forks of mastodon (eg glitch and hometown), pleroma and its fork akkoma, misskey and its forks sharkey, and firefish, and then forks of firefish, iceshrimp and catodon.
And yet there’s a good amount of conversation about how more platform diversity is needed to compete with mastodon. None of the above mentioned alternatives are especially stable, or perceived to be stable (firefish for instance was very popular in 2023 but has literally burnt to the ground with the main dev just abandoning it and the main instance), and so instance admins tend to be wary about running them and so they don’t get popular.
If half of the devs working on alternatives just banded together to make a compelling and stable and committed “alternative”, the fediverse would be in a better position.
Which is EXACTLY this. Melroy(Mbin dev), was a Lemmy dev that was “ignored”, then he was a kbin dev who was… “ignored”. But then he ran his own instance, which was again, ignored. So then he started Mbin, which of course he named after himself(Melroy Bin). In between each of these attempts, he’d go to numerous communities and post long rants trying to call out the other devs about how terrible everyone else was and how no one is listening to his brilliance and he’s the One True Savior of the fediverse.
Dude is pathologically egotistical and is exactly the kind of person I don’t want admining anything.
Then its great he has his own Fediverse with hookers and blackjack.
Presuming your story is true (I don’t know either way) … yes, a place the fediverse attracts that kind of behaviour (as well as a few others that just aren’t worth getting caught up in and relying on). And starting a fork is, unfortunately (as forks can be awesome things), a tell-tail sign.
Many are inclined to mock of be unhappy about how seriously the head of Mastodon takes himself (and how dominant his platform is) — he calls him the CEO of mastoodn, it’s actually a registered non-profit company, he openly considers himself the BDFL (beneficent dictator for life) — but he’s been at it since 2016, is committed, creates an appearance of stability and is the only one that’s got the whole fediverse thing working on a significant scale, whatever flaws he and his project might have. All of the hacking culture and sentiment can only take a project so far … as it ultimately needs people and users to be successful.