Mbin instances

submitted by RmDebArc_5

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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85 Comments

melroy , edited

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.

nutomic

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.

melroy

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.

nutomic

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.

melroy

Thanks. I do indeed a lot of open source projects in parallel. Besides mbin I also contribute and maintain dozens of open source projects and packages.

https://github.com/melroy89/ is my github.

I also host my own GitLab instance which also host a lot of my projects: https://gitlab.melroy.org/explore/projects

Blaze

I got a lot of hate without any reason.

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

Fitik , edited

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.

melroy , edited

Somebody needed to share it 🤭

melroy , edited

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.

matcha_addict , edited

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.

Trainguyrom

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

schizo

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.

DarkThoughts

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.

melroy , edited

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!

NSFW site

Like lemmynsfw (dot) com.

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

matcha_addict

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?

Aatube

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

jwr1 , edited

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.

aasatru

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. :)

melroy , edited

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.

Blackout

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.

melroy , edited

@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.

Blackout

Great job guys. I love using it.

jerry

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.

Lost_My_Mind

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?

melroy

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.

rand_alpha19 , edited

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

Lost_My_Mind

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.

bacon_saber

Hey! Not in my back yard!

Lost_My_Mind

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

bacon_saber , edited

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.

melroy

Both sites are legit. https://fedidb.org/software/mbin is also fine if people want to use it. FediDB is created by Daniel (@dansup@pixelfed.social), he also created Pixelfed.

jwr1 , edited

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

Lost_My_Mind

moist.catsweat.com???

originalucifer

from the faq

Why 'moist'?! wtf is wrong with you?

It's comically unmarketable

jwr1

Hey, I didn't come up with it. You could ask @originalucifer@moist.catsweat.com though.

Aatube , edited

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.

melroy , edited

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.

koncertejo

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

melroy

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

DarkThoughts

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.

melroy , edited

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.

Chozo

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.

poVoq

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.

DarkThoughts

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.

melroy

Not sure what you mean. But since Mbin is also using ActivityPub protocol. Mbin can federate with both Mastodon and Lemmy alike. So why not try Mbin?

Blaze

They are on fedia.io

DarkThoughts

I think you want to work on your reading comprehension. The topic is about politically problematic mbin instances, not how mbin works.

Deceptichum

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?

originalucifer

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?

melroy , edited

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

BentiGorlich

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...

melroy , edited

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.

jerry

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.

nutomic , edited

Wait, when have I ever denied any genocide?

Blaze

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

nutomic

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.

Blaze , edited

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?

nutomic

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

Die4Ever

I think probably the biggest holdup for 0.19.6 right now looks like https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/4983

I subscribed to the issue so I can see its progress

cacheson

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.

nutomic

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

cacheson

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"?

nutomic

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

mke

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.

AlexanderESmith

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).

RmDebArc_5 [OP]

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

schizo

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.

abff08f4813c

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).

abff08f4813c

Piefed? It does, at least somewhat. IIRC the main thing is that you can't follow specific Mastodon users.

  • From a satisfied pyfedi user.
Blaze

Nice instance name

electricprism

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

electricprism

Dickhead meet Dickbutt, sounds like reddit poetry to me

Wait A Minute

Deleted by author

Deceptichum , edited

https://github.com/dessalines/essays/blob/main/socialism_faq.md#whats-going-on-with-the-uyghurs

Here is one of the devs with an entire FAQ showing their denial of the Uyghur genocide.

nutomic

That's only one developer, but you were talking in plural. What other Lemmy dev are you referring to?

Wait A Minute

Thank you, I deleted the comment because I searched and found out