Mbin: A kbin fork that promises to never review PRs before merging them (kbin.social)

submitted 1 year ago by density@kbin.social to c/fediverse@kbin.social

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Somebody who was previously active on the kbin codeberg repo has left that to make a fork of kbin called 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.

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[-] density@kbin.social 4 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

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

[-] TheVillageGuy@kbin.social 1 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago)

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 ever

this post was submitted on 09 Nov 2023

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