I’ve been working for the past week on a new kbin app. At the moment, it’s just a prototype and only the “Feed” view has content (you can’t sign into an account or post anything yet); you can see threads, thread images, thread comments, thread links, and thread votes/boosts. You can also change the “Theme Mode” and “Instance Host” in the settings.
Here’s a link to the source code (contributions welcome for those that know flutter): github.com/jwr1/interstellar.
For testers, here’s the link to the latest working build: github.com/jwr1/interstellar/releases (AppImage and APK).
Feel free to post any bugs or suggestions in the comments, on GitHub, or on the Interstellar magazine.
Again, this is just a prototype. If someone else is working on a better kbin app, I might just use that instead.
I contributed a lot kbin directly in the past. It has a long history and story. Long story short: Ernest was offline for months without process, and contributors weren’t allowed to merge other PRs, except their own. The way of working within the kbin project means that only Ernest will have the last say and every review goes via him. Development halted when he was gone (yes he is now back). Multiple contributors had the same feeling, hence the reason for a fork. Mbin is community focused, it’s not driver my a single owner. All contributors have all rights. We work closer together and review each other code. I speak for myself, but I feel that this change of approach empowered all contributors in Mbin and more sense of responsibility. After all the drama at Kbin, Ernest didn’t change either. So I’m glad a fork was created. I wish it wasn’t needed.
Did you guys talk about this to Ernest? What did he have to say about this?
I feel that our visions for the project’s development are too different for this to succeed. At this stage, it will definitely be better to work on our own things, /kbin is open source, so there is no issue with that. There are several reasons for this link, link
Thank you for the reply.
From my point of view, you were offline because you had personal issues to deal with, and you dealt with that first, and simply resumed the development after that, and I also see no issues with Ernest being the owner because he is the owner and the founder despite the project being open source and sure, contributions had to go through him but that’s fine as long as Kbin itself isn’t dead, if it was, then asking him to remove that process would be more reasonable to let the rest of the community try to revive the project, but Kbin wasn’t dying or so, it was merely paused for a short period of time.
I personally won’t be hopping in-between projects like a kangaroo, I am invested and am already on Kbin so far, its good to have alternatives generally, but in this case, I personally see no reason to go for Mbin. I also encourage and hope potential future contributors focus on a set of projects and not spread themselves too thin.
We all have a life outside the internet, so pauses or breaks here and there is natural, this is less visible in big tech companies, more visible in small startups/projects in early stages which was really the case with Kbin, so we should be patient, I will be atleast :)