what happened to kbin?

the original developer mentioned handing off the site/project to other people due to personal issues but that was like a month ago.
this is part of the reason it was forked to mbin. the risk of a project being managed by a single person instead of a community is very real.
it seems dead, but i like to remember there would be no mbin without kbin
- True that, I just took a look at the FAQ and it still references kbin.
  Question, how do we donate to this project?
  
  We do not have a "project fund" or something like that. Some of us have donation sites to keep the servers running:
  mine: https://liberapay.com/BentiGorlich
  @debounced@kbin.run https://kbin.run/about
  @melroy@kbin.melroy.org https://melroy.org/thanks.html
  My opinion: I do not want to get paid to develop mbin. That creates an obligation and turns it into something like a job. I already have a job and intend to keep it, additionally I don't want to take the fun out of developing mbin. To commit to it full time or apply for grants or anything would currently be a big mistake I think
  
  I don't think there is a way to donate (monetarily) directly to Mbin, at least not at the moment.
  The second best thing might would be to donate to server admins, which a lot of them actually are Mbin developers anyway.
  
  depends on what kind of contribution you would like to make. i think they're mostly looking for development, testing and documentation help.
  there are some great links from the main github; https://github.com/MbinOrg/mbin including the matrix channels

https://codeberg.org/Kbin/kbin-core/issues/1383#issuecomment-1999046
The guy in charge was having medical and personal issues. And doesn't seem to have access to everything at the moment. It's a bummer, and I hope things get better for him, but that's how projects like this go sometimes.

I think most of the kbin instances switched to mbin

Ernest, the lead dev for Kbin, has had a lot of big events happen in his life recently, so he has a tendency to just kinda disappear for weeks/months at a time while the project gets put on hold. He'll usually come back, announce new plans for development, maybe push out a few updates, and then inevitably go radio silent again.
I believe he's got a few people assisting him now, but development has definitely slowed to the point of becoming concerning. I think it might be time for the Mbin team to start getting a little more free with the fork.
- I think it might be time for the Mbin team to start getting a little more free with the fork.
  eh? what do you mean?
  
  I believe that currently, Mbin isn't making any drastic changes, and relying mostly on Kbin's existing code as its base. As far as I'm aware, the Mbin team are mostly just doing maintenance-level development; fixing things as they break and making optimizations, but not so much in the way of developing new features. Mbin is currently just basically a copy of Kbin, without much distinguishing the two.
  Since Kbin doesn't seem to be moving much at all, I think it might be a good idea for Mbin to start flexing their own muscles a bit, and making it into its own separate project. Otherwise, having a copy of a stale project just leaves you with two stale projects.
- So it basically failed the bus factor
  Hopefully mbin becomes more resilient, or if Lemmy just gets some nice rewrites.
  
  I'm using both Mbin and Piefed and I'm loving both! It's absolutely not looking bleak. :)
- it might be time for the Mbin team to start getting a little more free with the fork.
  the impression i had of mbin was very "anything goes" did that not end up being how things shaped up??
  
  its a community. anyone can generate a pr, code it up and it gets discussed. so far there has been no crazy drama about what to include or not.. no one has proffered any incompatible ideas. its been quite pleasant
  its all public though, in the matrix or github channels
  
  That was the message that was pushed out when @melroy@kbin.melroy.org started the fork, because a lot of people were not particularly fond of the way he did it. We were trash talked a lot in the first months and obviously (and sadly) that kinda stuck on a lot of people.

Maybe helpful to some people who land on this thread: current list of mbin instances
- Mbin also got a join site
  https://joinmbin.org/
  
  Hey, thanks for linking that. I actually made that from scratch within the past month. It has dedicated Servers, Apps, and Releases pages, and also a home screen for info about Mbin. The home page needs a lot of work though, so if anyone here is good at UI design and would like to help, feel free to comment.
  
  Oh nice!
- does mbin federate with lemmy nicely?

Pretty much, as others have explained here. I wanted to add that in addition to its fork Mbin there is also the Sublinks project to make a new implementation of the ActivityPub protocol and thus surf the Fediverse independent of Lemmy. https://sublinks.org/ (link to GitHub there too)
- Piefed is another Lemmy compatible alternative that looks quite promising: https://piefed.social/
  
  Thank you, I keep mixing it up with Pixelfed in my mind and forget that it exists:-).
  It looks both really primitive (e.g. comment from Rima about lack of moderation tools) yet also extremely sophisticated at the same time. Like for me the upper right hand menu bar disappears entirely in dark mode (Android Firefox) - it seems still fully functional but I could not see it to know to click under most conditions - but those category arrangements and how they improve discoverability, it just makes so much sense!
  Wow, now I'm as excited about this project as about Sublinks:-).

!AskMbin@fedia.io