Admin of kbin.earth, creator of Interstellar.

  • 12 Posts
  • 69 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: December 20th, 2023

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  • I’ll say within the past few months there hasn’t been as much activity as there usually has been, so there’s not like a lot of new features coming in like there is for PieFed. Part of that is likely due to the fact that Mbin’s low on devs ATM, especially since one of the previous devs went AWOL. Still, I’ll say Mbin is already quite polished and works well, even if the dev team isn’t as active as they once were.



  • The experience for setting up an Mbin server has greatly improved with the latest Docker setup rework. So now, it shouldn’t take more than a few minutes to get a simple Mbin setup running.

    As for resource usage, my server (kbin.earth) doesn’t have anywhere close to the user base fedia.io does, but I’ve been able to run my server (which has ~150 active and ~600 total users) on a decently low-resource server. In the past month or so, it’s been a server with 16 vCPUs and 32 GB RAM, but previously it was running on 8 vCPUs and 16 GB RAM (had to upgrade due to DDOS).

    I’ve been running my server for about 1.5 years (since December 2023), and most of the time it is a set-and-forget type of thing, of course, until you need to update things or troubleshoot some issue. But overall, it’s been working great, and when you do run into an issue, the Mbin devs are usually quick to help troubleshoot with you.

    It is true that Mbin doesn’t have an “official” instance, but there are multiple servers that are run by the Mbin devs, including thebrainbin.org, gehirneimer.de, and kbin.melroy.org (and kbin.earth if you count me).








  • Writing this message on the interstellar app just now. My only minor gripe is that there’s no way to mark something as read with a single tap that I’ve found. (Got to long press and mark as read, but I’ll accept that I may have missed something)

    I’ll give a quick overview: to mark a post as read, you need to either open it, vote on it, boost it, or mark it as read explicitly, which can be done through the overflow menu (long press or tap overflow button, like you said) or by configuring the swipe gestures to have the mark as read action (then all you have to do is swipe on the post). In the next update, we will also have a “mark as read on scroll” option, which, when enabled, will mark all posts in your feed as read once it scrolls off the top of the screen.







  • I’m the developer of Interstellar, and I am actually from the US. iOS support is something I’d like to add, but is not the priority. @[email protected] made many good points about it not catering towards FOSS projects, but I’d also like to add, it costs $100 every single year in order to have an Apple developer account, which is required if you want to publish anything to the Apple App Store. Additionally, Apple’s very expensive hardware is required in order to build and release any Apple software, which I do not own.

    All that to say, I’d like to support iOS and macOS platforms, but Apple makes it extremely difficult (and costly) for that to happen. Why should I have to pay $100 every year in order to publish a free app that I’m not even making any money off of?






  • I’m sure you know, but technically, Microblogs are still considered “posting to your profile”. It’s just that Mbin also happens to categorize those microblogs into a specific magazine, either based on tags or manual placement. They still display in your profile just like normal. Additionally, if you view those Mbin microblogs from a Mastodon server, they will still appear as if the user “posted to their profile”. All Mbin is doing is assigning the Microblog a general categorization.











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