Crossposted from https://fedia.io/m/updates@kbin.melroy.org/t/4475005

As you all might know it, Mbin is a rather small project with a small team. In fact the current size of the team is 1.5 developers (0.5 for the ones which only have partially time). While our active devs do what they can in their free time, this leads to slow feature and security updates, sometimes slow support and increasing stress for the remaining devs.

That's why I ask everyone who likes this project, has time of their own to donate and knows how to program with PHP (or is willing to learn it) to consider helping this project move forward.
You can start with simpler features and submit them as PRs or even just help review existing PRs if full commitment to maintaining the codebase is currently too much. We are aware that parts of our codebase contains more spagett than some Italian restaurants, but we will help every newcomer to find their way through the sources.
Every bit of support helps, as it also shows that we have a passionate userbase which does not want Mbin to wither away.

Well ... as I'm not very good at writing motivational texts, just comment anything which comes to mind for this issue :D If you have ideas how to improve the chances that this post reach the right people, I would also love to hear it.

---

At the same time I want to bring up another topic, as transparency is important for any public project.

Some of our devs use AI assistants for generating code for PRs and also to assist with PR reviews. Simply because without it, they would not have time to continue contributing to Mbin (which would bring our devs down to 1, making it impossible to merge new PRs). On thing here is important to know: I will not call it slop nor vibe-coding, as they are a competent developer capable of understanding and managing the outputs of the agents. Still, I am very aware of the issues of AI and the general opinion on it in the Fediverse. That is why I would like to know your constructive opinions on this matter.
Also, I guarantee you that every PR is reviewed by at least one human pair of eyes.

Crossposted from https://fedia.io/m/updates@kbin.melroy.org/t/4475005

As you all might know it, Mbin is a rather small project with a small team. In fact the current size of the team is 1.5 developers (0.5 for the ones which only have partially time). While our active devs do what they can in their free time, this leads to slow feature and security updates, sometimes slow support and increasing stress for the remaining devs.

That's why I ask everyone who likes this project, has time of their own to donate and knows how to program with PHP (or is willing to learn it) to consider helping this project move forward.
You can start with simpler features and submit them as PRs or even just help review existing PRs if full commitment to maintaining the codebase is currently too much. We are aware that parts of our codebase contains more spagett than some Italian restaurants, but we will help every newcomer to find their way through the sources.
Every bit of support helps, as it also shows that we have a passionate userbase which does not want Mbin to wither away.

Well ... as I'm not very good at writing motivational texts, just comment anything which comes to mind for this issue :D If you have ideas how to improve the chances that this post reach the right people, I would also love to hear it.

---

At the same time I want to bring up another topic, as transparency is important for any public project.

Some of our devs use AI assistants for generating code for PRs and also to assist with PR reviews. Simply because without it, they would not have time to continue contributing to Mbin (which would bring our devs down to 1, making it impossible to merge new PRs). On thing here is important to know: I will not call it slop nor vibe-coding, as they are a competent developer capable of understanding and managing the outputs of the agents. Still, I am very aware of the issues of AI and the general opinion on it in the Fediverse. That is why I would like to know your constructive opinions on this matter.
Also, I guarantee you that every PR is reviewed by at least one human pair of eyes.

Crossposted from https://fedia.io/m/updates@kbin.melroy.org/t/4475005

As you all might know it, Mbin is a rather small project with a small team. In fact the current size of the team is 1.5 developers (0.5 for the ones which only have partially time). While our active devs do what they can in their free time, this leads to slow feature and security updates, sometimes slow support and increasing stress for the remaining devs.

That's why I ask everyone who likes this project, has time of their own to donate and knows how to program with PHP (or is willing to learn it) to consider helping this project move forward.
You can start with simpler features and submit them as PRs or even just help review existing PRs if full commitment to maintaining the codebase is currently too much. We are aware that parts of our codebase contains more spagett than some Italian restaurants, but we will help every newcomer to find their way through the sources.
Every bit of support helps, as it also shows that we have a passionate userbase which does not want Mbin to wither away.

Well ... as I'm not very good at writing motivational texts, just comment anything which comes to mind for this issue :D If you have ideas how to improve the chances that this post reach the right people, I would also love to hear it.

---

At the same time I want to bring up another topic, as transparency is important for any public project.

Some of our devs use AI assistants for generating code for PRs and also to assist with PR reviews. Simply because without it, they would not have time to continue contributing to Mbin (which would bring our devs down to 1, making it impossible to merge new PRs). On thing here is important to know: I will not call it slop nor vibe-coding, as they are a competent developer capable of understanding and managing the outputs of the agents. Still, I am very aware of the issues of AI and the general opinion on it in the Fediverse. That is why I would like to know your constructive opinions on this matter.
Also, I guarantee you that every PR is reviewed by at least one human pair of eyes.

After quite some slow development, finally we can release a new version of Mbin. It contains new features for users, performance improvements and important security fixes. Summary for Users

Show who boosted content in the feed (Combined view + subscribed + newest) Add ability to block instances. Content from blocked instances will not show up in the feed and search anymore. Fix emoji autocomplete inserts 'null' Show a placeholder when an image embed could not be loaded Improve design of posts and comments in some areas of the site Fix endless loop when compressing uploaded images Fix layout when a comment contains a very wide table Bugfixes for some federation issues (handling of Mastodon posts with multiple images, embedded video formats, buggy mentions, etc.) Change layout of list of cross posts Fix the issue of browsers wanting to download a file when unsupported media files are used in an embed Add translation for Swedish (by Jonatan Nyberg)

Summary for Server Admins

Minimum software requirements updated to PHP 8.5, Node 24 and Ubuntu 24.04 recommended Upgraded most of our dependencies. For more details see #2162 Add ability to block instances globally. Instances blocked this way will be blocked for all current and new users. Users can unblock them manually afterward; thus allowing a "soft" way to moderate the content shown by default for your users. For more details see #2155 Added the new queue async_slow for long-running tasks. If your async queue have gotten full often in the past, consider creating a separate messenger for async_slow. The sessions are now stored in Redis instead of Postgres. You need to enable persistence in your Redis server, if you want to keep open sessions on restarts of Redis. Fixed a couple of security vulnerabilities PostgreSQL autovacuum is tuned for high-churn tables

Summary for developers Mbin:

Minimum software requirements updated to PHP 8.5 and Node 24 Upgraded most of our dependencies. For more details, including possible breaking package changes, see #2162

Fediverse:

Fix issue that to value might be an object instead of array in some edge-cases

Upgrade Instructions There are significant changes in the DB. It is advised to create a DB backup before upgrading. After the post-upgrade script has run, you should not clear Redis / Valkey. For Docker

Get the official image or checkout the code and build it locally Stop all containers docker compose down Start all containers docker compose up -d

For Bare Metal

Ensure you have PHP 8.5 and Node 24 installed Login as the mbin/kbin user: su mbin Go to your repo cd /var/www/mbin Get the new release: git fetch && git checkout v1.11.0 Run the update script: bash bin/post-upgrade. Run exit so we are back at the root user (or put a sudo in front of every command) clear your opcache by reloading php fpm systemctl restart php8.5-fpm Restart the messengers: supervisorctl restart messenger:*

Cotemplate is a tool for creating "Megatemplates": a template the size of the whole canvas which contains multiple independent templates.
This has two main advantages: teams can see where space is left when placing their artwork and users without a team who want to help various artworks can get the template directly without having to ask around for a URL.

You can find the Cotemplate for this year's Canvas here: https://chocolatecakecodes.goip.de/cotemplate/ui/template/20260520-Canvas26_main

You can create your own team in the menu opened by the button top right. Everyone with the team credentials can add and manage templates of this team. Once placed, an image is visible for everyone (so outside the team too).
To login as a team-member you have to go to the login page.

I also want to highlight the following features:

• Direct URL to the current megatemplate is copied into your clipboard when clicking the small clipboard icon in the top middle.
• Individual templates can be (de-)selected in the list (opened by the button top left).

To the programmers who worked with Erlang and related languages (so targeting the Erlang VM): how was your experience?

I'm interested in the Erlang ecosystem but would like to know if its languages are hard or can be considered powerful modern languages (and possible easy, but not "Python easy", I want to write efficient software with statically typed syntax).
Also, how mature is the ecosystem? Are there good frameworks to write scalable webservices with? Did you have fun using them and the language or was it more a headache-inducing experience?

So all in all what did you experience, in which context did you; and would you recommend learning an Erlang related language?

...

Crossposted from https://fedia.io/m/mbinmeta@gehirneimer.de/t/3026365

In v1.9.0 we will be shipping the combined frontpage. In light of the recent release candidate we observed the wish to toggle it back to the old/current behavior.

What do you prefer? Which option should be the default?

1. All
2. Threads
3. Microblog

(this is a setting and can of course be changed)

My goal is to have a folder with images + a configuration-file which describes the stickers (file, associated emoji, name, link for sources / artist name) and then an application which can create / update sticker packs from the images for messengers like Signal, Matrix, Discord and so on.

Is there already such a (preferably FOSS) project or service?

As a regular user of Piped, it got very annoying when Google blocked almost all the public instances. As even Invidious is affected, I decided to run Piped on my local machine with my residential IP, so that it won't get blocked so easily.
To make the process of running such an instance as easy as possible for me and also other Piped enjoyers, I created LocalPiped, a project to deploy all the server components via AppImage.

You can download prebuild AppImages here.
For a description on how to make the database persistent, see the README in the Repository.

Please be aware, that most of the privacy-advantages do not apply anymore, as the application has to run via your own IP.
This also means that you might need split-tunneling if you use a VPN.

It is also possible, to use the application on an Android Phone:

1. you need Termux
2. in Termux, install PRoot Distro
3. with PRoot Distro, install Fedora: proot-distro install fedora
4. switch into Fedora: pd sh fedora
5. update packages and install wget and java-21: dnf update; dnf install wget java-21-openjdk-headless
6. download the AppImage: wget -O LocalPiped.appimage https://projects.chocolatecakecodes.goip.de/blued_gear/localpiped/-/package_files/16/download
7. make it executable: chmod +x ./LocalPiped.appimage
8. extract the contents of the AppImage (as it is not possible to use fuse in normal Termux): ./LocalPiped.appimage --appimage-extract && mv squashfs-root LocalPiped && rm LocalPiped.appimage
9. run it: cd LocalPiped; ./AppRun