I actually started on Kbin.social, but then it got shut down, Kbin died and now fedia.io seems to be the largest one running MBin. I like the interface on MBin and I guess it’s good to have a diverse fediverse with different services, but at the same time, why use mbin when everyone congregates on lemmy instances? The local magazines on fedia are for the most part, quite dead, when compared to lemmy collections. In the end I feel like there aren’t enough people to go around to support many more services like MBin and Piefed.
He doesn’t owe anyone anything, and he can decide to run his open source project just as he pleases, but it could have gone so much better. People are mostly just disappointed, I feel like.
I mean yes, in a certain sense mbin is exactly how open source is supposed to work when things go sideways: fork the code, change the name, leverage the original work, leave Ernest in peace, whatever he’s dealing with.
The first half of what you said is the important bit, to me. He owed no one anything, and I just remember seeing some comments from people that couldn’t comprehend that. Entitlement is strong on the internet imho.