Looks like KBin has an edge over Lemmy now in terms of monthly active users.

It’s obviously a pretty silly thing, and is not in any way indicative of which project is “better” or more “long-term viable” or anything — instances of both federate with one another, and with the rest of fedi, so it’s all one happy family.

That said, it’s notable. KBin is a relative newcomer to the “Reddit-like fedi instance” game, and also does not have the tankie baggage.

Anyway, the more, the merrier!

KBin: https://the-federation.info/platform/184

Lemmy: https://the-federation.info/platform/73

Discussion on fedi: https://mstdn.social/@rysiek/110527049024028986

  • rysiek@szmer.infoOP
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    1 year ago

    Lemmy is written in Rust, has been around for a while, and there are a bunch of established communities on established Lemmy instances already.

    KBin is sadly PHP, relative newcomer, arguably better interface, and no baggage.

    That’s all I got myself. Hope others will chip in.

    • leetnewb@beehaw.org
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      1 year ago

      Why is php a bad thing in this case? It seems like exactly the kind of application that php is well suited for. Plus there’s the maturity of php’s major frameworks. While I’m not saying Rust is necessarily bad for building web applications, it’s web frameworks must be less mature and battle tested. Plus, it seems like a lower bar to get community dev contributions for a php project than rust.

      • rysiek@szmer.infoOP
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        1 year ago

        Well, to me Rust suggests that a given software project might be somewhat more performant, and somewhat more secure — but it all also depends on the developers, of course.

        • sotolf@beehaw.org
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          1 year ago

          Well, that kind of sounds like the normal rust propaganda, don’t get me wrong, I do think the language is decent, it’s just tiring to see so many people just buying into and parroting some weird claims like “it’s rust, so it’s secure”

          • toadmode@beehaw.org
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            1 year ago

            I like rust a lot, but it’s definitely in the place Go was a few years ago, where people just assume “written in rust” = good for some reason.

            • sotolf@beehaw.org
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              1 year ago

              Exactly :) That’s what I mean as well, sure there are great things written in rust, but they are great because they are great, not because they are written in rust :)

      • sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works
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        1 year ago

        I can’t speak for everyone, but I personally do not want to work with PHP ever again. I’m sure it’s gotten better, but when I last used it (>15 years ago), the standard library was super inconsistent and performance was pretty terrible. It left a bad taste in my mouth, and I now prefer client-side rendering.

        But aside from my personal dislike for PHP, here is why I prefer client-side rendering:

        • easier to have a solid caching strategy - means faster initial page load on mobile/slow connections
        • performance issues are usually limited to database access
        • you get the API for free for third party apps
        • can separate frontend concerns from backend concerns, so it makes development a little easier to split into teams with different skill sets

        That said, for a federated system, it doesn’t really matter that much since people can just increase the number of instances to help share the load. I just personally am not interested in helping with kbin, but I would be totally on board with helping with Lemmy.

        • jonne@infosec.pub
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          1 year ago

          Yeah, it shows you haven’t used php in a while. Most of the gripes people have with it have been fixed over the years, and every framework encourages you to build an API-first app these days.

        • sydneybrokeit@beehaw.org
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          1 year ago

          That said, for a federated system, it doesn’t really matter that much since people can just increase the number of instances to help share the load.

          This is only partially true. There is a finite number of people willing to run an instance, and increasing the costs associated with a given size of instance means that we need more of them, or that they may not find it worth the time to pay $X per month for hosting when it only fits so many people.

          Federation is a beautiful thing, but we have some economic issues we have to reckon with.