cross-posted from: https://fedia.io/m/fedia/t/349909
As you are all painfully aware, kbin has been my nemesis pretty much from the start. Unlike Lemmy, Mastodon, Firefish, writefreely, akkoma, synapse, pixelfed, and peertube, I simply cannot competently run kbin. It’s a complete goat rodeo of database errors, kbin and lemmy aren’t getting along, and so on. Though I love the idea and trajectory of Kbin, it simply needs a more time to cook in the oven before being ready.
I will contrast lemmy (infosec.pub) with kbin on fedia.io: fedia.io runs an separate app server and database server. Both servers are larger than the single server that infosec.pub runs on, yet infosec.pub has about 10x the traffic, and kbin is struggling under the load.
If this were all I did, I could likely sort out the various database layout issues and make contributions to fix the code, since I am somewhat familiar with php. Unfortunately, I don’t. And more than that, I have observed a general slowdown in the rate of contributions to the code base of kbin, leaving me to think that it’s not going to get better any time soon.
I don’t take this decision lightly, and I kicked the can down the road for a long time hoping to find a way through so that I didn’t have to do this, but I have to face facts: it’s not getting better and I see nothing that is going to change that.
Most unfortunately, kbin has no options for account migration, which makes this all the more painful. My intention is to shut fedia.io down at the end of November.
I am intending to resurrect it as a lemmy instance, assuming I can sort out how to ensure there are no issues with account keys.
My sincere apologies for this…
Jerry
I guess we’re now seeing what software will survive the long run.
Things can still take a turn. There are a fuck ton and a half of pull requests still not pushed on the main branch that fopefully fix many issues.
Also, lemmy has been in development for quite a bit longer, so I wouldn’t give up on kbin yet. At least I won’t.
I mean, Kbin is written in PHP and Lemmy uses Rust. If I went with just that knowledge alone, I’d say that Kbin would have trouble attracting developers since PHP isn’t exactly a hip new language like Rust is.
Not being a hip new language is an advantage on my books, and on many others’. PHP has been battle-tested and was once (and in a way, still is) a pillar of the internet. Stability always trumps novelty. Rust wasn’t exactly created with the internet in mind, but PHP was, and it’s way easier to find PHP developers than it is to find Rust developers (last time I checked).
Though the performance boost provided by Rust over PHP is not something to be ignored, though servers written in C or C++ have also been around for quite a while, and PHP still managed to trump many of them.
You may be right but the popularity of a language has a MAJOR effect on the number of people willing to contribute to a project.
For example, I’ve been considering contributing to Lemmy while I wouldn’t touch php with a 10’ pole since it’s basically being replaced everywhere.
I hope I didn’t sound like I wanted it to fail, I definitely think it’s great with different platforms.
It did sound a bit like you were cheering for it, but I understood the message you were trying to transmit.
Yeah, unfortunately sometimes things can be misunderstood by how we write…
You can edit your post to be clearer, you know…
The beauty of FLOSS is that forks can come into existence, things the parent’s maintainer likes can be upstreamed to that project, and things that the fork’s maintainers like will deviate. There’s a nice ebb and flow, and there’s not really any need for one fork or another to “survive”. If kbin stops being used in favour of mbin, it wouldn’t be unusual for the maintainer of kbin to move into mbin development, even.
Lemmy has been forked, so we may end up not actually using Lemmy here either (it’s not unusual as I’m on Calckey a fork of Misskey, although Calckey is now called Firefish and has been forked as IceShrimp - I don’t care as long as it works).
Interesting, do you have a link to the fork? Is it the one by pawb.social, https://github.com/PawbSocial/lemmy ?
The one I saw the other day was !pangora@programming.dev - the developer said their idea was to work on things the community really wants like moderation tools with the idea that this could either be integrated back into Lemmy or, if it got traction, it could become a thing in its own right.
I did Google for others and found Lenny, described by someone else as a “Lemmy fork/instance for bronies” or “a Lemmy where I can use ethnic slurs”.
Thanks, Pangora seems promising!
I think the main developers being tankies might put people off from contributing, so it might also be a way to get more people involved even if the changes ultimately feel back into Lemmy itself.