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
That mstdn.social and the whole “lemmy = tankie” (whatever the fuck that means) is doing a disservice to the whole unreddit movement. I have seen plenty of discussion on reddit now of people not leaving because of these posts…
I did not say “lemmy = tankie”, I said Lemmy has certain tankie baggage, and that is in fact true. The developers are pretty clearly tankies, they also run a strictly tankie instance (Lemmygrad; many Lemmy instances do not federate with it).
Pretending this is not the case is not going to help in the long run. It might slow down the “unreddit” movement now, but I’d wager a bet it will make it more long-term viable and resilient, if people understand that choice of instance is important (there are quite a few great Lemmy instances that I would recommend wholeheartidly, like BeeHaw), and that there are alternative, independent implementations on Threadiverse (like Kbin).
Can you provide a source to your claim that lemmygrad is ran by Nutomic or Dessalines?
It used to be deployed on the same IP address as lemmy.ml. I don’t have the receipts. Take it or leave it.
What I don’t get is, I don’t see how that’s a reason to be concerned about Lemmy when the whole point is that there’s no central control over instances, which literally anyone can spin up, and instances can communicate / ban each other as they please. It’s impossible for the politics of the creators to have any real effect on the software, by design. I feel like people aren’t grasping how this all works. If you’re concerned about their politics, just don’t use instances that align with those politics, even spin up your own if you’re really worried about it.
I do indeed use a Lemmy instance that is not aligned with tankie politics. That being said, I am also acutely aware that technology is political and developers of a given piece of software make decisions based on their personal politics, sometimes even without knowing it. So it is important, I feel, to be aware of that.
Technically speaking, you are completely right. The problem is that the negative association rubs off on the project regardless of the factual context. Ultimately, it doesn’t matter whether the political views of the developers influence the political direction of the software. The association that sticks is: Lemmy is the one with the Stalinist developer.
Exactly.
It’s analogous to the way that Reddit knowingly allowing some subs to exist repelled some users.
Most were able to get past it and simply not subscribe to subs they found objectionable, but I’m sure many people just stayed away once they learned that certain subs existed and were very much known about by Reddit admins.
One key difference here is the way that your instance is able to enforce rules and to some extent influence and filter your user experience, and that’s worth consideration too.
I’m also curious if and how an instance like lemmy.ml can, for example, delete comments, ban users, take down content in cases of cross-instance interaction. Could the admins of lemmy.ml, for example, ban a user from another instance from Lemmy completely? From their local communities? Could they remove that person’s comments? Can they prevent their own users from seeing content they don’t like on other instances? Can they moderate content from their users that is posted to communities on other instances?
It’s analogous to the way that Reddit knowingly allowing some subs to exist repelled some users.
Let’s be absolutely clear about that:
For years (2008-2011), Reddit hosted forums for pedophiles to share “legal” pictures of young girls for other pedophiles’ erotic entertainment; e.g. upskirt photos showing children’s underwear.
For years, Reddit hosted forums for misogynistic men to encourage one another to perpetrate violence against women; for racists to promote and plan violence against black people; etc.
I will choose to leave it. Thank you.
No prob.
I can understand where mstdn.social is coming from and it is an “uneasy” situation. But the fact is that you have a choice here in which with whom you communicate.
The irony though of Reddit discussing to stay on Reddit and actually comply with the Autocratic leadership it has.
I don’t really care. I’m on Lemmy but fuck it, as long as it gets people off Reddit, competition can be a good thing in this space.
Metallica and Megadeth are historically successful bands, but Metallica would have never made it if Mustaine stayed.
competition can be a good thing in this space.
Absolutely, that’s why I am celebrating Kbin existing and being used.
As I understand both make the greater platform bigger, more Kbin users means more Lemmy content as well.
Imagine competition being mutually beneficial!
Megadeth would have never made it either!
This is great. It suddenly feels like the internet of 2003 again, with small communities popping up, competition and less of a corporate chokehold. Only this time they have a shared login and crosstalk, which was sorely lacking back then. If we are lucky this event might establish a stable, new part of the internet, which is separate from the consolidated platforms. The Fediverse doesn’t have to replace sites like reddit, just be a next step for people fed up with the corporate net (corponet?).
This is actually more like a return to the 90s of Usenet and mailing lists imho.
Yeah, I’ve been thinking all day that’s it is like Usenet 2.0 in a way. Back when Usenet actually had enthusiast conversation happening on it.
Maybe its just Nostalgia, but ill take that. Where you actually go to a place that has something to do with what your looking for, rather then a giant, centralized site where random people pop in, talk crap, and pop out.
Sorry guys, kbin is built on PHP.
I know this is a joke, but not only is KBin built on PHP, but so are Facebook, Pornhub, and Wikipedia.
Well if Pornhub is built in it, then I am down with it (quite obvious/jk)
I’m sure there’s some php still around at Facebook, but I doubt any new php projects have been started in 10+ years at any of those organizations.
You’d be surprised. Modern PHP with Laravel can actually be quite nice to work with.
I’m sure it is, and I hear good things about Laravel, but you’re still working under some really bad decisions made in the past. That’s always the problem with great frameworks on bad languages: the frameworks are great, but you can’t escape the past.
I’d point you to r/lolphp, but well, you know.
.
If history has taught me anything - I would say that means that kbin will persist forever.
I mean, almost half of all the websites on the internet is built on WordPress, so maybe you’re onto something here…
I think people get way too caught up on technical optimisation issues with a language.
The reason a language, programming or otherwise, catches on is ultimately based on how many people use the language. So the lower the barrier to entry, they more people who will use it. PHP has a pretty low barrier to entry to creating a website (however simple/bad) and it has a lot of cultural momentum. I don’t see PHP going away anytime soon.
Yeah ‘built in $language’ literally only matters from the point of view of attracting volunteer devs, end users couldn’t care less as long as the platform works. Lemmy and Kbin could be written in Malbolge for all they cared as long as it loads properly and doesn’t annoy them.
While I wouldn’t start a new PHP project myself as it’s yet another language to juggle and not one I’m particularly interested in it’s a perfectly legitimate choice even in 2023.
Yeah, I generally prefer kbin’s UI over lemmy’s but given the backend is in PHP I have concerns that it might not be able to scale effectively with its growth.
Not saying that PHP is a complete showstopper but there are valid concerns in terms of maintainability…
Can you explain this in simple terms for simple minds like mine? And I only ask for other people like me who may wonder but not ask
There is a “rumor”/“running joke” in programming community that PHP application is hard to maintain.
Primarily, because it is originally designed to whip up a website in a quick and dirty way, hence the original name “personal homepage”.
Where as rust (which is what Lemmy is built upon) is a much more modern language with more safe guard in place to help scaling the application.
Obviously, like many people pointed out there are many larger project is built by PHP. However, many larger companies have the resources build significant extension to PHP to make it more usable, like Facebook’s hhvm and hack language are both tools that revolve around PHP. This is a luxury not enjoyed by smaller projects like kbin, Lemmy, even mastodon.
My personal opinion is that PHP is not a great language, but language is just a tool; it is mostly up to the programmer to write maintainable program in a language. For example, python is probably one of the less principled language out there (for example, it’s variable scoping is very confusing); yet if the programmer programs in a manner to avoid these disadvantages, they can still build fast and maintainable project with it.
Cool, thanks! I only have experience with JavaScript and Python, and I personally prefer JS because Python has been confusing to me. But, I have heard Python is more efficient and easier in the long-term.
After ‘mastering’ JS to a sufficient ability I will put my efforts towards Python. I am stumped as to why I feel JS is easier than Python when I have also heard the opposite; that python is easier than JS
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Ahm, no ;)
Both JS and Python are neither efficient nor easier in the long-term. They are both languages that were primarily built to make quick-and-dirty small and simple programs/scripts.
Both are really slow and inefficient (though Python is much slower than JS nowadays). Both are dynamic languages which opens then up for all sorts of dirty hacks and are pretty negative for maintainability.
Because of that, both languages have unofficial typing support (Typescript and Mypy) to make programs in these languages somewhat maintainable.
If you are looking for performance, the first tier is natively compiling languages like C/C++/Rust/Go. The second tier are languages that compile to bytecode and run on heavily optimized runtime environments like anything running on the JVM or C# or therelike. And the worst tier are super dynamic languages like JS or Python.
In terms of what’s easiest, it really depends on what you’re doing to be honest. Like, if you’re a data scientist, you want to learn Python. If you’re a web developer, you want to learn JavaScript - I believe that Wasm is the future of the web, but we’re going to have traditional HTML/JavaScript for decades to come.
A lot of people seem to be talking about whether PHP has enough developer support, but that isn’t the main issue.
The issue is that code written in PHP is probably at least 10 times less efficient in terms of CPU and memory than the equivalent code written in Rust.
This means that loads of hobbyist developers will be able to run lemmy instances for a fraction of the ongoing cost of kbin.
And the main issue Reddit and a migration has is server costs. So, it could be running into a face plant.
Lemmy.World instance has a new dedicated host with EPYC 7502P around €200-€300 a month with 15k users aboard. If PHP is even x2 as inefient that’s absolutely insane. Those prices may be off but even so, shits going to cost and we all need to participate.
Let’s not hate on tools. Php has its uses and has been proven to be useful in commercial applications. So has Rust. They are different but the choice of programming language means nothing for the core project.
I, too, can use a banana to hammer in a nail
hahah, this made me laugh. I will be stealing this from you.
To be a bit more verbose, I don’t think all programming languages are created equal, and its a disservice to pretend it is.
Duck Duck Go was written in Perl. GitHub (originally) in Ruby on Rails.
Languages are tools only because they’re general purpose programming languages. The real path to success is in choosing a tool that you’re good at using (no matter how blunt), rather than pretending all tools are equal.
Sure but dissing on languages you don’t like will only make devs who like those languages defensive. Not every dev is good only at languages you’re good at.
Fair, but for me, both Rust and Php mean I won’t be customizing or contributing much to the project.
The repo’s contributor archetype will change based on the language too. What language would you be comfortable in contributing with?
Me? I’m always at home in Python. It’s like a warm cozy blanket of productivity and joy.
Modern PHP is supposed to be a decent language these days rather than a collection of footguns so I wouldn’t write it off out of hand. It wouldn’t be my first choice of language but it still runs huge swathes of the web, interesting choice for a greenfield project though. What it will mean is it’ll be harder for Kbin to attract developers on a voluntary basis I think, if I’m giving my time for free I’d personally much rather spend it writing Rust than PHP even if PHP is decent these days.
Quite the opposite. A poor technology choice is a lasting technology choice.
Urgh… php.
Rust or die…
Is php as bad as it wad previously?
No. It’s not perfect by any means but it’s leaps and bounds ahead of where it was.
Are there any sites in the Fediverse written in .net? I’d like to contribute to these sites, but I haven’t touched PHP in over a decade.
Great news to me I’m not “pro-lemmy”, I am “anti-reddit”.
Same! I use a Lemmy instance myself. I’m just happy to see there is diversity in terms of software projects in the Threadiverse.
“Threadiverse” – i really like that :)
I wish I came up wit it myself! Sadly no, noticed it in a few threads over the last few days.
Humans are amazing.
I hope I just witnessed the beginning of something we’ll casually use in a few years.
I tried kbin but it currently slow as hell at least for me. It definitely is more inviting with its design though.
Despite the Tankie stuff I prefer the interface of Lemmy, though I have accounts on both. Love that they federate. Things are happening.
Agreed Lemmy is a lot cleaner IMO. I’d be all-in if it weren’t for the political baggage, even with federation we’re empowering these guys and giving them a bigger platform. l’m still uneasy about that.
I’m pretty uneasy about the association, but the attitude of Beehaw is the antithesis of it so I guess it balances out…?
I did play with Kbin first but the interface felt kinda broken to me, buttons not reacting and the like…
Tbh, it’s floss so I don’t care who’s working on it. I just don’t really get kbin ui myself, lemmy is far closer to reddit for me. If I wanted the microblogging I already have Mastodon so I don’t see why it’s trying to do both. I prefer the old unix philosophy myself.
Kbin just feels like a home project to my eyes. Hope it goes well and the federation will be absolutely amazing.
You can just block a community or user and you won’t see it. Main thing is that its not corporate owned
Federation also works between kbin and Lemmy so if you’re worried about that, the only solution is defederation from them.
I’ve been having a blast on Lemmy so far. Just had to unsub from the Brazil community because Brazil has a lot of tankies for some fucking reason.
I choose to believe Brazilians have dealt with fascists in their government for so long it’s all they want now.
Personally, I’m loyal to Beehaw. I like the culture that it is trying to grow. But I like how I can subscribe to things outside of beehaw as long the instance has federation enabled.
I don’t like that beehaw doesn’t allow community creation (or nsfw).
Is kbin also part of the fediverse? Can you interact with kbin from lemmy, and how is it different?
Use another instances then? Afaik beehaw is more of a family friendly place and not for nsfw. lemmy.world allows both community creation and nsfw
yeah, that’s why I signed up at lemmy.world :)
The cloudflare protection of their main instance is breaking federation right now, which is a bit annoying. I hope this will be resolved soon.
in the short term we have a few upcoming critical mod tool launches we need to nail
Umm, you really should have launched this before shutting down the current tools mods use.
They’ve been promising better mod tools for years
They are totally right around the corner though, and won’t be a buggy mess at all!
Can I use kbin to read Lemmy content?
Yes. Check out the biggest currently active instance of Kbin, https://fedia.io/ — plenty of stuff from Lemmy instances.
What I don’t understand is why there are SO many missing comments when reading threads in one instance from another instance. For example, the top “Hot” post on Fedia right now is a post about community fragmentation on Lemmy. When viewed from Fedia, it has 8 comments, but when view within the source Lemmy instance, it has 40.
This is an issue I’ve seen in every instance on both Lemmy and KBin and it’s a huge issue. One of the main reasons I joined Beehaw. In fact, Beehaw shows more comments than even the NATIVE Lemmy instance, at 57!
servers being overloaded right now, it will smooth out
Just note that kbin.social currently has Cloudflare DDoS protection enabled which is breaking federation. Until this is removed, the communities are seperate.
I’ve got my lemmy instance proxied through cloudflare. It can work if you make it work. It does take a page rule to get around some of the bot detection nonsense.
It may be worth passing that rule/config over to @Ernest@kbin.social
The captcha bot detector thing seems to be making it wonkier.
Thanks, I just made a test post and could not figure out why they were not in sync.
There are other instances, like https://fedia.io/ for example.
Can someone explain the “tankie” baggage? I’ve seen it thrown around quite a bit but no one seems to explain it in detail.
(Some) Lemmy devs seem to have political ideologies that are within the “tankie” settings. That’s mostly it. Some people express they feel uncomfortable about it. Such devs hold an instance separate from the flagship instance (lemmygrad.ml), which in my opinion is not bad at all, I think it’s better they keep them to themselves giving an option to other instances to block it. They’re not trying to shove tankies ideas down anyones throats through the softwate or anything. Though this has leaked to the flagship instance sometimes as shown by this post
While true, there’s still some pretty questionable/pro-CCP moderation on lemmy.ml.
That’s true and I added it later by an edit in my original post which appears not to have synchronized to Beehaw yet. I wholeheartedly agree with the final paragraph of that post.
Glad they can’t take over the whole Fediverse. I mean Reddit admins were okay with jailbait and a lot of other disgusting stuff, and they actually make decisions for the whole site. The Fediverse is immune to that, the lead dev could literally be a CCP agent and other instances would still be trustworthy as long as the software is open source.
Well, TIL a new word: tankie.
Purge it from your mind before you fall down a rabbithole of some of the most brain-broken people on the internet.
I linked the “tankie baggage” phrase to a post about it now. Check it out.
The lack of app for KBin kills it for me.
I have a account with KBin and I may use it as well if there’s an app
/cries in iOS
God, what I would give for Apollo to rip the Reddit API guts out and refit with Lemmy’s. He open sourced it so I’m sure someone will.
Didn’t he open source the server backend? Not the app
Server backend stuff was to contradict the Reddit CEOs claims about Apollo being inefficient on the API.
Would be hilarious if all the third party reddit clients updated at the same time to connect to a completely new board.
You can do the whole ‘add to home screen’ and it sort of functions like an app in iOS.
On Android, you can add it to your home screen and it functions kind of like an app… it could definitely benefit from a native app, though.
Nobody is going to fly with mobile browser these days. It’s App or die in this regard.
The biggest social media sites have apps. It’s suicide. Heck, the reason these sites are having the mass infux is because Reddits app sucks. If it was amazing nobody would of really cared and the spez drama wouldn’t have happened.
Just my 2c.
Yeah an official app would be great.
Even a fork of Jerboa or something could be a start!
Huh i thought jabora would be able to log into it
Just took a look at the stats on The-Federation.info and looks like Lemmy is doing just fine.
Lemmy Stats: 162 Nodes 90,053 Users 277,427 Posts 610,007 Comments
Kbin Stats: 7 Nodes 5,960 Users 3,992 Posts 4,844 Comments
I just noticed the same thing. I do not see a stat that shows kbin is overtaking lemmy.
Would kbin’s current non-federation because of cloudflare stuff be stopping the-federation.info from accessing more recent stats?
I believe there was a post by a Kbin hoster that they had to set up a specifc rule in Cloudflare to get around the issue. Although AFAIK I would assume that Cloudflare could definitely be causing some issues for some instances which may not be set up correctly to get around the issue, which in turn could lead to the issue your suggesting. But then again don’t quote me on any of this I’m not a dev for any of the projects, and I’m basing this on my own projects where getting around Cloudflare to scrap data is a complete pain and sometimes more work then it’s worth.
Oh I am not saying it is not doing fine. I just found it super-interesting that a much younger project got ahead, even if perhaps only temporarily, as far as active users are concerned.
Honestly, many people are turned off by Lemmy tankies. I myself though I’d never come back to Lemmy until I found beehaw.
Honestly, many people are turned off by Lemmy tankies.
I keep hearing people commenting about that, but so far I haven’t noticed any particular tankie-ish influence.
Maybe I’m just not choosing the communities where they hang out?
Lemmy.ca blocks lemmygrad just like Beehaw so you can’t see anything from the biggest tankie community on Lemmy.
So for those of us that do t have any association or federation with the “tankie lemmy”, there shouldn’t be any taint, right?
Yeah, there shouldn’t be posts/comments to the communities that block Lemmygrad and in those that can like lemmy.ml’s communities - I believe that you can’t see them.
