this post was submitted on 11 Jun 2023
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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

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[–] z2k_@lemmy.nz 43 points 1 year ago (4 children)

Just note that kbin.social currently has Cloudflare DDoS protection enabled which is breaking federation. Until this is removed, the communities are seperate.

[–] Helio@sh.itjust.works 16 points 1 year ago

Good to know, I was wondering why I couldn't see any kbin stuff here

[–] Saik0Shinigami@lemmy.saik0.com 15 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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.

[–] UselesslyBrisk@infosec.pub 10 points 1 year ago

It may be worth passing that rule/config over to @Ernest@kbin.social

The captcha bot detector thing seems to be making it wonkier.

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[–] wit@lemmy.world 37 points 1 year ago (2 children)

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..

[–] rysiek@szmer.info 20 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (9 children)

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).

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[–] BlackCoffee@beehaw.org 10 points 1 year ago

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.

[–] bad_alloc@feddit.de 36 points 1 year ago (3 children)

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?).

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[–] unix_joe@lemmy.sdf.org 33 points 1 year ago (3 children)

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.

[–] rysiek@szmer.info 12 points 1 year ago

competition can be a good thing in this space.

Absolutely, that's why I am celebrating Kbin existing and being used.

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[–] uthredii@beehaw.org 28 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

I am on both and kbin seems less active.

Perhaps the numbers are counted different?

lemmy might be counting people who have posted this month and kbin might be counting anyone who has visited the site.

Big respect to all the devs for handling this growth so well.

[–] rysiek@szmer.info 14 points 1 year ago (1 children)

lemmy might be counting people who have posted this month and kbin might be counting anyone who has cisited the site.

The data is from The-Federation.info, and the idea is that the metric is about users whose accounts were active over the last month. I think "active" in both cases means "has logged in recently".

Big respect to all the devs for handling this growth so well.

Absolutely. Sending all the hugs and good vibes, the Big Wave has not even started yet, I think.

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[–] pinkpatrol@anarch.is 27 points 1 year ago

I think it mainly comes down to the project landing page being more friendly and the UI being more polished.

The landing page of join-lemmy.org doesn't show what the website looks like. The only screenshots are of code and github. That section is geared towards potential instance administrators, not potential users.

[–] croobat@lemmy.world 25 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Great news to me I'm not "pro-lemmy", I am "anti-reddit".

[–] rysiek@szmer.info 11 points 1 year ago (3 children)

Same! I use a Lemmy instance myself. I'm just happy to see there is diversity in terms of software projects in the Threadiverse.

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[–] nii236@lemmy.jtmn.dev 24 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (16 children)

Sorry guys, kbin is built on PHP.

So even if it did succeed, it won't be for long.

[–] ipkpjersi@lemmy.one 19 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (5 children)

I know this is a joke, but not only is KBin built on PHP, but so are Facebook, Pornhub, and Wikipedia.

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[–] venuswasaflytrap@lemmy.ca 18 points 1 year ago (3 children)

If history has taught me anything - I would say that means that kbin will persist forever.

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[–] Gecko@feddit.de 11 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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...

[–] reric88@beehaw.org 12 points 1 year ago (2 children)

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

[–] derived_allegory@beehaw.org 11 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (5 children)

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.

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[–] daan@lemmy.vanoverloop.xyz 23 points 1 year ago

The cloudflare protection of their main instance is breaking federation right now, which is a bit annoying. I hope this will be resolved soon.

[–] PeaPanties@lemmy.ml 22 points 1 year ago (11 children)

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

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[–] ubergeek77@lemmy.ubergeek77.chat 21 points 1 year ago (1 children)
[–] communist@beehaw.org 19 points 1 year ago (5 children)
[–] ubergeek77@lemmy.ubergeek77.chat 13 points 1 year ago (2 children)

I keep hearing similar things, but not a single person has linked to a comment or anything the devs have actually said.

Where can I read about this? I want to see what they said.

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[–] Sleeping@iusearchlinux.fyi 20 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (9 children)

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

[–] worfamerryman@beehaw.org 14 points 1 year ago

I just noticed the same thing. I do not see a stat that shows kbin is overtaking lemmy.

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[–] Towerism@beehaw.org 14 points 1 year ago (2 children)

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.

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[–] farizer@discuss.tchncs.de 14 points 1 year ago

I tried kbin but it currently slow as hell at least for me. It definitely is more inviting with its design though.

[–] Defaced@lemmy.world 10 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Can someone explain the "tankie" baggage? I've seen it thrown around quite a bit but no one seems to explain it in detail.

[–] brunox 15 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (3 children)

(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

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[–] biscuitsofdoom@beehaw.org 10 points 1 year ago (19 children)
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[–] Nikokin@lemmy.world 10 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Can I use kbin to read Lemmy content?

[–] rysiek@szmer.info 11 points 1 year ago (3 children)

Yes. Check out the biggest currently active instance of Kbin, https://fedia.io/ — plenty of stuff from Lemmy instances.

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[–] trachemys@iusearchlinux.fyi 10 points 1 year ago (2 children)

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.

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[–] joneskind@lemmy.world 10 points 1 year ago (7 children)

Looks like this post didn't age very well

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[–] Browning@lemmy.world 10 points 1 year ago (3 children)

Can someone please explain the "tankie baggage"?
I understand the words, but not the history.

[–] bouncing@partizle.com 16 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (6 children)

A "tankie" is a pejorative word for a Stalinist. (Just in case any readers aren't familiar with the word?)

Basically lemmy (the project) was started by some Marxist-Leninists who have a soft spot for the CCP and authoritarian communism (really). Lemmy.ml and lemmygrad.ml actually share the same IP address. And lemmy contributors seem to have lemmygrad accounts.

@feditips, who is a pretty well-respected Fediverse advocate, has recommended against lemmy here and here, with pretty good reasoning.

Having said that, the politics of the authors of the software do not necessarily dictate how you, me, or anyone else choose to run instances.

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