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
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.
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.
Edit 2: another person expressing concerns (with receipts) about moderation policy on lemmy.ml
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!
Sorry guys, kbin is built on PHP.
So even if it did succeed, it won’t be for long.
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.
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.
.
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.
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.
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.
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 the 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 a tool; programmer is also a huge contributing factor in creating maintainable program. 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
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.
Oh, I didn’t know this, I appreciate the insight. I have been working with typescript a bit, but sidestepped back to JS for a small project because of familiarity. My next project may be typescript just to get a feel for it.
I have heard a lot of buzz about rust, but I haven’t looked it up because I don’t want to overwhelm myself with new things. But it does seem very popular. And I doubt there’s anyone, even people unfamiliar with code, who hasn’t heard of the C family!
I’m not giving up JS, since it is so popular for web development, but it does make me sad that it’s so inefficient for other tasks in comparison to the other languages. Butz it also makes me kind of excited to get into some of the meatier stuff
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.
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.
Quite the opposite. A poor technology choice is a lasting technology choice.
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.
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.
kbin.social currently has 20k + users. However it currently has federation disabled due to the traffic is receiving. Edit: It isn’t 100k
It’s a bit funny to be like “federation is what will make this great” and then “federation blows us up, so we’re turning it off”.
It was just too much greatness all at once. Like a fire hose of greatness when you just wanted a small sip
Yeah it’s only temporary, they are on the process of moving to a bigger server
honestly federation is one of the major things that confuses people about fediverse stuff, so that’s probably helping them.
Federation isn’t disabled directly. The admin put the instance behind a cloudflare proxy, which breaks the ActivityPub federation without further tweaking to open up the relevant ports. He’s working on loosening up that restriction to get federation working properly again.
is this why I’m currently unable to access kbin from within Jerboa (Lemmy android client if you weren’t aware) aside from meta@kbin.social? or would that not work anyway?
Yeh. That and some instances are just slow right now.
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!
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 other 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 :)
kbin is different software but is part of the fediverse since it follows the ActivityPub protocol. Therefore you can interact with kbin from any lemmy instance as long as they allow communication with each other.
EDIT: To add to that, although I have signed up at Beehaw, I have subscribed to many communities of other lemmy instances, and several magazines from kbin through the Beehaw lemmy instance.
What are the pros and cons of one platform over the other? Is KBin just Lemmy+Mastodon? Can Lemmy see KBin magazines?
Yep, thread based communities are shared perfectly between Lemmy and kbin. Other than currently the largest kbin community is having federation issues due to the influx of users
So does that mean that any thread in the fediverse can be shared together? Or is kbin another Lemmy instance? I thought we could only look at other Lemmy instances.
They both use a similar protocol to talk between servers, but they are different software.
So we can interact with any software in the fediverse?
Yes, I’m on mastodon and can go on any lemmy thread and comment. There are some caveats but if it’s in the fediverse it can interoperate.
@TheOneCurly I’ve been noticing massive #Kbin federation issues, even from the small instance that I’m on, kbin.projectsegfau.lt
Agreed, Fedia.io was mostly working this morning but at some point federation just stalled.
Same here, I was using Fedia but I’ve switched back to lemmy.world because I straight up couldn’t subscribe to some communities. And then realised the homepage is bugged and sorting by new doesn’t actually show you the newest posts. I’ll try it again when it’s less of a buggy mess.
If I were to switch from Lemmy to KBin (or vice versa), would I have to start over (e.g. create a new account there and loae all my comments etc.)? Or would it be possible to “migrate”?
For now, you would have to lost everything and create a new account. But maybe we’ll see a solution for it coming
You can’t just subscribe to their communities?
You can, but you will lose the accees to the notifications of the posts and comments you made, and if you’re a moderator, it’s even harder to transfer everything manually
I do not believe there is a migration tool for Lemmy-KBin migrations.
Can someone please explain the “tankie baggage”?
I understand the words, but not the history.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.
It’s not a pejorative word for any Stalinist. It’s a pejorative word for a specific type of Stalinist, ie, one that will back any oppressive regime that espouses itself to be Stalinist.
Via Wikipedia:
Tankie is a pejorative label for communists, particularly Stalinists, who support the authoritarian tendencies of Marxism–Leninism or, more generally, authoritarian states associated with Marxism–Leninism in history. The term was originally used by dissident Marxist–Leninists to describe members of the Communist Party of Great Britain who followed the party line of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. Specifically, it was used to distinguish party members who spoke out in defense of the Soviet use of tanks to crush the Hungarian Revolution of 1956 and the 1968 Prague Spring uprising, or who more broadly adhered to pro-Soviet positions. The term is also used to describe people who endorse, defend, or deny the crimes committed by communist leaders such as Vladimir Lenin, Joseph Stalin, Mao Zedong, Pol Pot, and Kim il-Sung.
The thread from fefitips makes claims without providing any evidence. They say they “have receipts” and can provide on request, but why not simply post it if it actually existed?
I have no dog in this fight - today is the first time I’ve heard the word “tankie” - but I would take the linked claims with a grain of salt until proof is provided.
Ok, here’s some evidence. There’s two primary/full-time developers of Lemmy. Here’s one’s github page of essays.
If you search that tree, he mentions lemmygrad several times, has a crash course on socialism that points you to “asktankies”, and his FAQ denies several holocausts, including (for example) Stalin’s slaughter of millions of Ukrainians.
Many thanks for the links, that’s great to start a dialogue. I didn’t see anything particularly terrible in my read through the crash course (I might have missed something). In the FAQ I see a link to What about Stalin? Didn’t he kill millions? (Revleft podcast on Stalin), which is an external podcast and I don’t plan to listen to it to find out what it contains. Is there something specific which the developer wrote which you can link to?
Regardless of whether any particular developer is or isn’t a “tankie”, Lemmy the software and Lemmy.ml don’t appear to support any ideologies. Their Code of Conduct specifically states “We are committed to providing a friendly, safe and welcoming environment for all, regardless of level of experience, gender identity and expression, sexual orientation, disability, personal appearance, body size, race, ethnicity, age, religion, nationality, or other similar characteristic.”
Please don’t think I am merely arguing or playing devil’s advocate. I have only just started using Lemmy and would prefer to not waste my time on a platform that ultimately I wouldn’t like to be associated with, but so far it feels a bit overblown.
Regarding lemmy.ml as an instance: Dig further into it. They do have a certain ideology.
At any rate, you asked what evidence there is that the devs are tankies. I would simply point out that they describe themselves using exactly that word. And even the official docs are laden with political commentary. Regardless of what you think of their politics, or how much politics is “too much” or outside of your overton window, I don’t think it should be controversial to call them tankies.
Great link, updated the post to link to it. Thank you!
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.
Looks like this post didn’t age very well
In what sense? Kbin is struggling with the wave of new subscriptions just as Lemmy is, and since it’s a smaller project with fewer resources, it’s having a harder time doing so.
That does not make the fact that at some point Kbin was ahead of Lemmy in terms of active accounts any less notable. I would even argue it makes it more notable.
Looks like KBin has an edge over Lemmy now in terms of monthly active users.
I just followed the links in the post:
KBin 2,753 users Lemmy 112,013 users
I watched all the charts and every KPI have the same ratio of 1:40
Note that I am a today subscriber to Lemmy, and just took a look at KBin.
KBin is dealing with the onslaught of new users, and as it is a newer project, it’s not handling it as well as Lemmy.
Also, you are looking at user accounts, I was talking about monthly active users.
Also also, biggest instance of KBin is currently out of federation (so does not show up in these stats), but it is still growing and is pretty damn huge now: https://kbin.social/statsWe shall see what happens when kbin.social re-joins federation. But also: this is not a competition. What matters is that there are independent software projects in this space.
I think the kbin numbers are deflated because >90% of kbin users are on kbin.social and they are having trouble federating. I think the numbers will bounce back once they resolve the issue.
A lot of posts there are lamenting that Lemmy is harder to sign up for, so I think the influx of users comes from kbin.social’s ease of new user signups. Hopefully they can scale up and get back on the fediverse.
The fact that Kbin is handling the wave worse than Lemmy is not unrelated to the fact that Lemmy’s tech stack is much lighter weight and more efficient. It is a fundamental issue with the technology. If either are going to become major players then they need exponential growth, and Lemmy is just better at that.
Sure, but it’s not a competition. In the broader fedi there are instances using all sorts of stacks, including PHP-based ones (like Pixelfed), and these have instances that are huge and performant.
I do prefer the Rust stack to handle my data, but it’s in no way a cut and dry case. And looking at https://kbin.social/stats, I don’t know if any Lemmy instance would have handled that ind of traffic much better.
Why is that? I’m out of the loop.
Lemmy Devs are saying things in support of China’s actions against the Uyghur population: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uyghur_genocide
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 the Beehaw instance, since it seems less affected. In fact, Beehaw shows more comments than even the NATIVE Lemmy instance, at 57!
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.
