this post was submitted on 11 Jun 2023

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146

KBin has taken over Lemmy in monthly active users count (szmer.info)

submitted 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) by rysiek@szmer.info to c/technology@beehaw.org

295 comments fedilink hide all child comments

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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[–] Veraticus@lib.lgbt 1 points 2 years ago (2 children)

Hmm, interesting. I just spent some time getting a Lemmy instance set up -- maybe I should've gone for kbin instead?

[–] rysiek@szmer.info 1 points 2 years ago (7 children)

I don't think you need to worry about it. It's up to a given community whether or not that baggage affects it or not, I think. Building communities that are very explicitly not tankie is a great way of helping overcome that baggage for the whole project.

[–] Veraticus@lib.lgbt 0 points 2 years ago (1 children)

Yeah, I didn't even investigate kpub very much though. And Lemmy is a lot of lock-in; obviously once you're on it, you're on it.

I guess it is the more robust project so I shouldn't be too concerned. Will definitely keep an eye on kbin though.

[–] rysiek@szmer.info 0 points 2 years ago

Sounds about right. And there is always a possibility of someone creating a migration tool.

[–] NattyNatty2x4@beehaw.org 0 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (3 children)

Brand new to fediverse and this is the second comment I've seen saying lemmy has tankie issues. Is this a term specific to fediverse or is it referring to the category of communists that are called tankies? If the second, I didn't realize tankies were big here

[–] z2k_@lemmy.nz 0 points 2 years ago (3 children)

I see you’ve joined the beehaw.org instance which doesn’t federate with lemmygrad.ml which is the main source of tankie views.

[–] DarbyDear@beehaw.org 0 points 2 years ago

Thank you for solving a mystery I've had since I heard of Lemmy! I kept hearing about a supposed tankie problem, but never saw anything about it. Now I'm even more thankful about choosing Beehaw; I have leftist leanings, but tankies definitely rub me the wrong way.

[–] chaoticPuppies@beehaw.org 0 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago)

Good to know! I have been trying to figure out what was and is going on here.

[–] NattyNatty2x4@beehaw.org 0 points 2 years ago (2 children)

Interesting, thanks. I guess I lucked out on which instance I joined lol. Is there a way to see what instances federate with which instances?

[–] z2k_@lemmy.nz 0 points 2 years ago

There’s this website but it’s not mobile friendly https://lemmymap.feddit.de/

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[–] coldredlight@beehaw.org 0 points 2 years ago

Until recently I think lemmygrad was the most active instance and it's full of communists, including obnoxious tankies who scared off new users and contributed the reputation.

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[–] lunarshot@beehaw.org 1 points 2 years ago

i think you can engage and interact across both so it may not matter as much.

[–] nii236@lemmy.jtmn.dev 1 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (27 children)

Sorry guys, kbin is built on PHP.

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

[–] Hexorg@beehaw.org 1 points 2 years ago (7 children)

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.

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[–] bad_alloc@feddit.de 0 points 2 years 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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[–] Xathonn@lemmy.zip 0 points 2 years ago

I really like Kbin's microblog feature. Basically able to "tweet" in a community without making a whole post

[–] pinkpatrol@anarch.is 0 points 2 years 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.

[–] deephurting@beehaw.org 0 points 2 years ago (1 children)

A couple times a day when I go to kbin they Cloudflare me...kinda irritating. beehaw or Squabbles are down with a VPN dropping by, apparently. Or whatever's at work here.

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[–] Alkalyon@lemmy.ml 0 points 2 years ago

I don't expect a huge difference to be honest.

It still has the same issues as Lemmy. Here I just pressed save on my settings.

[–] biscuitsofdoom@beehaw.org 0 points 2 years ago (11 children)

What's kbin?

[–] MrSpectroscopy@sopuli.xyz 0 points 2 years ago (1 children)

Not sure, but it looks similar to lemmy. It's "federated"? I wonder if we can see kbin links through our lemmy server? Just trying to figure this all out...

[–] SpookyBogMonster@lemmy.ml 0 points 2 years ago (2 children)

My understanding is that people on kbin can interact with Lemmy instances. Not sure if that goes the other way though

[–] worfamerryman@beehaw.org 0 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (3 children)

I am subscribed to a kbin community through lemmy. I will check. Please wait.

[–] cnnrduncan@beehaw.org 0 points 2 years ago (2 children)

I saw somebody mention that kbin recently implemented cloudflare protection that breaks federation with Lemmy

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[–] uthredii@beehaw.org 0 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years 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 0 points 2 years 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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[–] z2k_@lemmy.nz 0 points 2 years 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 0 points 2 years ago

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

[–] Saik0Shinigami@lemmy.saik0.com 0 points 2 years 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 0 points 2 years 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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[–] PeaPanties@lemmy.ml 0 points 2 years 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

[–] ContentSpy@fedia.io 0 points 2 years ago (1 children)

Yeah an official app would be great.

[–] cnnrduncan@beehaw.org 0 points 2 years ago (1 children)

Even a fork of Jerboa or something could be a start!

[–] Goodtoknow@lemmy.ca 0 points 2 years ago

Huh i thought jabora would be able to log into it

[–] spamfajitas@beehaw.org 0 points 2 years ago (1 children)

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.

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[–] ubergeek77@lemmy.ubergeek77.chat 0 points 2 years ago (1 children)

"Tankie baggage?"

[–] communist@beehaw.org 0 points 2 years ago (5 children)

Lemmy devs are tankies.

[–] ubergeek77@lemmy.ubergeek77.chat 0 points 2 years 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.

[–] communist@beehaw.org 0 points 2 years ago (6 children)

https://mstdn.social/@feditips/106835057054633379

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[–] Sleeping@iusearchlinux.fyi 0 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years 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

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[–] Hamartiogonic@sopuli.xyz 0 points 2 years ago (2 children)

Any ideas what are the pros and cons of each option?

[–] rysiek@szmer.info 0 points 2 years ago (1 children)

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 0 points 2 years ago (7 children)

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.

[–] sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works 0 points 2 years ago (2 children)

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.

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[–] damn@lemmy.fmhy.ml 0 points 2 years ago

Here's a post discussing that: https://feddit.de/post/781919

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