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submitted 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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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[-] [email protected] 0 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago)

kbin.social currently has 20k + users. However it currently has federation disabled due to the traffic is receiving. Edit: It isn't 100k

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[-] [email protected] 0 points 2 years ago

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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[-] [email protected] 0 points 2 years ago

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

[-] [email protected] 0 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago)

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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[-] [email protected] 0 points 2 years ago

What are the pros and cons of one platform over the other? Is KBin just Lemmy+Mastodon? Can Lemmy see KBin magazines?

[-] [email protected] 0 points 2 years ago

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

[-] [email protected] 0 points 2 years ago

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.

[-] [email protected] 0 points 2 years ago

They both use a similar protocol to talk between servers, but they are different software.

[-] [email protected] 0 points 2 years ago

So we can interact with any software in the fediverse?

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[-] [email protected] 0 points 2 years ago

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

[-] [email protected] 0 points 2 years ago

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.

[-] [email protected] 0 points 2 years ago

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.

[-] [email protected] 0 points 2 years ago

Well, to me Rust suggests that a given software project might be somewhat more performant, and somewhat more secure — but it all also depends on the developers, of course.

[-] [email protected] 0 points 2 years ago

Well, that kind of sounds like the normal rust propaganda, don't get me wrong, I do think the language is decent, it's just tiring to see so many people just buying into and parroting some weird claims like "it's rust, so it's secure"

[-] [email protected] 0 points 2 years ago

I like rust a lot, but it's definitely in the place Go was a few years ago, where people just assume "written in rust" = good for some reason.

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[-] [email protected] 0 points 2 years ago

I mean the reason people believe that is because it's a very explicit language. It knows what's in its memory at all times, and so at the lower layers it's more secure by nature.

As opposed to php, you're less likely to introduce a vulnerability by being sloppy with data sanitation - the language demands you tell it exactly the data structures you want it to put into memory. For that reason, the language is more secure - the parse json function is going to be less likely to be able to run rogue code maliciously embedded inside it than php, and if it does manage to do so, it's easier to write php to blindly open a hole in the system from inside an interpreter than it is to break out of or hijack the runtime.

Obviously that doesn't make it secure. It just means that all else being equal, rust is less vulnerable to a sloppy mistake at any given layer in the stack. Doesn't mean you can't make a logical mistake and open up a glaring security hole

And obviously you can write bulletproof php code, but every layer of the stack needs to be just as bulletproof. Including the interpreter and all your libraries - which historically were very much not bulletproof (it's definitely much more strict than it used to be, and I think I heard fb tried compilation and I'm not sure if that's become a thing, but it's generally is more secure than interpretation for similar reasons)

All that being said, humans are just dumb and sloppy. We write shit code, and we try to minimize the surface area for mistakes. Rust has a much smaller surface area than php

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this post was submitted on 11 Jun 2023
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