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

  • @derived_allegory@beehaw.org
    link
    fedilink
    English
    12
    edit-2
    1 year ago

    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 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.

    • reric88🧩
      link
      fedilink
      English
      31 year ago

      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

      • Square Singer
        link
        fedilink
        English
        31 year ago

        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.

        • Blake [he/him]
          link
          fedilink
          English
          2
          edit-2
          1 year ago

          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.