Lately I often read about kbin.social being similar to lemmy but more accessible. So I created an account there to check it out. My experience so far is a little mixed. From kbin I can access all Lemmy posts, although I find the interface less intuitive to join new communities. So from the kbin side it feels like an other Lemmy instance.
But when searching for kbin from this Lemmy Account, I do not find much. I feel like I am missing some basic concept, that makes it pretty clear. Why this is such a one way experience.
So now I am wondering: How does this work, what are the difference, what do both sites have in common?
kbin looks good but I can’t get over the fact that its backend is written in PHP. In the long run, lemmy’s Rust backend will probably be way more resource efficient and thus better for hosters. We’ll have to see though, since tech stacks aren’t the most important thing. But for me a Rust backend is a huge plus.
It’s still PHP but it’s not the unholy spaghetti mess that PHP 5 once was. PHP gets a bad rep for all the shitty websites from the early 2000s that people ended up inheriting from other teams, but modern PHP with typing, classes, and ORMs is quite pleasant to work with.
Take a look through the kbin source, I find it quite readable to the point it may just as well be C# or Java with some dollar signs sprinkled in.
I’m sure it’s fine code, I just can’t imagine it’ll ever be as efficient as Rust.
Lemmy is not bottlenecked by anything related to the Rust code and neither is Kbin most likely. Modern php is efficient enough for it to not really matter (contrary to Python or Ruby etc.).
Modern PHP is better than PHP5 but it still uses that brain dead execution model where every request starts the entire framework from scratch.
If it can run on PHP8 you get JIT compilation, which should go a long way to closing any gaps (if they exist, which I suspect not).