What do you think is responsible for lemmy’s growth over other alternatives like KBin and Tildes?

Frost Wolf@lemmy.world to No Stupid Questions@lemmy.world – 327 points –

Is it speed? Features? Ease of development? Just curious why lemmy is seeing more activity as opposed to other networks.

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Kbin is pretty new, no apps, and faced a lot of issues during the wave of incoming redditors. Some lemmy instances did, too, but there were more of them so there were alternatives when one crashed. If we compare kbin.social to a big instance like lemmy.world, it's not doing too bad.

Tildes is invite-only so I don't think they wanted to grow that quickly in the first place.

I guess you’re right. Even some lemmy instances had to close registration. Ahhh so kbin is newer. I guess that explains a lot too.

Also took a quick look at tildes and it’s text only, as far as I know. So if they change their mind about registrations, not a lot of people will join anyway.

Don't quote me on this, but I've read lemmy is a few years old already while kbin is just a few months old (3-4 mos?). Add the number of instances (i only know of 3 kbin instances) and you can see why it didn't take off the way lemmy did.

I agree. Purely text-based sites need a certain kind of audience/users. I love a good discussion/debate, but I need my memes, too. Lol.

The Kbin creator had initially joined to help Lemmy, but decided to create his own thing when he couldn’t take their political alignments anymore. The Lemmy devs used to be vocal Uyghur genocide deniers and pro-North-Korea, and would answer questions on Reddit’s r/AskATankie (a tankie is someone who supports communist dictatorships), but now that Lemmy is successful, they’ve kind of grown hush-hush on it, without really addressing it.

So, he went to create Kbin, but since he’s not a software engineer, he chose foundations that won’t really scale too well. Kbin is written in PHP, which is an interpreted and mono-threaded technology, it’s great at some stuff, but not high-scale services (source: that’s what I do for a living). Lemmy was written in Rust, which is compiled and multi-threaded. It doesn’t mean Lemmy won’t meet tricky scale bottlenecks, but it will give it a much larger toolset to get through whole classes of them.

And of course, Kbin being much younger, it doesn’t currently have a bunch of critical stuff that Lemmy already has. For instance: an API, which has been allowing other people to build great native clients for it.

Without an API, all clients would need to rely on scraping, which is slower and more resource intense - almost orders of magnitude. Until Kbin develops an API, it will always be less used.

This is interesting. Thank you for the info. Quick question, though: does this mean kbin will inevitably face scaling issues when it gets too big? And there's no way to prevent that?

My best answer is: if they get to sufficient scale, both Lemmy and Kbin will face scaling issues to get through, but Lemmy is based on something that will make it much easier for humans to get through a lot of those bottlenecks.

I hope what this answer conveys is that the technology choice is a major factor, but not the only factor. If the Lemmy dev team doesn’t know how to scale a service, and don’t enlist the help of people who do, the underlying technology won’t make much of a difference. But it does give them a very strong upside.

Another Lemmy user was saying that the Kbin move to use PHP was like someone saying: “oh, I like the airplane you just built by yourself with the intention to fly above the clouds, I’m going to do the same thing, let me prepare my cardboard”, and there’s a lot of truth to it. 😉

That analogy really drives the point home. Basically, lemmy already has a built-in advantage due to the tech they went with. But like any program/machine, it's only as good as the people behind it. Thank you for the answer.

In fairness, despite its age, kbin feels like it has more features. I guess the simplicity of lemmy has its draws too, plus its already growing community.

Lol as a visual person, I couldn’t agree more. Images make everything pop. I came from the dial up era and the boom of forums and chat rooms. But even I appreciate good memes and images sprinkled here and there.

I do like the microblog feature of kbin for when you have some random question, but don't want to make a full on thread about it.

There's also the issue that during the first big influx, Kbin turned off federation while the dev tried to fix things up. It was off for days, so any fledgling magazines there couldn't take advantage of Lemmy traffic, we couldn't sub to them and made our own communities instead, and by the time they turned federation back on a lot of Lemmy communities were already pretty established as "the main one".

You are correct about Tildes. They are very intentionally cultivating a different atmosphere and don't want Reddit's huddled masses. There is a subset of reddit users who fit there but it's not the shitposting crowd.

It's a gated community, basically, not a social network. And a very snobbish one at that.