Us sitting here with our fiber internet and recent model phones have it pretty good. But the “i” in iPhone stands for “inequality”. Most people in the world still have pretty bad internet and old/slow phones. For a platform to be widely adopted and to serve the needs of those who often miss out, it needs to be frugal in network and cpu usage.
Lemmy
Kbin
PieFed
Home page
4.5 MB
1.65 MB
700 KB – 930 KB
Viewing a post
360 KB
826 KB (varies)
29 KB
Home pages
Due to Lemmy’s javascript-heavy software architecture, visiting a Lemmy home page involves downloading . And this only gets you 20 posts! Also community thumbnails, even if displayed as a 22px by 22px icon are served directly from their home instances, unresized, which can often be multiple megabytes in size. The home page of lemmy.nz is currently weighing over 9 MB.
Kbin’s home page comes in at a respectable 1.65 MB due to relying less on JavaScript. However it is let down by not using loading=”lazy” on images so they all need to be loaded immediately and by generating post thumbnails that are twice as big as they need to be.
When viewing a post, we can assume various assets (CSS, JS and some images) are cached due to loading the home page first.
The picture looks similar when viewing a post, which is a bit surprising. One of the usual benefits of the JS-heavy SPA architecture used by Lemmy is that once all the ‘app’ is loaded into the browser, subsequent pages only involve a small API call. However, going to a page in Lemmy involves two API calls (one for the page and one for the comments) both of which return quite a bit of data. If you look at the ‘get the comments on this post’ JSON response you can see the developers have fallen into the classic SPA pitfall of “over-fetching“. They’re retrieving a whole haystack from the backend and then using JavaScript to find the needle they want, which involves transferring the haystack over the internet. Ideally the backend would find the needle and just send that to the frontend.
Kbin sends more data than it needs to when viewing a post, again because of not using loading=”lazy” which causes every profile picture of the commenters to be loaded at once. Making this simple fix would bring the weight down, from ~800 KB to around 50 KB.
PieFed only sends 10 KB – 30 KB to show a post, but it varies depending on the number and length of comments. This could be reduced even more by minifying the HTML response but with PieFed under active development I prefer the source to be as readable as possible to aid in debugging.
This is no accident. It is the result of choices made very early on in the development process, well before any code was written. These choices were made based on certain priorities and values which will continue to shape PieFed in the future as it grows. In a world where digital access remains unequal, prioritizing accessible and fast-loading websites isn’t just about technology; it’s a step towards a more inclusive and equitable society.
@piefedadmin Let me second that design needs to anticipate low bandwidth. I have lived in several countries across Africa where watching YouTube was only possible if using the lowest video settings -- 240p or 360p. Thanks for highlighting the average global user's challenges on the internet.
Yeah, it has to be experienced first hand to really understand. Many web developers in the first world have only ever had excellent internet connections.
I spent 4 years in South East Asia, working remotely, often from rural areas with a couple of bars of 3G. Then, 3 years powering my life from 300 watts of solar panels while using a 4G connection.
In teoria dovreste poter seguire gli aggiornamenti tramite @ulaulanotepad direttamente da qualunque account federato.
Spero questa cosa funzioni (i post che vanno al gruppo di astronomia su #feddit li vedo anche qui sulla mia timeline mastodontica, per esempio).
Welche #Reddit Alternativen gibt es denn gerade?
Ich habe #Lemmy und #kbin auf dem Schirm und habe nur ein unbestimmtes Gefühl dass es an Lemmy viel Kritik gab, vielleicht auch an Kbin. Habt ihr mir da mehr Infos?
Hintergrund: Ich würde r/fellnasen auch gerne hier im Fediverse haben. Die Community hier ist wahrscheinlich sehr klein aber einen Versuch wäre es ja wert. #Ratten#haustiere
@LemmyDev@moanos Interessant, dass Du Dich nicht zu China (möge Winnie the Pooh den Weg aller mörderischen Diktatoren gehen), Nord Korea, LaRouchite Gedankengut, dem Massaker an Uighuren, etc. äußerst.
Und, nein, wenn ich mit dem Gedankengut des Chefs von Müllermilch nicht einverstanden bin, und dem Umgang den er pflegt, kann ich nicht losziehen und "Weihenstephan" kaufen gehen, weil das ja eine "andere Firma" ist, die nur Müller Milch's Technologie verwendet.
So lange Lemmygrad und Lemmy.ml Brutstätten eines pro-Stalinist, pro-CCP, pro-Nord Korea, Holodomor-verherrlichenden, LaRouchite Gedankengut verbreitenden, Sumpfes sind, und sich Lemmy nicht nur mit "alles Lügen" rausredet sondern ganz klar von diesen diktatorischen, genozidalen, Regimes distanziert, steht meine Aussage.
Und, nein, der weiche Whataboutismus "aber Amerika, whine whine" zieht nicht. Der zieht, wenn in China freie Wahlen stattfinden und Regimekritiker nicht mehr ermordet werden.
@mikka@moanos Grade eben hast du noch von Antisemitismus, Tankies und Klimaleugner schwadroniert. Kaum antworte ich darauf ziehst du schon den nächsten Unsinn aus dem Hut. Hast du echt nichts besseres zu tun als Open-Source Projekte schlecht zu reden?
Having #reddit host (and therefore own) the conversation space on any subject is ridiculous. But the way #Lemmy & #kbin work presents the same problem. Basically they are not really decentralized etc. But if there were no communities/magazines, if hashtags only served that sorting function, and we instead merged the best parts of those conversation tools with the decentralized feed of #mastodon etc, we'd have something better than the closed corporate silos could ever provide. #fediverse
@wjmaggos "hopefully server admins police their members" is doing a lot of heavy lifting here, what if they don't? It doesn't even have to be something explicitly illegal or rule-breaking in order for that content to not be desired in a community, or it can be a private instance with opposing views.
You can't enforce what people use hashtags for, and you can't expect everyone to individually block every offending member or instance.
It is still early enough in the #redditmigration that #lemmy or #kbin can easily be replaced if something superior comes along. So if #piefed or #sublinks can develop their consumer facing products better and faster then they will inevitably get the community support. And since sublinks uses the existing Lemmy API it might have the best chance to do so.
You never know, the current Lemmy devs might be pushed aside tomorrow, anything could happen.
@ecksearoh the even better prospect is that with all these platforms with group threads with voting systems, there will be even better standard tooling, transferability, apps, and discovery ecosystems that work across all the federating platforms.
It’s crazy how much of the comments about #Subllinks on the threadiverse are mad that the author is using #Java or just complaining that they chose to build another implementation.
Most of it seems to be #Lemmy users who think that #kbin, #mbin, #piefed, etc don’t exist and no other federated link aggregator should exist.
i'm still on #kbin for the #fedivoyage. One major confusiong aspect is the difference between boosting and faving: These seem to be two different things and only one works as "upvote" as reddit does – but it's not clear which one... Most sources on kbin say boost=upvote, but the explanations are confusing. Most sources outside kbin say the opposite. :/
Summing up, I'm really confused by #kbin. I think #lemmy is easier to use, but I imagine that if you are using it a lot, the confusing kbin features start to make sense and be really useful. #fedivoyage