I've been trying both. I find Kbin has a better user interface, BUT it's slower. Possibly server specs, but probably partially because tech stack underneath - Lemmy is Rust, Kbin is PHP. Neither seem to make use of any search core like Elastisearch, which would be a big win for performance, but probably another administrative overhead/cost for the admins.
Kbin also doesn't have a mobile app yet, where Lemmy does, though I think Kbin's web interface on mobile is pretty good.
IIRC Lemmy is Rust, Mastadon is Rails, Pleroma is Erlang. I'm not a huge fan that Kbin was PHP, but PHP is a lot better than it was. Presumably the dev is more capable with PHP and for basic web work it's fine.
What I think they should probably focus on is offloading some of the work for search etc. onto external services like Elasticsearch. As far as I have seen Mastadon is the only one that makes use of this. Maybe it's too expensive to run up other services like this though.
Not to mention that paper doesn't list the versions of those languages being used. PHP has some major performance improvements over the last few years.
Kinda. PHP is fine for web workloads. Don't forget Facebook tried to move off PHP and wrote Hack/HHVM because of the performance. It just happens that PHP 7 was faster.
I've not looked at the codebase, but there are probably some routines (search) that could be done faster outside pure PHP/Postgres.
The dev seems to have done a pretty good job with this though, performance issues are likely server load more than the stack. Not sure what he's running this on...
Nice! This is actually a really good teaching example of how to not use comments. They're there, but I gain nothing from them that the code doesn't already say, and I still don't know what the fn does (without reading it all) :D
OC Difference between kbin and lemmy?
Why do you use one over the other? Also, what's the deal with Calckey?
Take a bow, developers of kbin.social
Hats off, guys. I can't even imagine how hard it must have been for you guys to keep kbin.social up and running since yesterday....
Here's one of my first scripts. I think it's pretty funny.
https://beehaw.org/pictrs/image/ca32e40e-facf-47da-85de-b5e21543e251.png