I know that Lemmy is open source and it can only get better from here on out, but I do wonder if any experts can weigh in whether the foundation is well written? Or are we building on top of 4 years worth of tech debt?
From some comments I’ve read, it’s at least in better shape than kbin? A few people expressed interest in helping with that project and then went running for the hills after reading through the code.
I read from one admin that a Lemmy instance is a lot easier to set up and maintain than a kbin instance. It’s initially more complicated to set up and updates are just a super headache to deal with. That sounds like a showstopper. I mean kbin is not going to get too far if it’s that difficult to run and maintain an instance, no matter how good or bad the code.
From a user perspective kbin has a really nice looking interface, though Lemmy has more features. I’d like to see kbin do well. It’s younger than Lemmy so it’s going to be behind, but hopefully the overhead in running an instance can be resolved.
It’s probably not the only reason, but Rust is a much more attractive language/platform for devs to work with than PHP. (Source: https://survey.stackoverflow.co/2023/#section-admired-and-desired-programming-scripting-and-markup-languages)
It’s also more scalable, because it’s a compiled multi-threaded technology, while PHP is interpreted and mono-threaded.
PHP is really old isn’t it? I remember using phpBB forums some twenty years ago. They worked really well, but that’s going pretty far back.
Mother. Of. God. Did they really write Kbin in PHP?
I may be talking shit because I’m not a PHP coder, but the times I’ve seen it, it was a nightmare.