Announcement post here: https://discuit.substack.com/p/df5f002f-e27a-46a6-b30d-7641b266bd65
For those unfamiliar, Discuit is another Reddit alternative that’s been floating around for a while. I was unable to find a MAU count, but I am honestly more interested in their software than their communities. Particularly curious what you all think of this stack. A consistent complaint around Lemmy is that a Rust backend makes contribution difficult, will a Go backend contribute to a lower overall barrier of entry?
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Doesn’t really matter if they open sourced, since many reddit alternative over the years have been open source: Voat, Ruqqus, Raddle, doesn’t really make.a difference since they all failed one way or another. They either never hit that critical self sustaining mass of users, or they attracted the exact wrong type of users who drove out any reasonable users there.
Federation seems to be the only way to create that critical mass of users, and Lemmy is the only alternative that really succeeded (kbin is kinda…hanging on for dear life for various reasons but is alive only due to federation) precisely because it is not a website, but a platform inside of a greater ecosystem.
All Discuit really have is a pretty UI, as it is nowhere even near feature parity with a current defederated Lemmy instance, and Lemmy also has like a dozen different desktop and mobile UIs already.
Federation has its downsides though, there’s less cohesion across the board. A lemmy/kbin platform may have 20,000 users (an example) but most of them might end up with interacting on instances outside of the one they signed up on. Whereas everyone on Discuit, for instance, will be only interacting on Discuit. There’s something to be said for how a userbase is spread, not just the amount of users. If Kbin wasn’t federated and its own thing, its user trajectory and interaction could’ve been different - although having only recently arrived, I understand that features had stalled for a long time.
I think the long-term trend of federation is smaller instances simply shutting down due to lack of interest/money in maintaining it without any noticeable growth and a small bloc of highly used instances dominating, one main one, and probably some politically charged ones orbiting it. Yes, anyone if they’re annoyed with a particular instance can just down their tools and migrate to another instance - but if you’ve got or run communities on that instance, it is a downside.
Although in Discuits case, yes, it is really, really basic - and that more than anything likely stopped it growing before anything else. There was also administrative problems and other issues that drained users. It hypothetically federating wouldn’t help it at all. Their users would just stop using Discuit and use the larger communities all across Lemmy.
Fed up with alternative bs, lemmy is the only sensible reddit alternative.
I prefer kbin over the tankie shit.
Meh, I use Kbin fork and like it more then lemmy, I don’t think that your opinion describes everyone
There’s already a PHP backend, kbin, though judging which is a better language for this sort of thing is outside of my wheelhouse.
https://github.com/MbinOrg/mbin has more active development
Are they still calling communities “magazines”?
I think so, that’s not that big of a deal, is it?
I find the terminology of Kbin confusing and it’s one of the things putting me off it, personally. I don’t think referring to a shitposted meme as an “article in a magazine” makes a whole lot of sense, and from an onboarding perspective it seems more intuitive to work with familiar terms like “community” and “post”. Especially with the microblogging integration: if you want to make a thread somewhere you have to click “create article” because “create post” will have you make a microblog instead.
From what I remember, the mbin team was indeed discussing it. I don’t remember the details, but I think it was aligned with what you are saying.
