When I visit kbin.social, I see new posts regularly. On other servers posts stay on the frontpage for multiple days. This is also true if I switch their sorting to “hot”. So that is probably not the difference.
What is kbin.social doing differently?
I’ve seen like 5 different posts about this already, I guess I’ll reply to this one too xD
Lemmy “Hot” ranking is currently kinda broken. There’s an edge case that stops the hot_rank column from decreasing, meaning the post never goes off the front page. Will be fixed in 0.18.
Do you know when 0.18 will be out?
Trite answer: When it’s done
More in-depth answer: Currently there’s no set date. It depends on how quickly they can tear out all the WebSockets code and replace it with simple HTTP (that’s the BIG change, will fix a lot of different things), and then test those changes. The hot_rank fix has already been merged, that’s done, but they want a stable, cohesive release with all the good stuff.
Current estimations I’ve seen range from 1-2 weeks, but it all depends on how fast they can get it coded and tested.
I believe it’s supposed to drop next week as long as there are no last minute problems.
2 weeks is juuuust in time for the 3rd party apps cancellation
Why are they getting rid of WebSockets? It’s really useful for instant data and is often faster than simple HTTP requests.
You can see the discussion about this here, but the short version is that it’s not scalable, hits apps & browsers like a truck, memory leaks, and live updates cause feed reshuffling which is really annoying
Different sorting algorithm? But yeah I agree, the hot feed on kbin feels more active with posts as new as 30 mins.
Sometimes I’m wrongly upvoted/downvoted the post when browsing through a very crowded lemmy instance. New posts like every minute lol
What is kbin.social doing differently?
Unknown about kbin, but I’ve heard that Hot is currently broken for (most?) instances across the lemmyverse. (This might be related to the size of the instance - apparently for small (single-to-double-digit users) instances Hot works fine?)
Edit: and this is supposed to be fixed in the next release, 0.18
I presume you’re talking about Lemmy from any of the different instances. If you’re looking at local it’s only going to show local posts and not “everywhere”. Be warned though, currently there’s a bug where when you do select “All” it updates with a pull from outside the instance very often, so much so that it can make reading and browsing difficult. That should be updated soon.
I mainly tried lemmy.world, lemmy.ml, beehaw.org and a few others. I did try them with and without “all” and it was cumbersome regardless. Either I was served posts with zero or negative upvotes that to me do not classify as “hot” or my feed did not update at all.
What’s weird to me is that kbin.social was the only one I tried that was not affect by any of this strangeness.
Kbin and Lemmy are different frameworks and have been written using different languages. After some hiccups initially, kbin seem to be more stable than Lemmy right now, including when it comes to frontpage sorting. But both are pretty new and are actively being developed. You can expect these issues to be fixed soon as the devs push new updates.
Kbin uses a completely different backend and is nicely optimised. The owner (Ernest) is also investing in server space to accommodate the higher user activity.
They might answer you themselves, I’m sure they’re lurking here somewhere. 🙃
It depends on what you mean by other servers…Lemmy instances? I haven’t seen any differences between kbin instances.
Kbin is entirely different software from Lemmy; it’s a completely different backend.
So that would be why it’s “better” in that regard than Lemmy instances. My understanding is that it’s a bug in Lemmy that will be fixed soon.
The “popping” of the feed in Lemmy is tied to their use of websockets instead of http. I believe the devs stated they’ll be moving off of websockets in the future.
Yeah Lemmy instances. I thought kbin is also a Lemmy instances. Thanks for clearing up my confusion.
You bet! The fediverse is definitely a confusing concept to wrap your head around the first time. And it doesn’t help that different software server instances don’t need to use a site name that specifies which software they are (like Beehaw, for example).
Kbin is entirely different software from Lemmy; it’s a completely different backend.
Wow did not know that. So how can it interact with the lemmy instances if it’s not running lemmy software?
Because they use the same protocol: ActivityPub
For example, E-Mail gets send over the protocols pop3, smtp, imap. It doesn’t matter if you use Outlook or Gmail for Android or whatever email program. They still send data to each other using these protocols. Therefor both know what to do with the information exchanged.There is software that is completely different from Lemmy and Kbin which can still interact via the ActiviyPub protocol. For example Mastodon for Twitter-like mini blogs. Or PeerTube which is a video platform. Pixelfeed is an image sharing platform similar to Instagram and the like. But since they all use AcitvityPub you can interact, comment, vote etc. on these images and videos or mastodon posts here on Kbin or on Lemmy.
In theory this sounds great. But obviously the different software needs to have the backend and the UI to support these features implemented.
To make it all even more difficult to implement, since all these different installations are spread over many different servers (= federation). Which all can have difference in their software again and different speed and rules about how often they synchronize their data.
That’s the magic of ActivityPub! It’s the protocol that most of the fediverse is built on, and it lets users from completely different fediverse platforms share posts with each other. It’s the special sauce that lets Mastodon, Lemmy, and kbin (and more!) work together
Via the ActivityPub protocol that fediverse software uses :)
Pretty cool stuff!
Kbin can also directly interact with Mastodon users and toots because of this. Kbin magazines can natively contain both “threads” from Kbin and Lemmy, and microblog “posts” from Kbin and Mastodon. (And other software depending how they map these features.)
The ActivityPub protocol! It’s how all these platforms talk to each other.
Have to agree that Kbin.social has more consistently given me content i’m interested in.
It’s also nice that it doesn’t do dynamic updates by default, so I can just look at what i’m interested in and refresh the page once I want to see new things.
I think the “dynamic updates” behaviour is tied to Lemmy’s use of websockets instead of http. Kbin uses http. The Lemmy devs have stated they’re going to move off of websockets in the future as they present scaling issues with the way the software is written.
The websocket protocol allows bi-directional push communication regardless of the previous request which means that new posts are constantly triggering server side updates which then appear like a page “refresh” on clients.
Arguably, while websockets have very cool realtime features compared to http, for a Reddit-like content aggregate their use can quickly overwhelm usability without significant retooling.
