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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 15th, 2023

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  • If you signup to social media it will pester you for your email contacts, location and hobbies/interests.

    Building a signup wizard to use that information to select a instance would seemto be the best approach.

    The contacts would let you know what instance most of your friends are located (e.g. look up email addresses).

    Topic specific instance, can provide a hobby/interests selection section.

    Lastly the location would let you choose a country specific general instance.

    It would help push decentralisation but instead of providing choice your asking questions the user is used to being asked.



  • SpaceX are launching 26-52 satellites at a time and have sustained 3 launches a week for most of the year.

    The satellites are in a Low Earth Orbit, without constant thrust, atmospheric drag will force them to re enter earths atmosphere within a few months. This means they aren’t adding to junk in space.

    Unlike Nasa, ULA, Arriannespace, RoscosMos, etc… SpaceX have always performed 2nd Stage Deorbit burns, so they aren’t adding to Space junk by launching either.

    The Low Earth Orbit is to ensure low latency and the need for constant thrust means the satellites have a short life expectancy by design. That is why SpaceX fought to keep the satellites as cheap as possible (e.g. $250k)

    First stage booster reuse and fairing reuse means the majority of the launch cost is the second stage ($15 million).

    The whole lot is privately funded




  • Activity Pub has a few parts, Lemmy implements the Threaded message part.

    Mastodon implements a short messaging (posts) part. Meta’s Threads will implement this.

    KBin implemented both parts, within KBin you’ll see microblog as an option for magazines (communities/subredits). This shows either ‘posts’ made to the magazine or posts with hastags associated with the magazine.

    The posts and threaded message parts have overlap in how they work so mastodon users can see certain threaded messages and comment on them.


  • Github stars is not a good metric, firstly because KBin is hosted on codeberg but mainly because a healthy project has lots of unique contributors and regular updates/enhancements.

    KBin has 79 open Pull Requests, while Lemmy has 29. From a visual check PR’s seem to be older than 2 weeks. Its hard to say one is “healthier” than the other, without scraping information into a spreadsheet.

    Secondly Rust is new and has a lot of hype surrounding it, as a result you get a lot of people using it on random projects.

    Languages have strengths and weaknesses and developer ecosystems build on the strengths.

    For example if I was writing a web application with a database backend I would choose C#, Java or Node.js because there are loads of libraries, tools and frameworks to make it really easy.

    Rust is gaining a lot of adoption by embedded system users (replacing C mostly). Lemmy is the only Rust based web server project I am aware of. Which means the level of work to do anything and to keep it updated falls on the Lemmy devs rather than spread out amongst a larger community.

    Everyone loves to insult PHP but it has a niche in webservers and won’t disappear anytime soon. KBin effort will thus be spent on KBin.


  • There is a standard for sharing tweet style information and for threaded type information between websites.

    You have software which implements the tweet standard (Mastodon), the threaded standard (lemmy) and both (KBin).

    You’ll notice some communities will be [email protected] or [email protected], etc… this indicates they are not local to the website your using and those addresses are KBin instances, its just your website has a copy of the information.

    KBin is newer than Lemmy, it has a fairly simple responsive design that works well on mobile. Lemmy has a REST api so its easier to build mobile applications, a lot of people seem to expect/need to access websites via mobile applications.

    The key difference is Lemmy is developed by Tankies, they think China’s genocide of Ughurs is justified and they administer lemmy.ml.