I think Kbin is something good being built by good people, I get what they’re trying to do, but unfortunately I don’t have a lot of faith that it will turn out to be a successful project.

In terms of technical scaling, I’m puzzled that they went with an interpreted language if the goal is scale. I get that the basic usage of Kbin’s features may not require a ton of CPU-heavy operations, or a fine handling of the memory; but once it meets sufficient scale, there will have to be some scale edge-case bottlenecks where you’ll want to step out of the beaten path and get lower-level, so I’m a bit confused about why they chose a technology that will make those harder to get past rather than easier. PHP is great for rapid prototyping, but I’d argue that’s not what the vision should be here.

About community scale, I’m not expert, but they seem to really care to offer a karma system; and we’ve seen the karma-farming behavior that this has been incentivizing on Reddit. I don’t see why it would be any different here if enough people end up joining. Lemmy is intentionally not offering a karma system, and it really feels like the healthier move long-term.

I think all it would take would be for the Lemmy devs to admit that they’re in over their heads, and that their political affiliations have been a hindrance to the project, to the point that they transition the governance of it to other people. I really hope they do that. If they do soon enough, they’re so far ahead and built on so much more long-term thinking, that I think it would pretty much make Kbin kinda obsolete. I have no special information about this, so I could be wrong, and I hope for them that I am; but I can see that as a pretty likely outcome.

(That, and on the shorter-term, I wouldn’t contribute to a product I don’t use, and I can’t use it for now because my usage is 100% mobile, and the current lack of API means no native client. I wish the mobile web was better than it is as an application platform…)