Looks like KBin has an edge over Lemmy now in terms of monthly active users.
It's obviously a pretty silly thing, and is not in any way indicative of which project is "better" or more "long-term viable" or anything — instances of both federate with one another, and with the rest of fedi, so it's all one happy family.
That said, it's notable. KBin is a relative newcomer to the "Reddit-like fedi instance" game, and also does not have the tankie baggage.
Anyway, the more, the merrier!
KBin: https://the-federation.info/platform/184
Lemmy: https://the-federation.info/platform/73
Discussion on fedi: https://mstdn.social/@rysiek/110527049024028986
The fact that Kbin is handling the wave worse than Lemmy is not unrelated to the fact that Lemmy's tech stack is much lighter weight and more efficient. It is a fundamental issue with the technology. If either are going to become major players then they need exponential growth, and Lemmy is just better at that.
Sure, but it's not a competition. In the broader fedi there are instances using all sorts of stacks, including PHP-based ones (like Pixelfed), and these have instances that are huge and performant.
I do prefer the Rust stack to handle my data, but it's in no way a cut and dry case. And looking at https://kbin.social/stats, I don't know if any Lemmy instance would have handled that ind of traffic much better.