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
Yeah, it shows you haven't used php in a while. Most of the gripes people have with it have been fixed over the years, and every framework encourages you to build an API-first app these days.
Sure, but the whole point of PHP is the templating. If we're going to avoid that (and kbin uses it), why use PHP?
The backend is going to be request heavy, so something with good async support is going to be a good bet and scale well. I don't know much about how modern PHP handles async, but it just seems like an odd choice for something with a high volume of small changes. Anything can work if you try hard enough, but at least for me, I'm more likely to get involved with Lemmy than kbin.