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.

A lot of people seem to be talking about whether PHP has enough developer support, but that isn’t the main issue.

The issue is that code written in PHP is probably at least 10 times less efficient in terms of CPU and memory than the equivalent code written in Rust.

This means that loads of hobbyist developers will be able to run lemmy instances for a fraction of the ongoing cost of kbin.