The posts in Kbin don’t seem to move much the last few days I’ve been using it, but if I go somewhere like lemmy.world the content is always pretty fresh
Is KBin just slow or is there something fundamental I don’t understand about federation? (Likely)
Every instance has two queues - and outbox and an inbox. Either or both of those, on lemmy.world or kbin.social or both, could be full, leading to federation delays.
If you see a post on lemmy.world that doesn’t exist on kbin then it could mean the post is still in the Lemmy outbox OR in the kbin inbox. Both servers are popular so it could be either.
It would be helpful if queue sizes were shown on a status page somewhere…
Yes it seems kbin is quite slow at times with fetching posts. I often have to check magazines I subscribed to to see if I did not miss something.
Lemmy uses a rust back end which basically compiles to native code. By contrast, kbin uses a php back-end.
In my experience, that has a big effect on the speed of federation. My first brush with the fediverse was friendica which is php. It had a lot of really great features, but the one thing that I just couldn’t deal with was the slow speed of federation. My instances aren’t like lemmy.world or kbin.social, pretty much every message comes from somewhere else. The better federation works, the better my experience.
How much data is pushed through ActivityPub? Unless it is at least tens of thousands of requests/events (i’m not familiar with how it works) per second I doubt that the choice of language would have big impact. PHP is made specifically for web backends after all.
Yeah. PHP is not a speed limiting factor unless you’re calculating Pi to X million digits. Almost everything about ActivityPub is limited by network IO.