Yes….on a technical level. But the picture is bigger than that. Personally, I have a hunch that the choice of Rust is making Lemmy’s development slower. This seemed to be evidenced by the fact that Kbin has more functionality than Lemmy while having only been around for 2 months. Vs Lemmy’s 4 years. The Kbin dev has also been much more able to fix things on the fly during the surge in users. Whereas Lemmy will supposedly move off websocket use any day now.

Adoptability isn’t something to be discounted. The fact that there any more people out there familiar with PHP may give Kbin an edge over time. And let’s be honest, in real-world test PHP can very often be faster then - less-than-mature-Rust codebase.

Really? Kbin as the name is what intrigued me initially over Lemmy. It’s actually inspired by Linux, the sbin directory to be specific.

Kind of like how Lemmy made up communities? Lol you don’t call microblogs “toots” either. Seems every fediverse software has their own terminology.

Also it’s dev, singular. Kbin has been put together by only one dev. I personally find that damn impressive considering it’s functionally on par with Lemmy being only 2 months old to Lemmy’s 4 years.

They do have their own crawler and I believe supplement from bing only when necessary. Something like 98% of results are from their own index across all users. They actually have a breakdown for every search.

I think they actually have the largest independent index outside of Google/Bing right now.

Others that exclusively use their own index are:

Mojeek (results aren’t great)
Kagi (result are pretty good imo)

I think Google peaked about 6-8 years ago now and then started slipping at an ever accelerating rate.

It’s almost useless for me when searching anything remotely technical or otherwise niche.

I almost consistently need to go to the second page of results now, something I don’t remember doing since like 2009.

I find Bing acceptable. Brave search works well. But I’m actually using Kagi now since I’m hoping their paid model will actually mean I’m not the product.

I think the “dynamic updates” behaviour is tied to Lemmy’s use of websockets instead of http. Kbin uses http. The Lemmy devs have stated they’re going to move off of websockets in the future as they present scaling issues with the way the software is written.

The websocket protocol allows bi-directional push communication regardless of the previous request which means that new posts are constantly triggering server side updates which then appear like a page “refresh” on clients.

Arguably, while websockets have very cool realtime features compared to http, for a Reddit-like content aggregate their use can quickly overwhelm usability without significant retooling.

Using Orion on iOS currently (there’s a macOS version too). It’s made by the same people behind the Kagi search engine. I’m loving it. Built with WebKit and on mobile it utilises some power saving feature Safari does not.

They plan to release a Windows version eventually too, and using WebKit! (Not Chromium).

Just checked out the Arc website and am interested! if you can still can send invites I’d take one :)