When I visit kbin.social, I see new posts regularly. On other servers posts stay on the frontpage for multiple days. This is also true if I switch their sorting to “hot”. So that is probably not the difference.
What is kbin.social doing differently?
Trite answer: When it’s done
More in-depth answer: Currently there’s no set date. It depends on how quickly they can tear out all the WebSockets code and replace it with simple HTTP (that’s the BIG change, will fix a lot of different things), and then test those changes. The hot_rank fix has already been merged, that’s done, but they want a stable, cohesive release with all the good stuff.
Current estimations I’ve seen range from 1-2 weeks, but it all depends on how fast they can get it coded and tested.
I believe it’s supposed to drop next week as long as there are no last minute problems.
2 weeks is juuuust in time for the 3rd party apps cancellation
The websockets work has been merged. I’m using it on my instance now, but there’s no release yet. It’s been really stable for me so far, so I’m hoping there aren’t major issues and they can push it out soon.
Why are they getting rid of WebSockets? It’s really useful for instant data and is often faster than simple HTTP requests.
You can see the discussion about this here, but the short version is that it’s not scalable, hits apps & browsers like a truck, memory leaks, and live updates cause feed reshuffling which is really annoying