Most people aren’t even thinking of moving to reddit alternatives. Users have a lot of power in this situation. Just move your community to Lemmy or Kbin. It’s not that hard.
We’re early adopters. Early adopters have a higher tolerance for (and ability to deal with) things like bugs, confusing UI, uncertainty, and probably continual change for the short term.
But hey, someone’s gotta do it. The end result of this will be an established community and a more polished product. Over time, more and more people will show up as this place gets better and better, and Reddit continues to worsen. (Everyone knows that old.reddit is going away, it’s just a matter of when.)
We’re early adopters. Early adopters have a higher tolerance for (and ability to deal with) things like bugs, confusing UI, uncertainty, and probably continual change for the short term.
Not to mention, a lack of content. While it’s populating nicely it’s still not like Reddit, especially for niche subjects. You definitely have to endure a lot of shouting in the wind situations while this builds up.
Also historic threads that probably will never be feasible to create anymore. Eg, I loved to read TV show episode discussions right after I watched the episode. That includes for older shows. As long as it didn’t predate reddit, basically every notable show had a decent sized thread for every single episode. But a lot of those were only able to take off because they were created when the episode aired. Rewatches don’t get the same kinda discussion.
I think a lot of my reddit usage boils down to searches.
“Best pregnancy lotion reddit”
“Bed gouging ender 3 pro reddit”
“Submarine disaster askhistorians”
Are the main ways I used reddit this week.
Before all the drama I had pointed to many friends that most discourse and live interaction on my regular subreddits had already moved to discord. The unified ui and functioning search make it more useful.
Before all the drama I had pointed to many friends that most discourse and live interaction on my regular subreddits had already moved to discord. The unified ui and functioning search make it more useful.
But discoverability is zero for that content. discord is “deep web” which is not indexable at all by search engines.
for me discord is just not organized. There is no way im scrolling up on conversations when I have not been on for three days much less a week. I think discord only works if you are looking to be on social media all the time or at least daily.
Agree. No matter what discord is still essentially just a chat room imo. Even with bots, read only channels, pinned messages, etc., navigating and searching for stuff that I want is still as painful as any other instant messaging services.
Yeah, and just googling something will be completely useless with a project named after a famous rock musician.
„How to upload pictures lemmy“, yes, thank you google, I know how Lemmy Kilmister looks, thank you.
That’s (among other things) why I hope kbin will be the victor of that race…
im not sure I want a victor or even see a race as long as the federation survives we all win.
If I’m not wrong, kbin right now isn’t allowing for web crawlers. So using kbin for searches like for Reddit isn’t possible for now as well.
Yeah, I’ve certainly found myself subscribing to any and every magazine that looks even remotely like it could be interesting. Getting inundated isn’t a problem around these parts just yet. But the volume definitely has gone up recently.
I still am struggling with how to sub to a magazine. Poor guy running this needs a bit of help with ui so stupid people like myself can enjoy it
It’s genuinely hard and needs to be improved. Subscribing to a magazine that someone else on kbin has subscribed to already isn’t too bad. Go to the magazine (eg, click what looks like the subreddit name in the post) and scroll alllll the way down and there’ll be a subscribe button.
But if nobody has subscribed yet in the instance, it’s hilariously hard. You have to search in the general search (not the magazine search) for specifically “magazine@domain.com” and you should see a subscribe button then. You will not content in that magazine that existed before you subscribed. If that sounds terrible, it’s because it is. Thankfully, most of the time, you won’t be the first to subscribe to a magazine and thus can just use the magazine search or browse the front page to see posts.
PS: the subscribe option is also as the bottom of each thread. So you can alternatively just open a thread in the magazine instead of the magazine itself.
PPS: I’ve mentioned the subscribe button being at the bottom because that’s the placement on mobile and I think many of us are on mobile. On desktop, it’s in the sidebar.
thanks for the PPS as im on a laptop. I thought you were being dramatic at first as I was like. oh its not that far down. One scroll with my low rez screen. Im a smartphone luddite myself.
That’s the one thing that bugs me, federation should be automated, why does it need for someone to try to pull a community first before that starts? It should be like Usenet or DNS and self-propagate.
It’s probably a resource management issue. No need to sync with servers that nobody is reading yet, it just wastes bandwidth and CPU time.
For mobile kbin users, you can tap the top left burger menu and scroll down just a little bit to subscribe to a magazine, instead of scroll past all the comments. The burger menu is just the side bar on desktop.
It seems almost exactly the same as the view from old reddit. right hand side sidebar with a box that says subscribe until you hit it and then it turns into unsubscribe. The only difference I see is the subs are consistent so like in reddit it was not consistantly in the same location but here it is.
The way I’ve found it (on kbin) is that there’s a column on the right-hand side of comment thread pages. One of the boxes in the right-hand column is labeled “Magazine” and there should be a black button that’s labeled “Subscribe” somewhere.
Yep. The battletech comunity on reddit is like 45k subscribers and stays active. Kbin’s /m/battletech has 56 subscribers. There are 5 threads. It’s gonna be quite a while before niche communities actually have any momentum.
Well damn, thanks for talking about it, another community to sub to!
Time to find a Shadowrun one as well.
deleted by creator
Hah, yea, you’d think so too right? If I still can’t find one I’ll go create it. Again, like with BT, I’m not sure what I can contribute, haven’t played a game since 4th Ed Anniversary. I do have a copy of Anarchy that I got cheap since I was curious, but I haven’t read it yet.
Out of all the social platforms, Reddit is probably the easiest to copy. The moderation was all handled by users in the first place, and I don’t think Reddit employees are as needed as Twitter or Facebook.
Reddit is just shooting itself in the foot right now. I understand the need to make money, and I can understand the API becoming a revenue stream. They just handled it so poorly. There were tons of ways to open a dialogue with app devs about charging them. They could have made their users move to a subscription model. I just don’t get it.
This is my first comment on kbin!
Yeah, spez has really shot the golden goose (the free engaged moderation staff).
And welcome!
Yep, Reddit will be a dumpster-fire even more. Probably worse when old reddit goes away. right now old reddit its living on borrowed time!
The decline is happening really fast. They’re in a race with Twitter to see which one can die sooner.
yeah when the api thing happened I assumed old reddit was on borrowed time. So many folks where complaining of the jesus gets us ads that I never noticed.
They’ve already started removing mods from subreddit
Yeah, this is my feeling. I was willing to put up with kbin.social using Cloudflare and being slow as all else, plus the random site breakages, and there not being an app - but a lot of folks I know wouldn’t be, especially the ones who couldn’t be bothered to figure out how to pick an instance for Mastodon to leave Twitter. Not to mention that right now, people have too many choices and don’t know what’s actually going to take over. They’ll wait until there’s a critical mass at one of the many Reddit alternative sites.
Most folks go where the other people are. We have to make the fediverse into the place where people want to come, and then this will be the place where people are.
Yeah, the trigger event that basically started all this was reddit deciding they don’t want third party apps anymore (and people not wanting to use reddit’s app). Well, there isn’t much for apps here either.
Also, the network effect is still in play. Despite the fact I’m using this fully for all my posting, I still searched for reddit threads when I finished Tears of the Kingdom, because I wanted to read people’s thoughts on various topics and those reddit threads already existed. Kbin and Lemmy threads don’t yet exist in the large enough numbers for the various topics I was searching for (like if other people thought the sky islands felt too copy-paste or what people thought the lore of the depths were or how many people did the story out of order). I know I can make discussions here, but at the time I just wanted to read existing discussions. It’s gonna take some time for the Fediverse to catch up to that.
Admittedly, I am only a casual user of Reddit (or I should say was). Seeing all this happen over the past few weeks, I have come to realize just how crazy moderation can be in a forum like this or Reddit.
Seeing everyone come together and log issues, problems, work on iOS and Android app accessibility for kbin and lemmy is phenomenal…an eye opener. It’s an exciting moment for sure, and the collaboration between everyone is humbling.
But hey, someone’s gotta do it
When the going gets tough, the tough get going
300% this. People like us can navigate our way through all those drawbacks, but are deal-breakers for people like mom who lurk Reddit from time to time.
Yup, as an early adopter (and someone who loves bleeding edge thing), Vulcan can tolerate the lack of features at Kbin (and Lemmy).
Trying to convince some friends, and they complained about lack of activity in #threadiverse. Alright then, we can use this momentum to build and grow #threadiverse to be as competitive as the Snoo Platform.
It’s similar to playing MMORPGs and then switching to another game. You create an account with a lot of karma that people are proud of, you acquire those avatars and milestones, and you make friends. Then you start in a new place which is not user-friendly as the old one, and you lose everything from your previous account.
Many others, of course, are like me and do not care, but I believe the majority of people do.Here are the issues for me:
- The fediverse is still below an active user threshold that makes it an effective replacement. I’m not saying that it needs to match reddit’s size to function, but I joined reddit about 6 months before the digg v4 migration, and it felt more alive then than the fediverse does now.
- Much of the activity here seems to be about the reddit protests and migration away from reddit. This, combined with activity below a threshold necessary to make it feel like an effective replacement for reddit’s core functionality is a little off putting. (Yes, I realize I’m in /m/RedditMigration, but I’m subscribed to a wide variety of magazines/communities and reddit migration content still dominates my subscription feed) The fediverse needs to show that it is capable of supporting itself with actual content, and I don’t think it’s proven that yet.
- I still don’t feel there is any fediverse instance which feels as clean, elegant, and unclaustrophobic as the old.reddit.com UI. Whether that’s just my own aversion to change or a legitimate comment on the quality of old.reddit I’m not sure, but there are some aspects of the UIs that are unquestionably rough, like full page loads which could be replaced with AJAX.
- The UX in general is a little rough in ways. The entire way the fediverse works is a little intimidating. If you’re just looking down the barrel of the kbin registration form that’s not a big deal, but if you need to choose an instance, or you’re subscribing to communities/magazines and you you see 3 different communities with the exact same name, things can get a little overwhelming.
- The jargon which has developed around the fediverse is kind of awkward. Needing to differentiate between kbin and lemmy, magazines and communities… even just “fediverse” is a little weird.
- Even if all of the above problems are fixed, I wouldn’t see myself abandoning reddit, just due to the sheer size of its activity. However, I would be likely to use reddit as a readonly site.
I think most of these problems have relatively straightforward fixes. As for the UX issues I’d like to see two things:
-
an instance which combines communities/magazines into “hubs” which users subscribe to simplify the UX. Users could can then tweak their hub experience by toggling which instances feed into their hubs. So instead of having kbin.social/m/news, lemm.ee/c/news, lemmy.world/c/news, etc… you just have something like /h/news and you can configure what’s included in /h/news. The mods of the instance’s community would determine which communities feed into the hub by default, but users could customize this as they wish.
-
Better cross-site user and reputation management. I’m not sure exactly how to make this work… but if, when you created an account on once instance, every instance its federated would somehow reserve or automatically create a matching account for you, then the anxiety around which instance to join can kind of melt away. The different instances could become windows into, effectively, the same account and same system.
Im sorry but your hubs point screams for https://xkcd.com/927/ but personally I find kbin a little nicer in ui than old reddit but im an old school person.
I still don’t feel there is any fediverse instance which feels as clean, elegant, and unclaustrophobic as the old.reddit.com UI. Whether that’s just my own aversion to change or a legitimate comment on the quality of old.reddit I’m not sure, but there are some aspects of the UIs that are unquestionably rough, like full page loads which could be replaced with AJAX.
+1 on that. old.reddit (combined with the sub-specific CSS) is something that somehow needs to be ported over to the lemmy/kbin side, too. new reddit was too much wasted space and non-loaded stuff for me (old had more comments loaded by default)
The communities I browse are either small (behavioral science/school) or full of elders who aren’t interested with switching platforms. So that’s a pretty big reason. Some of them have organizations that still have large presences on things like fb. Not having an account hamstrings a persons ability to stay current with professional topics…not great for a lot of fields. Now, this is just my particular instance. But I’ve heard a lot of the same from colleagues and adjacent professions. As for me, my account is deleted and I don’t contribute content meaningfully anymore. Which I suspect is another major downside to all of this, brain drain.
Im not sure how much I want people to leave reddit. There was a lot of garbage users and bots and such. Even if all actual individuals left reddit the corpo, bot, other things from some organization elements I bet would be a fairly large populace.
I would prefer if only those who wants to leave reddit left. That this would be an option only for those who are prepared to migrate, and not the redditor who likes their new UI and their official app. I think this place might be the wrong place for them. At this point Lemmy gives me the feeling of a web forum, which in all fairness is pretty cool tech wise (I really like the federated part) but also more or less just a web forum. I can’t imagine what kind of negative experience the average redditor would have here…
“It doesn’t look like reddit” “What are communities?” “Where are all the people?” Etcetera.
Which is fair, I think Fediverse has a bit of growing to do still. That being said, I can live without that kind of content here, and I’d rather have more quality over quantity here. That’s just me though, I’m looking forward to seeing where this place ends up.
Well, after what happened with /r/MildlyInteresting and others, more of us have are starting to feel as if Reddit, the company, has metaphorically declared a wanna-be “war” on the mods. Toss in the statements by Spez the other day about users, who gave the company loads of data for free, somehow being wrong to expect a certain degree of reciprocity and, I might expect a certain increase in migration rates. After all, I am now here. (Hello!)
Kbin and Lemmy are still fairly new so I do not anticipate everyone would be willing to make the jump if it means putting up with relatively small member counts. We just have to put in the extra effort ourselves to keep these communities fresh and active.
The answer can be many things if you go into detail but the summary is change is hard.
Most people just want things to work, and once they’ve become accustomed to a platform, they’re reluctant to learn a new one. Especially if it’s just getting off the ground. It wouldn’t surprise me at all if a lot of the early adopters here have gone through this before and know that things will get better (in terms of functionality as well as content) as time goes on.
Because it still lacks content, is pretty unpolished, and the nature of fedi makes it complicated for a lot of people. That’s a lot of barriers, so it’s going to be a slow growth from here while these issues get worked on.
Let me tell you folks, nobody does it better than Reddit, believe me. Nobody. It’s tremendous, really tremendous. People ask me, ‘Why would anyone use anything other than Reddit?’ And I have to say, they’re right. Reddit is so easy to use, even the so-called stupid people covfefe can actually understand it. It’s just tremendous, folks. Nobody does it better than Reddit.
I don’t know if I can trust you. Some folks say you can’t even suck dick well. That your bad at it.
Just move your community to Lemmy or Kbin. It’s not that hard.
No, it is that hard.
- You have hundreds/thousands of community members accustomed to a certain user experience that have to start that learning all over again when they move platforms.
- You have teams of moderators that have to learn a new set of tools for a new platform.
- Less content and inferior experience for everyone until there’s headway made on 1 & 2.
Anyone whose worked on a team that had a management shakeup can appreciate this. Anyone who has a friend that refuses to migrate to windows 11 can appreciate this.
to be fair windows 10 to 11 is not much of a change vs like windows 7 to 8 or windows xp to 7
I fully moved to lemmy myself, but still browse reddit just for the vast amount of information available there.
I’ve been here for about a week now, and still feel like there are features I don’t understand or completely overlooked. The concept of the fediverse is simultaneously really simple (e.g. email analogy) and confusing (still not really clear on what makes kbin different from lemmy; and I have to subscribe to like 8 iterations of what is effectively r/worldnews… and there’s a fed youtube-like that I haven’t looked into yet, but haven’t run into here so far… I can see lemmy content on kbin, but I can’t log into Jerboa with a kbin account…)
It’s a lot to take in.
…and honestly, ^that makes it kinda fun. Reddit gave me the middle finger, so I gave it right back by building my own theme-park with blackjack and hookers. Thoroughly enjoying the blackjack and hookers; but the “building my own theme-park” bit is a challenge - one that I (probably most of us here) find engaging and gratifying, but very much a challenge, and that isn’t what everyone’s looking for.
When I can show my tech-handicapped boomer mother a 2-minute video explaining the the whats and hows of the fediverse, it’ll give the reddits and facebooks a run for their money; until then the fed will remain fairly niche. Which isn’t a bad thing - finding and engaging with a niche you enjoy will ALWAYS feel better than engaging with generic shit built for mass marketability.
Subjective bit, but imo our branding also kinda sucks. “Fediverse” sounds like some clunky .gov message board that the FBI uses to share crime statistics with the CIA and ATF. Anything “-iverse” comes off as hyperbolic. “Lemmy” sounds like “lemming”. “Beehaw” sounds like an apiary manufacturer based in Alabama. “kbin” evokes imagery of a trash can for…‘k’. I mean, it’s all nit-picky shit, but the connotation of our chosen labels lean negative. It wasn’t a barrier to entry for any of us here now; but you know there are potential users who take one glance at the word “fediverse”, conclude that it sounds stupid, and move on without a second thought. All that said, I’m cool with folks like that staying on reddit!
Same problem as with any social network migration: the network effect.
Sometimes the largest equivalent Lemmy community for a subreddit is tiny, or worse, nonexistent. Sure, you can go create one, but unless you can also convince other people to join with you, it won’t be much fun.
That plus picking servers and browsing communities. Onboarding is not as simple as other social media experiences.
