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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I hope we get a way to easily access our followed list or like shortcuts like RES. Can sub to a lot and just shortcut the ones I really want to check out on their own.
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.
although, I’m sure, google results will adjust accordingly eventually.
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.
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.
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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.
Personally I was getting a bit tired of not having one of my interests here so I created the magazine for it. We’ll just see if it takes off.
For some other niche interests…I’ll wait and see, I don’t feel invested enough to create the magazines for them.(For those interested in vegetable gardening @VegetableGardening )
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.
They’ve already started removing mods from subreddit
The Snoo Platform is currently a chaotic mess, with purge of moderators being shown publicly…
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.
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!
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.
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.
You can make the same comment between Facebook being 'easier" than Reddit. Or forums being easier than IRC.
A natural order is as user mass increases, ease of use improves. I think it’s fine to acknowledge the challenges while continuing to spread the message and leveraging early adopter influence with folks comfortable doing some reading to understand vs a casual “mom” internet user that needs a very safe, templated app experience without many (or any) customization options.
I got reminded of IRC a bit ago, wonder if that’s gonna get a resurgence. I was thinking maybe something like lemmy/kbin with a built in IRC like how kbin has the microblogs.
In the workspace Slack is very big and is very analogous to a supremely polished IRC. Discord outside of professional workspaces is similar, though a bit more detached.
To me, these are the mass market evolutions of IRC from back in the day.
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.
I got into reddit about ten years ago … I wasn’t part of the first wave but back then it felt like the site was new and things were happening. Then it just slowly devolved into what it is now
I really don’t mind the change as it just gives me a new perspective on things and people … change is good … any time we are caught standing still, we always seem to lose something, especially in the digital world.
Same here, ten years ago, Vulcan also discovered Reddit and later hop into it.
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.
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.
But hey, someone’s gotta do it
When the going gets tough, the tough get going
The answer can be many things if you go into detail but the summary is change is hard.
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
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.
I strongly agree about the content on this site needing to not be about reddit. So much of my front page is news about reddit. And what’s more it’s so damn repetitive. Often the exact same stories posted over and over in half a dozen different instances because apparently everyone wants to create their own sub about the topic and doesn’t want to say “oh, this is a duplicate, just go use so and so sub instead”. And they get upvoted like crazy, too.
The posts often don’t contain anything new, either. Sometimes they do, but so many posts are just another major news site covering the ongoing events. I think many people upvoted that because they like the idea of this getting more press.
Honestly, I get it. I am having a lot of schadenfreude at reddit cannibalizing itself. But at the same time, I only want to discuss that a bit. I want to see the site have a diverse amount of interesting content. And I have tried to practice what I’m preaching here. I don’t upvote most reddit related threads anymore and I’ve posted a lot more than usual.
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)
Never underestimate the power of comfort and convenience. “It’s just too HARD to move!,” people will say. “Everybody I know is here!,” they’ll say. I’ve heard people say this a lot since the social media collapse sparked by Elon Musk. It’s their choice, but I’m not comfortable staying. Maybe in time they’ll realize that it’s the right time to leave as well.
I second this and have experienced it myself trying to move to privacy-oriented options for online and mobile services.
I think Reddit is a bit unique in the SNS space, since the primary unit of subscription is community (or topic) rather than user, so I think it serves to depersonalize the platform a little bit, and remove some of the power of “Everybody I know is here!”
The reality is people hate change, especially from a platform they already feel comfortable with.
Not everyone uses a 3rd party app, nor are they eager to disrupt their daily flow by abandoning a platform they have grown accustomed to using.
The people most angry are those who are invested in reddit the most. There are a lot of folks who are way more casual and maybe only care about a couple niche subreddits that relate to their hobbies, but are uninterested in sitewide drama.
Without the mods and power users tho (content creators) these casual users will have fewer reasons to visit reddit. The drama affects them too, whether they realize it or not.
I agree fully, but I think there is a subset of users that like reddit itself, don’t fully appreciate just how much work moderators put in to make the site usable.
These people will start to notice it more in the weeks to come, but i think many will stick with reddit for the time being while places like the fediverse become more established.
Someone just posted in my reddit niche sub about our new instance on kbin, and the first comment not from me was and I quote: “No Lemmy? :(”.
I mean, if you build it they may come, but many people just want to be served.
that user didnt notice the fact that kbin and lemmy can talk together, same protocol underlying.
Except in the niche subs. Some people never go to r/pics and such, and if someone is in like 4 communities and 3 are remaining, those people seem to not be in favor of leaving. It’s a self-centered attitude and a short-sighted one as well, especially if they use old-reddit. But for the people who are happy with like the iOS or Android official app, they’re happy just to keep right on going.
And we need to be okay with that, imho - diversity isn’t a bad thing at all. All we can do is offer a friendly community for them to join when they finally see it for themselves.:-)
Step 1 have you tried to understand? Can you not create a list of plausible reasons? I bet you can
I think it’s that a lot of the people who were protesting have this mentality of, “I’m only protesting if other people are doing it.” Unless subreddits have shut down, they themselves aren’t getting off Reddit—either because they don’t want to have left while their favorite communities continue on the platform or because they don’t see the need to continue if they feel Reddit won’t change. Many people just aren’t willing to stick to their values in these situations if it means missing out or not having an immediate effect.
If you are willing to stick to your values in spite of these, then getting off Reddit (and even encouraging your community to migrate) is a no-brainer. Reddit has disregarded their users’ wishes again and again, changing rules and shadowbanning moderators in order to keep their profits. If that’s not something you want to support, then you get off Reddit, move to one of the alternatives, and maybe even go outside more.
What you just described is literally the hardest thing about social media.
There’s probably a large percentage of Reddit users that are still getting everything they’re looking for with the official app and what’s left of the site. Quick hits of memes are fun, and I do take some pleasure in correctly guessing the top comments in a thread.
The level of conversation on Kbin/Lemmy reminds me more of what old Reddit used to be like back in the day, and I think I’m okay with that being a smaller community than Reddit at large. I keep reminding myself and others that these communities don’t ever need to be as big as Reddit, they just need to be big enough.
Absolutely. Smaller communities are often even better, more a conversation and less of an overwhelming hive mind.
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!
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I don’t know if I can trust you. Some folks say you can’t even suck dick well. That your bad at it.
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.
The familiarity of Reddit is a huge boon. People think the fediverse is some mystical hard thing (it’s not lol) but they want simplicity.
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.
