Preface: I am not an engineer. I am not a software guy. But I play games and use websites, and have since i was 8.
If you make the website usable, people will use it.
Reddit and Twitter had a symbiotic dichotomy where they were the embodiment of “causal brainfarts and reactions” vs “long thoughts and thorough argument”. One tweet with an exclamation and some emojis, vs a 7 paragraph breakdown or tutorial in a technical subreddit with hyperlinked sources. Both platforms had just enough to give what people needed in an easy to digest manner.
Kbin (and by extension the Fediverse, which I still do not understand after using this website for a week) just doesnt have that easy to drop in rabbit hole experience that these major platforms do. BUT IT CAN.
But right now pictures are smooshed and theres still huge empty space. It feels old, theres weird bugs like the UI flashing light mode on refresh, and other problems that make a user go “ick”.
Fill my screen with content and let me touch it, interact with it, react to it, let me repost it, let me subscribe to that community or user, and maybe preview THEIR feed or posts so I can get MORE content.
The major companies are at a plateau and know they have to start farming our clicks: thats why we see trends like Tiktok’s “knock on the screen to keep engagement” or “satisfying” videos pasted together with political opinions. Its why every company refuses to innovate while maintaining they deserve more money when they are already the monopolistic hegemony. If kbin can provide a more honest, more personal, more legitimate content sharing experience anonymously, it can explode into the new “front page” as reddit likes to call themselves.
I really like the idea of an integrated Twitter/Reddit alternative, that shares content across “front ends” like Mastodon and reformats information to be readable based on the users preferences. If we (and by we I mean you, the coder who can actually help this open source project) can come up with a design ideology that fosters curiosity, and enables connections, instead of force feeding you ads and sponsored content, that will be the future.
Im really, really hoping the internet heals from this huge burning that Elon and Spez have put on us. I know it can be done.
EDIT: i want kbin to the the place where Iranian women go to be heard. We should strive to be a platform for sharing an education. For connection, not profit, and not propaganda either. #womenlifefreedom #slavaukraini #freepalestine #fucktheccp #beexcellenttoeachother
EDIT2: also NOTIFICATION?! like there is no indication when i go to kbin that this post has any interaction. I have to manually go to the post.
That and a good default home page. Right now on “all” and “hot”, all I see is two day old posts. It’s ridiculous.
Which posts you see depends on the instance that you’re viewing from. If you’re on a really small instance and content from outside (e.g other Kbin or Lemmy instances) isn’t viewed much, your instance will not backfill the threads.
This essentially means that until at least one person follows a given magazine/community, posts from said community will be invisible. This is some jank regarding Federation that many people are currently working on improving, but efficiency is still a huge concern.
Everyone says it doesn’t matter which instance you use, that “all” should be all or something. Also still doesn’t make much sense to see 2 day old posts in “hot” if there’s any engagement at all.
I’ve got my settings to not include federated sites* and my first page or two of ‘all’ is fairly current with most things being 12 hours old or less. I also checked out new a few times yesterday and it took 4 or 5 pages to hit one hour-old posts.
*I’m kbin-only because of all the porn on other instances that doesn’t seem to tag itself NSFW (looking at you, lemmynsfw) and therefore isn’t hidden/removed by my settings here. I know there is a solution being planned to address this in a future update. I’m aware there are ways to address this if I were using a desktop browser but I’m not and don’t plan to.
Where is this setting?
I’m on mobile so not sure if it’s the same for desktop…
At the bottom of this thread just below the comment box are two icons. The one on the left is where the federation on/off setting is and the one on the right (gear) has the display settings.