How can we smooth out the migration and help promote kbin/lemmy to subreddits and redditors?
I think the biggest thing we need to figure out is how to make it sound easier than people say it is. People get too hung up on the technicalities of how the fediverse works, and they never try it out and see that it isn't as confusing as it sounds. If we could write up a simple blurb to help promote kbin to subreddit moderators and people around reddit, I think that could really help
I think people need to cut the bullshit and tell it how it is:
This whole fediverse thing ISN’T user friendly nor it is as practical as the main community platforms out there. This isn’t a substitute for Reddit.
Content and interaction is lacking, but it’s up to us to change that.
The communities are VERY fragmented. Between instances, some instances using exclusively microblogs, others using microblogs and threads… some magazines having their individual rules on which content should be microblogged and what should be threaded, duplicated communities across instances… it’s all a mess right now.
And after all, there’s something here worth building and following. Right now it’s underwhelming but who knows… maybe in a decade Jenny will use Kbin to write a quick rant about boba tea, and have other thousands of non-techies engaging with her.
To be honest, I finally signed up for a reddit account when Trump got elected to add my voice of opposition to the choir. It took a good year to find all the music subs, subs for people who work the same job as I do, and then why not just watch all of this stupid videos. I'm not here expecting a whole lot right off the bat. Just getting settled in.
Where do we comment during the arraignment riot tomorrow? 3pm EST. That's what I want to know first off. =)
UPDATE: Politics, duh. And there's TIL. Subscribe also easy enough to spot. Off to the races!
I was thinking that too. In the way we could do /r/gaming+pcagming+gamernews for example, if we could have /m/gaming+gaming.lemmy (or whatever the syntax would be). Ideally, if people mean for this to replace reddit, it can't be broken up to begin with, which is to say, the communities with the same name are automatically merged between instances. That seems pretty unlikely though.
Merging communities across instances is a much-needed feature, though duplicate/similar posts on the same topic across different communities could be an issue...
True, but I think duplication would only be an issue at first. After they're initially combined duplication should be minimized as long as most users are using some kind of "multireddit".
Your login should allow you to interact with every other instance it’s federated with.
For example, I’m on Kbin.social but I’ve commented on communities on Lemmy.ml with no problem, using my same account. You just have to access the community from within your home site.
EDIT: for example, search @chat(dot)ml <use a real dot, I had to escape the formatting shortening it> in the search bar of Kbin.social and you can interact with that community.
This is perfect. It really is quite a shit show. The hoops you have to jump through to find communities that you're interested in is going to drive most people away. On Reddit you search for something you like and bam it’s there, click subscribe. On lemmy you have to search, it might pop something up, but if it’s on a different instance you have to search for it a different way with ! And @. Hope it smooths out some way.
Aside from the decentralization those are points that could be made about early reddit as well. Demand will drive innovation and accessibility. Then kbin will turn profitable, investors come in and ernest either fucks off into retirement or becomes a rich asshole that antagonizes the userbase. Anyways, after years of corporate-run bullshittery users will at some point migrate to the next little community and the cycle continues.
I don't think the fediverse is that complicated. It's like email, you have one provider that can talk to other providers. Everyone "gets" how email works pretty quickly. Now, if someone isn't willing to devote literally a single minute to figuring out how it works; that's not really solvable. If someone asks how to get on the network, I just recommend they register onto whichever instance I'm on, and that's really all they need to know to get started.
EDIT: Yes, the searching really is a pain. It gets worse because a subset of people are actually opposed to indexing or scanning the network, which is going to make integrating everything much harder than it needs to be.
I don’t think it’s that complicated either, but I’ve been messing around with computers and programming since I was a kid.
Twitter, Facebook, YouTube exists. My 70 year old parents can barely understand those. They still can’t understand why Reddit exists or why anyone would want to use it. Trying to sell them the fediverse in its current state is just going to be impossible.
And yeah, you might say “I don’t want whatever 70 year olds, or 20 year olds have to offer”, but I do for the sake of having multiple points of view, and content from all kinds of people. Reddit made itself famous for nesting insufferable know-it-alls, which is changing due to it becoming more popular, attracting tons of new casual adopters and communities.
Right now, you need a personal drive to not use the simpler, popular offerings, to instead take the obtuse, convoluted one which is the fediverse… and who’s gonna do that? Mostly techies and people versed in internet culture.
Having less people, means less content which means less incentives to join. Less people also means less variety of voices and more echo chambers, which in my opinion, will just turn the fediverse into another specialized community like hackernews or 4chan, which cater a very specific demographic. Is that good or bad for the fediverse? Depends on who you ask.
That's me! It reminds me a lot of browsing reddit for the first time way back in '09 or so, or the chans before they went to shit. There's a lot of different stuff on different instances, but I figure the longer I spend navigating and posting/commenting, the clearer the communities/magazines I want to be a part of will become.
There's a bunch of websites running software that let's them mirror content from each other at users' request. Some of those websites are made to look like a Microblog, like Twttier. Some are made to look like Reddit. Some are made to look like YouTube. Some are made to look like Instagram. But they all speak the same language, and they can all share content between them.
That's the whole ecosystem here in a nutshell. Join one website, see shit from thousands of others as well as the one you joined. Depending on the UI, you may not have any idea that any of that content came from different websites.
I guess the first thing I realized is that subreddits are called magazines here on kbin and communities over on lemmy. This reminds me of the whole astronaut/cosmonaut/taikonaut thing. Unnecessary terminology complications, especially considering magazines and communities are really just different views of the exact same thing as near as I can tell.
But what causes a bit of confusion is that unlike with a subreddit, you can have more than one magazine with the same name but hosted in different places. For example, I search python and it comes back with python@lemmy.ml, python (the one hosted here on kbin), python@sh.itjust.works, etc. It's a bit ironic that for a system whose raison d'être is to aggregate content, there seems to be something of a need for all these different sources to be aggregated together?
At this point, people seem to be busy recreating the usual suspects in terms of the subreddits we all know and love locally here on kbin, regardless of whether or not they already exist elsewhere in the fediverse. I am not necessarily opposed to this. If kbin develops in a more self-contained way, this may be more approachable to someone coming over from reddit. I could see a situation in which the bigger subreddits all turn into locally-hosted kbin magazines while the more niche ones require you to step outside and find them on the outer rim of the fediverse somewhere?
Magazines are different from Communities. Magazines include both the forum element (called a Group in ActivityPub parlance, and is what Lemmy calls Communities) and the microblogging element. Magazines can have Mastodon(/Misskey/Pleroma/Friendica) hashtags associates with them and collect posts from those platforms into the magazine's "Microblog" tab.
Lemmy doesn't do that. Communities there are only the forum element.
Also, there being groups on different websites that use the same name really isn't a call for them to be aggregated. They're different communities, with different people using them.
Consider @politics instead of @python. Can you imagine how @politics might be a radically different community than @politics? Is there confusion there? Should those communities be smushed together?
Turning back to @python, r/Python is a pretty big subreddit. Possibly too big for most peoples posts or comments to ever get noticed by others. That's not a community. That's not a space where most people can have meaningful discussions. Having a dozen, or a hundred local Python communities where people actually get to know each other, get to have their contributions or questions actually read, and get to feel like they're actually part of something, rather than just shouting into the noise, is a feature, not a bug.
Jumping back to what you said about communities and magazines having differences, I think you helped me understand something that's been mildly confusing.
Is it safe to say that communities are equivalent to subreddits, whereas magazines are subreddits with a group chat (called microblogs that are what a "post" contributes to)?
edit:
A microblog is more of a tweet rather than a group chat. A person is posting an announcement/microblog within the magazine and anyone can see and comment on it. In a group chat, it is for invited people only.
Yes to subreddits equivalent to communities and magazines. But magazines have microblogs unlike communities.
The Microblog is literally a sampling of Mastodon chatter that's reaching the server. The people there aren't necessarily subscribed to the Magazine, they're just using hashtags that the Magazine's admin has chosen to follow.
From there you can participate in discussions on Mastodon. Or just observe.
The option to combine feeds from multiple communities could be useful just as a view. Maybe some way to track cross posts or see other posts with the same link. Not sure how much of a pain that might be from a technical side of things or if it would just be too slow with little utility.
Magazines include both the forum element (called a Group in ActivityPub parlance, and is what Lemmy calls Communities) and the microblogging element.
Interesting. TIL. So if one were to view a magazine as a community from the lemmy side, would it be stripped of whatever metadata like hashtags that are only meaningful to the kbin side? Because I made a lemmy account too and it looks like kbin magazines do show up there, though the subsciptions I tried to make are eternally listed as "pending", presumably because kbin is rather overloaded at this point.
Should those communities be smushed together?
Well, I think any sort of aggregation should be opt-in? Is there some way to make groups of subscriptions? For example, sometimes I want to know what's happening with that war in Ukraine, and there are a handful of magazine/communities covering that. It would be nice to have a feed view that groups just those ones together.
Turning back to @python, r/Python is a pretty big subreddit. Possibly too big for most peoples posts or comments to ever get noticed by others. That's not a community.
I guess there is always a trade-off there. I like having all posts regarding a particular topic in one place so I can skim over what's new quickly, but you're right in that it loses some intimacy once the community grows beyond a certain size.
The terminology is quite confusing for me and it's been somewhat of a barrier to utilizing the fediverse as much as I would like. Granted, I've been fairly busy and haven't been able to spend too much time learning things. However, I've decided to just jump in and just try things for now. I do quite like the idea of the fediverse though.
I'm not sure how new you are, but I started over this past weekend with both kbin and sh.itjust.works. Having a few uninterrupted hours checking out the different tabs, communities, magazines, etc. was a big help. I basically jumped in also, but just having time to LOOK at things, read posts, and check out different communities made me feel comfortable. I still don't grasp how the microblog section works, but that's something new to explore next weekend I guess.
The Microblog section is just a feed from Mastodon sites (and sites using other Fediverse microblogging platforms) that someone on kbin.social is following.
When viewing a Magazine, this feed is restricted to posts containing hashtags the Magazine's admin has specified.
Is there a feature like multireddits here? that would let you just combine the feeds of python@lemmy.ml, python (the one hosted here on kbin), python@sh.itjust.works into just 1 magazine you can view at your leisure. I feel something like that would help people navigate these new spaces.
And when creating content you would get to choose which one you post it to.
Does anyone remember the first time they saw Reddit? I know my first reaction was something like "wtf is this mess I'm looking at???" Maybe remind people that like a lot of things, it's going to seem intimidating at first because it's unfamiliar. There are some guides available already, and more will pop up, but if people just start slow and remember that it will get easier as things become familiar, that might help people switch over.
Even if it is - the federated nature of things means you can just move somewhere else. If Spez buys Kbin.social and Elon buys Lemmy.world or whatever, you can pack your bags and go to the plethora of other instances.
Moving isn't pleasant - it never is - but it's easy enough to do. If people are spread out enough, you won't even notice a difference. I'm really hoping that the fediverse is the real Web3. Not the crypto nonsense... just people, talking to each other, away from corporate greed.
Speaking of - even Facebook is getting in on the fediverse. They're launching "Threads", which is a competitor to Mastodon - and it uses ActivityPub. The fact that one big tech company sees potential in this setup means that hopefully the fediverse will be okay for "normies" soon too.
Of course, I'm also speaking as a crotchety old guard... I joined Mastodon in 2017, and Lemmy in 2020. This is the moment I've wanted for a long time.
I feel like something that could be very important is to create mirror communities of all niche subreddits in here as people migrate, and almost copy their guidelines and sticked information. I am longing for my subreddits to be here.
A great example of this in action is the migration of r/196 to blahaj and Lemmy. The community has exploded there because it is essentially a carbon-clone of our former (and I mean it nicely) shitposting subreddit.
First time I went to Reddit I was flabbergasted on how ugly the UI was. I didn’t take to Reddit until I saw someone post a screenshot of Apollo. I hope there are similar experiences in the future of this fediverse thingie.
The same happened to me as well. I avoided reddit because it was so clunky and ugly. Eventually I found Apollo and really got into reddit. Fortunately kbin and Mlem for Lemmy help out a lot.
The sheer number of cat subreddits alone(!) is daunting on Reddit. They had a whole wiki page devoted to link after link of cat subs and new ones kept popping up! I don't mind that every instance seems to have a "cats" community - they'll all end up having a plethora of cat photos to keep me happy. :)
Someone needs to make a YouTube video explaining kbin and how to use it. What magazines are and how to create posts and save them. Share them. Use the site. I tried looking for something earlier and it's all kpop stuff... I had to play around to figure it out and I'm still learning more every time I open the site
Someone needs to make a YouTube video explaining what kbin is and how to use it. How to install the prerequisites, how to set up the database, and how to compile the docker image.
Because the way to use kbin is to create more websites using it, and to direct people away from kbin.social.
@artillect I'd avoid the technical parts as much as possible, at least at first. Or try to explain things with the method of "lying to babies", so that the new concepts aren't as likely to scare people off. Starting the explanation by comparing to things the other people already know also helps in absorption of the information, and a potential acceptance to it.
The email analogy is good but I wouldn't even try to explain federation to newcomers - it's not the most immediately useful piece of info when first opening the homepage. Start by explaining magazines, articles, microblogs, and where to find the subscribed feed and the magazine list.
Lemmy.ml is extremely user hostile. I was banned recently without any explanation or warning. The Lemmy developer and Lemmy.ml owner, Dessalines, is a Marxist/Stalinist who is apparently banning anyone who criticises Russia or China. He denies the Uyghur genocide even exists.
One thing that will help is maybe providing links to popular kbin AND Lemmy magazines/communities. It’s one thing to say “You can read Lemmy communities on kbin,” but what does that mean and HOW is going to be a sticking point for anyone new. You need to tell folks HOW to access other ActivityPub sites instead of telling them they can. A walkthrough of some kind would go a long way.
Getting the server running smoothly will be the biggest single thing we can do here. New users joining up are getting cloudflare redirects, they're getting a slow UI, and critically they're NOT getting proper federation which is absolutely key to a good experience here.
It’s been only few hours and I’m not tech savvy, but I’m kinda enjoying it. Few simple things like introduction of an app would do I guess. Also, when I had to reply to your post, I had to scroll all the way down to comment. May be I’m missing out on something.
How can I set kbin to hide posts I've already voted on? That's how I used Reddit: I set it to hide upvoted and downvoted posts so that my main page was always new content (since I would vote on everything I read).
Any way to do that here? How do you use kbin without seeing the same posts you've already read?
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