So what corners have redditors gathered to during the blackout?
Here (kbin), Lemmy, Tildes... I hear Mastodon had a user spike. Is there something obvious I'm missing?
I ask because I haven't felt the same mass of users that Reddit had. Obviously users have spread out, servers have been hammered, UIs have a learning curve and so on... But there might be other alternatives I haven't looked at that are worth that look.
I'm on Tumblr as well, and I've seen more "The redditors are here! They must know the rules!" more than "Hey I'm new from Reddit" posts. But then again, I may not be in the same circles your friend is.
I'm really enjoying kbin and Lemmy. I'm really keen on giving Tildes a go but have been unable to get an invite. I've emailed the Tildes team but I'm guessing they're probably pretty busy these days!
I got my invite to Tildes this morning. It seems like the main dev is churning thru the 2000 requests in his queue very quickly. both he and Ernest here at kbin deserve medals for their work this week :)
The way it should work is that people who routinely contribute in a way the user-base appreciates will be trusted to make decisions that, if not undone by the admin who guides the culture of the site, will snowball into more trust and power. It's dependent on the community sharing an approach to how to contribute, enforced by the vision of the founder.
The biggest thing with Tildes is that it seems intentionally designed not to scale. That's actually very cool, in its way, but the main instance is not and never will be suitable to be a replacement for mass numbers of Reddit refugees.
Basically, my understanding is that pretty much everyone at a certain level of use on Tildes will get moderation powers. Any use of those powers are transparent though, and there’s a public log of these actions. So any abuse can easily be corrected, and moderation privileges can be revoked. It sounds ok to me on paper and I definitely like the idea of a public mod log, but its actual effectiveness won’t really be known until/unless it’s actually implemented. If anyone has a better understanding or explanation of this, please feel free to correct me.
It won't happen over night. As the quality of reddit declines, more people will give Kbin and Lemmy a shot.
A lot of power users are leaving reddit and that's where the quality was.
Apart from a few sports subs, and they are a whole other mess of non-typical reddit demographics, I was actually mostly participating in more niche communities (and Star Wars, lol). I long ago unsubbed to most of the big standard ones, which has been a double-edged sword during the blackout. I don't have a huge gap in where I was getting news and giggles, but most of what I did want to read on Reddit was coming from smaller, often not tech-related, communities that are not going to coalesce quickly. One topic and 5 comments a day on college football is not going to scratch that itch, even in the offseason, and I don't know when we will actually have a way to bring 19,000 fans of country-adjacent rock/folk/etc. music together in one place.
That's the thing. Some people went to lemme, or kbin, or tildes or something else. Some people just stopped using anything. Some people stayed at Reddit at the subreddits that remained open.
It was never going to feel like everyone coalesced in one spot. It was all going to seem very small to start.
You need to decide if you're OK starting at something new and helping it grow, or remaining at a product you disagree with because more people are there.
yeah it really feels like were in the growing pains phase right now for kbin / the fediverse as a whole. Things are still expanding and people are working on improvements that are needed to allow for larger user bases. I really do think kbin is where I want to be though. I like the discussions that are happening and I tend to lurk but have been trying to participate more
I checked a single thread in /r/technology this morning from the Narwhal app and folks there are in full apathy mode. "it was never going to do anything", "It actually helped reddit by making other subs discoverable", etc.
It's frustrating to see the level of distaste I have as a 15 year user of reddit and the 3rd party apps they've supported doesn't seem to remotely be reciprocated by that crowd.
And even on the subreddit discords I'm a part of, none of them seemed to be talking about alternatives or have any enthusiasm for such discussion.
My guess is that it’s younger/newer/more causal internet users who don’t remember the days when the internet wasn’t just, like, 5 websites. I wouldn’t be surprised if the audience on kbin/lemmy skews older since that would be the cohort that was used to forums and an early web that was more shifting and moving, and would be more comfortable packing up and going to another site. Linus Tech Tips made the great point that there’s been a shocking period of stability on the internet with Twitter and Reddit as institutions, but that maybe that time is coming to a close.
I think you're right mastodon seems to skew older at least going by the polls Ive participated in I was surprised when the average skewed older than me (I'm 27) and I wouldn't be surprised if that's also the case here.
Yeah, I'm also getting the impression it skews older. I think the other reason people won't leave is that it was a slow creep, over time reddit made it less necessary to visit other sites. Then it becomes habit and habits are hard to break. I hated how it was managed even before this newest controversy and wanted alternatives. Now when that's becoming more of a reality, I still find myself checking it out of habit.
I'm using kbin.social mostly, I will just follow Lemmy communities from kbin once federation is re-enabled. It doesn't make sense to me to have an account for Lemmy AND an account for kbin if they're both part of the Fediverse.
I am also using Mastodon, even though it's part of the Fediverse. I'm doing this because it's more like Twitter, and the tweet equivalent on Mastodon is the same as a "Microblog" on kbin.
Ditto on the last point. I understand other Fediverse platforms like Mastodon and such should just work with others like Kbin/Lemmy, but the UI's are so massively different. So I've went with the idea of having separate accounts. One for my existing Mastodon instance and one here on Kbin. To me it feels like the best way to manage it.
As a bonus to all of this, I should be able to easily follow my Kbin account and boost posts over on Mastodon if needed once federation is all sorted.
I like that everything has a different UI but should all connect eventually. I never really got into it like Twitter, but I was on Reddit for a decade. I chose kbin because the UI is similar to Reddit, but now I’ll be able to venture to those other sites for content while using a UI I understand better.
Still I may create accounts on other networks just to snag a name in case I decide to leave kbin.
One additional plus to using kbin over Lemmy is there's no "Microblog" feature on Lemmy. So if you follow Mastodon accounts on Lemmy, you won't see anything. Whereas if you follow Mastodon accounts on kbin, their posts will come in as Microblogs!
To my knowledge, you will have to do it manually. You would simply search for user@mastodon.instance.
So for example, I followed my own Mastodon account by searching for Lilkev@mastodon.social (see image below).
There might be a script or something floating around that can automate the process, but not any that I am aware of at least.
NOTE: The people's posts you are following on Mastodon will not show up on kbin right now due to Federation currently being disabled/not working. But, they should populate with data once Federation on kbin is fixed.
Kbin, reddthat for the federation, and squabbles just from the level of interaction but I plan on leaving it as soon as it dies off because it's centralized
After reddit my needs from a social book marking website are simple:
Completely open source
Moderators can be recalled by the communities they mod.
Not for profit (ads are not the primary source of funding)
The internet needs to have something like reddit as core infrastructure. A digital public square. This requirement is incompatible with profit motive. This is why time and time again social media sites fail.
A st Peter's square of everyone trying to be the funniest person in the room. It was impossible trying to have any level of conversation because everyone just jumped in with a dumb joke constantly
Not unreasonable pricing. The estimate I saw for reddit is about 30 cents a year per user is their current take. Would I have paid $5 a year for ad free access? You bet your ass I would, but it wouldn't be nearly greedy enough for Reddit.
Once I get my bearings and decide where I'm going to be hosted (bouncing between beehaw, here and Lemmy) I'll be contributing regularly. I'm happy to pay when I know It's going for something like this, not to make a creeper into a billionaire.
#1 I can get on board with, but #2 and #3 seem a bit, for lack of a better word, "naive".
Who wants to be an unpaid volunteer to work potentially hours a day and be beholden to the whims of a community, the exact same people they have to worry about moderating? If you censor or ban someone, now you have to worry about them instigating a revolt to get you demodded as well? How many people are willing to both actual do hard work as a moderator, and also deal with that sort of nonsense?
So, you can't do ads, but good luck asking people to pay up. If there is anything Redditors (and ex-Redditors) hate more than anything, it's asking them to pay money for anything. If you can figure out this problem then you'll have solved a problem that has plagued online communities for decades.
Before reddit and even now there were community forums. Those were moderated in the same way without paying people. I think if people care about something, they donate their time for free. There has to be some way to make it worthwhile. In the case where no one wants to moderate because they're being held accountable, which is just ridiculous.
As for ads and supporting a system, some community members care about the thing they support. So they'll donate money (like myself). Before reddit started going crazy with their IPO crap, they used to have a progress bar on the front page that showed how much money needed to be donated in order to support the infrastructure at that time. Any community website should have that. For people who care about that website, they can donate and they can see the progress of their donation making a difference.
I donate to everything I use because I care about it. But as you said, a lot of people don't. So there needs to be some way to fund these things that doesn't involve taking money from advertisers because it's 100% proven advertisers will pull their advertising if they don't agree with something on the website. And this affects everybody. You can't rely on ads. One of the reasons Reddit is increasing their API pricing because of AI companies taking their data and using it to train their models. If we had some website that the community controlled, we can do the same but at a much cheaper price. This can support the website.
But then again, it all comes down to the people who control the website, the community donating their information for free, and people being okay with not getting rich off of it, or amassing power, which is the problem. Everyone wants to get rich, but this space is difficult to do that and keep everything free as in freedom.
If reddit simply wanted to sustain its userbase, it'd be in a much better place.
That's fundamentally the problem with the internet (and corporate culture as a whole, really). When a site takes off, the expectation isn't to sustain the status quo, it's to continue that growth. It inevitably reaches a point where maintaining exponential growth becomes more and more difficult, but even more profit still needs to be made. They find ways to squeeze every last goddamn drop out of it, almost always to the detriment of the users, the user's experience, and everyone's privacy.
The never-ending growth model is fundamentally the problem here, and that's why I completely agree with you. Like you said, "This requirement is incompatible with profit motive."
Ironically, reddit was open source. Here's the python source code repo for what the site was between 2005-2017. They have it preserved in an archive, and reddit the company still does contribute a lot of open source code and to open source projects, but I don't think the react rewrite of the site is included in that list.
On mastodon I already was active since the twitter exodus, now with reddit I am here and also on lemmy :) Still figuring things out, I also want to take a look at the code of kbin when I have some free time since is in PHP and Symfony and maybe I can help there too :D
I'm finding kbin and lemmy refreshing. If/when kbin gets a dedicated app I think it will be my preference. Was feeling down at first not having my instant dopamine blast from doom scrolling. That has turned into bliss as I'm finding the fediverse much more engaging. Also, been exploring Mastodon a bit which is ok more polished but less engaging.
You know, a huge part of the issue here is that reddit shows up as the top results on google search? I believe people just want an answer to their questions, which reddit's history has a ton of. Some subs just cant be closed without porting over all the answers. Additionally, instead of recommending a few sites, recommend just 1, that way the communities dont get split up looking for a new alternative.
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