Welcome to Another Eden on kbin

TheTheMeet, 10 months ago

heya thanks for this. Im still familiarized myself with this site.

OpenStars, 10 months ago

Welcome! It takes quite a bit of getting used to - most things don't quite work as expected, but it does "work", kinda. Kbin, after being absolutely overwhelmed with the growth from the Rexit event, just got a fresh new set of multiple admins who came over from another instance (so are very talented & knowledgeable right from the start), so I expect great things to happen in the next month and beyond.

Also, reportedly kind programmers have already coded up new features to be added to kbin's core software, and it was just that the instance admin was so overwhelmed (having to approve each new user sign-in by hand, in order to prevent mass bots signing up) that was acting as the hold-up for them to be rolled out already. So I literally expect great changes to happen even in the timeframe of mere days.

In the meantime, I hope you feel welcomed and enjoy poking around:-).

OpenStars, 11 months ago

A very interesting and relevant article: https://www.reddit.com/r/RedditAlternatives/comments/144hqpg/looking_to_learn_why_do_you_believe_federated/. TLDR: everything now is going to be about "managing expectations". Not only is Reddit never coming back, but nothing is going to replace it either, period. 20k members from Another Eden Global aren't even going to fit on kbin.social (or maybe I'm wrong there - certainly we couldn't all jump over in one day, nor is that perhaps the best idea to begin with...), and how would bot/spam filtering work once it got "noticed" and triggered the ire of even one person who decided it would be a good idea to flood this place with filth? This article says that Federation is doomed from the start (tbh I didn't understand all of it so just read/scan for yourself to see what you can glean from it:-).

beithioch, 11 months ago

There are concerns, but the OP doesn't really get the Fediverse.

First, Mastodon is doing fine, very well in fact, and had hiccups when scaling rapidly. Literally every service has trouble with scaling fast. Reddit fell over when it scaled down rapidly. kbin/Lemmy/etc instances can throw resources and money (if they have them) or people will scale via new instances. That's how it works.

The old saw of federation is hard is blown out of perspective. kbin federated with Lemmy and it's not been an issue so far. In fact, it's been great. Overnight they more than doubled the number of magazines.

And remember, kbin is only a week or two old. They're actively developing it.

Moderation is gonna be the same here as Reddit because most of the existing Reddit mod tools aren't maintained by Reddit and are going dark due to the API costs. It's gonna be a gong show over there. Ditto on DMCA, GDPR, etc. Eventually people will build mod tools for Fediverse instances, like with Reddit, and that'll be good.

Will the Fediverse survive? Yes. Will it thrive? Yes, but maybe not kbin et al. Mastodon is doing well, and federation means that anyone using any ActivityPub based solution is potentially a memeber of this magazine. That's nothing to sneeze at.

All that said, we may never grow this magazine. Maybe the AE Reddit community won't move. That's cool. We may grow our own community. I'd rather not fracture, but lock-in is real. We take it as it comes.

OpenStars, 10 months ago

I've looked at all the popular Reddit replacements - and some not as much even. Some have nice UIs, like 9gag tbh, but all have major, most often serious issues.

Like Discuit has only a single channel ("general"), and while tildes wants to scale up (yet not in terms of number of users it seems?) it too can only have channels created by the owner, squabbles.io is perhaps the best UI that is most similar to Reddit, but you have to constantly click "Show more", and "Show replies" over & over & over & over again - it's very annoying. Plus it's a Twitter replacement, not a Reddit one.

kbin.social really is the best. Even if it sucks - which it doesn't... exactly - it's flat-out ahead of all the competition. It's not that hard to learn, really, and quite frankly maybe that's not a bad thing - if you simply refuse to read and are unwilling to learn, even with people offering to help you, then your obstinacy is perhaps the kind of attitude that would have gotten you banned from here anyway?:-P The other side is that it can indeed be quite confusing - and yet since 98% of that can be ignored, is that so bad? Some of us care how it works, but most will care simply that it does.

I'm not much of a content creator though, so that may be the thing that this community really needs.

AzizLight, 11 months ago

I for one support our new overlord Sword-wielding Savior!