Reddit's strategy of antagonizing app writters, moderators, and millions of redditors is good news for reddit alternatives like KBin and Lemmy. And not just them! The fediverse has always grown in waves and we're at the start of one.
Previous waves have led to innovation but also major challenges and limited growth. It's worth looking at what tactics worked well in the past, to use them again or adapt them and build on them. It's also valuable to look at what went wrong or didn't work out as well in the past, to see if there are ways to do better.
Here's the current table of contents:
I'm flashing!!!!!
But first, some background
Don't tell people "it's easy"
Improve the "getting-started experience"
Keep scalability and sustainability in mind
Prioritize accessibility
Get ready for trolls, hate speech, harassment, spam, porn, and disinformation
Invest in moderation tools
Values matter
This is a great opportunity – and it won't be the last great opportunity
I came here after reading a migration guide at r/redditalternatives, i just wanna say, describing the technical aspects of kbin and ActivityPub doesnt really help navigate the the kbin UI.
It's not really necesary to explain how kbin, lenny and mastodon can interact with eachother when the average brand new user doesn't know how to interact and is overwhelmed by kbin's webpage alone. Currently these platforms are being intoduced from the developer's POV and it's like being thrown to the deep end of the pool.
Anyways back to reading any and all posts i can find to figure this site out lmao
Yup, totally agree. Kbin.social does the best job out of all of them thus far by keeping the initial experience confined to this site. I love the federated nature, but the lag and incomplete index of going off to non-local communities (magazines?) is really confusing.
Blind user. So far my experience with Lemmy is good, slightly better than Reddit. The major accessibility hurdle is some way to easily navigate through comments. Possible ideas would be using HTML landmarks, headers, or invisible (to sighted users) separators.
Wow the comments are are all nested under the same parent, without hierarchy.
See:
document.getElementById("comment-517862").getElementsByTagName("p")[0].innerText
// and
document.getElementById("comment-517862").parentNode.getElementsByClassName("comments")
Don't tell people it's "easy" anytime. Anything is easy when you know how to do it. Learning new things is difficult and telling someone it's easy just makes people feel dumb and that they can't do it. Encourage folks to learn.
I'm a first-wave Reddit refugee and I agree, don't say the fediverse is easy. I've been online since the early 90s and it's not an easy transition. I wish there was a map. I wish it were easier to set up new communities for chatting.
But having been through these cycles (online and IRL) before, I must say that maybe you don't want it to be too easy. You don't want to get too popular.
I hope the Reddit revolt works. I want my niche communities back.
I stated a similar sentiment elsewhere. The reason the discussions on reddit became less rigorous and interesting over time is a case of Eternal September. As you make a site more user-friendly and accessible, you actually are inviting a lot of users who are would have been unwilling to learn a slight learning curve, whether technical or social. Maybe it's remiss of me to say, but I think it speaks to their unwillingness to change their minds or being willing to view a new perspective about much.
As an older person here who was on Slashdot and left for Digg and then left to reddit, I genuinely think having a slight learning curve prevents people who would otherwise be shitposters and nothing else from joining the fray. I really would like to see high quality discussions online thrive again like they often did in the early days reddit (and where they often still do on its predecessor, hackernews), and as elitist as it is to say, I think having it be a little more technical and confusing isn't a bad thing.
Also, as an older person here, if people are willing to figure out the initially quite confusing way (to me anyway) that Discord works, they can figure this out, too.
@dingus I strongly disagree. Most people have better things to do with their time than fight their way through buggy and confusing software. And as I say in the essay, if it were harder to sign up for Gab, would that make the quality higher? Of course not.
The more popular a community becomes, the shittier it gets. The easier you make it to join and interact with, the more popular it will become.
In the case of places like Gab, Truth Social, Parlor, and other right wing nut job havens, while the quality of users might not get higher if you raised the barrier to entry, those places certainly wouldn’t have become as popular as they have.
But the barrier to entry isn’t the only reason they’ve congregated there, they have other cultural reasons driving them, primarily the owners or moderators being friendly to that kind of mindset. I don’t think the same crowd would be able to gather here as they’d just get defederated.
@SemioticStandard There are good subreddits with over a million users. At least up to some threshold, it's just not true that the more popular a community becomes the shittier it gets.
I disagree with that. The larger subreddits have significant moderation problems. Only through extraordinary efforts by the mod teams, such as at /r/askhistorians, are things kept in line. It's simple math: the more users you have, the more likely you are to have people posting in bad faith. If a subreddit of 1 million users has only 0.05% of its users posting low quality content, that's still 50,000 people that need to be moderated for.
@SemioticStandard I agree that the larger a community gets the harder it is to moderate well (and the tools here are still much less advanced than Reddit, which is a big problem). But trying to deter bad actors by making it hard to sigh up doesn't work. Spammers and other bad actors are typically more likely to make the effort than people who might well add a lot of value.
@SemioticStandard experiences moderating forums and discussion groups on multipple platforms, helping to start two social networks, and what I've learned as part of Disinfo Defense League over the last few years.
[And I have no idea why fediversenews is boosting this post!]
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