I mean the only people who are gatekeeping are those that prevent themselves from joining because they are unwilling to work out how the fediverse and by extension Lemmy work and how it's actually surprisingly easy to use, once you get used to it.
In other words people's fear of change is the true gatekeeper here.
Still annoying, but so long as we don't try to make it harder for these people to adapt than it already is, I think there should be no problems.
As much as I don't want to contribute to gatekeeping, I found myself thinking this same sentiment yesterday. The train of thought for me isn't "normies ruined reddit" but instead "the more democratized reddit became, the more it attracted capitalist interests and mindsets, which both set the agenda for reddit's executives in terms of service rollout and for corporations wanting to advertize across the platform because the larger audience started to trend toward the American average of pretty stupid."
This vying for dollars is why so many OnlyFans accounts were kind of ruining NSFW amateur subreddits; why (if you weren't using a 3rd party app to evade ads) you couldn't block the HeGetsUs ad campaign; why China and Russia started infiltrating communities to extend disinformation and disruption campaigns into digital spaces; and why other nefarious bad faith actors started concentrated efforts to radicalize for the Right among reddit's youth.
I think what will make it all real and solid for me is when I have an app that can just have all my magazines from any fediverse site. Right now there is just to much "fomo" about am I on the "good" instance since the more traditional website paradigm is very ingrained in me.
I think the fundamental thing for alternatives to succeed is that they can't primarily exist as outlets for us to complain about reddit. Certainly there's going to be a lot of that given that reddit's actions sparked a partially-reluctant exodus, but the best revenge is living well and all that.
That's super temporary and just due to current circumstances though; wouldn't worry about it at all. The success of alternatives will be driven by active users growing, not what is the hot topic.
I think the timing actually unintentionally works well. This first surge is allowing us to work out a lot of the kinks (kbin repo has had tons of activity), and then in a couple weeks we will be able to handle the second surge better.
Do you think if the mobile Reddit apps stop working (the ones that are miles better than the official Reddit app), mobile users are going to flock to kbin/lemmy? Are there any good mobile apps? All the ones I could find are extremely alpha/beta quality.
I'm not sure about lemmy since I'm primarily a kbin user, but the mobile website is already really good to begin with. I just use Hermit to make it even more "app-like" with features like full screen and frameless. I even did the same to the websites of some of my other apps.
I'm with you on that. Most of the front page on kbin has been Reddit related since I've been here, but whether it's just because federation appears to have kicked in (guessing @ernest may have disabled Cloudflare, as I've not been challenged yet this evening?), or we're kicking other magazines into gear, my front page today is a lot more varied. I'm looking forward to seeing things flourish across every instance.
It's still early days, and kbin and Lemmy are experiencing a massive influx of Reddit users.
I would compare it to Mastodon just after Elon Musk took over Twitter. Giant influx, and for a few weeks it was full of people talking about Twitter. But then they got that out of their system and started talking about other stuff, and now Twitter only comes up if Musk does something really, really, really stupid.
I expect Lemmy and kbin will follow a similar trajectory. There will be a period when it's all Reddit sucking all the time, but people will soon enough start using them to share news and links.
This is what happened when Reddit usurped Digg as well. A solid few weeks of people just railing on Digg until they got comfortable with the new way of life. This is normal.
Yeah, we've literally seen this forum migration happen many times in the short history of the internet. Reddit had some novel concepts in terms of evolving and democratizing the concept, and it was the best thing since sliced bread for a long time.
Federation is a reasonable evolution of the user-run, user-generated concept, which ultimately requires more freedom that a heavily monetized platform can ever deliver. I there will always be a distinction between internet media as a product, and internet media as a utility. The neat thing seems to be that the internet kind of always seems to evolve new versions of the latter when they are needed.
i think accessibility is why lemmy has such an "Old Internet" vibe to it. there are probably a lot of people here that joined reddit over a decade ago (my account turned 11 this year).
that and, there's no reason to tie your real identity to your account. i think about the difference between lemmy and mastodon (aside from mastodon being like twitter). i look at mastodon maybe a few times a month, but when i do look at it, i see people using their real identities and posting as if it's a piece of their professional career
Something like Facebook is still useful for keeping in touch with extended family and social circles. I may not particularly care about great uncle John, but it's nice to be aware that he's in the hospital after a bad fall without that information going through 5 rounds of the telephone game.
Somewhere like Reddit or the fediverse? I would never want my real identity associated with these accounts. It's nice to have some anonymity.
Well, give that time. Kbin is extremely new and the documentation for spinning up an instance needed some polishing. Since Rexxit began, two new English-speaking instances have already spun up, and more will certainly be on their way.
I think so, true commitment for this community is what makes it more interesting.
Still Reddit has the perks of being the source for tons of Google searches and less experienced users which brings lots of interesting topics/solutions etc.
But being away of repost, ads, influencers and that kind of shit is reassuring not gonna lie lol.
I think that makes it a great replacement for the more community-based subreddits, but it makes it a very bad replacement for the kind of communities that show up when you google "issue I'm having site:reddit.com" or "productname reviews site:reddit.com"
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