I think these long explainations of instances and federation are really not necessary. It should just say “pick a server and start browsing. You’ll be able to see everything*.”
“*If you really want to get into the weeds, blah blah blah.”
For real. Wanna try Mastodon? Make an account on mastodon.social. Wanna try Lemmy? Make an account on Lemmy.world. Once people buy into the platforms they can migrate to smaller/niche instances if they’d like. Simply things at first, active users will then slowly figure out the rest.
It sucks migrating between instances right now. I’ve found no way to port my subscriptions from one instance to another. All of your subscriptions are saved on your current instance as websites, but to subscribe on you new instance they need to be formatted ![name]@instance Lots of work needs to be done
There are also some quirks in how Kbin handles things that differs from Lemmy. Linking to Lemmy instances works fine when viewed from Kbin, but it doesn’t seem to work when linking Kbin communities. All fairly minor though!
Yes. Anytime someone starts trying to explain the Fediverse to someone signing up I want to put my hand on their face and tell the newbie right this way.
Agree completely. It just makes it all sound much more complicated than it is in practice. I’m used to the fediverse now and my eyes glazed over reading all that.
Another issue I have with the article is that he doesn’t even touch on third-party apps, which are abundant and pretty damn robust considering how new they are. The fact that much of Reddit’s self immolation was directly due to their treatment of third-party apps. At least worth a paragraph in my opinion.
It’s like how there aren’t articles comparing email options. We all just kinda picked an email site and stuck with it until something goes wrong and then pick the next one. No one’s really investing time in debating ones over the others or trying to convert others to Team Hotmail or somethin.
Unless you're crazy like me and host your own email server :)
I like the direction Lemmy and Kbin has provided in terms of providing a messaging environment on the internet where it is more decentralized much like the internet of old.
Email on the other hand has taken a serious step in the other direction with email monopolies from the big names such as Google and Microsoft etc that have made self-operated email servers quite a bit more difficult to operate then it really should be, at-least from the perspective of actually sending email to other people using their servers and getting it in their inbox.
I find it ironic that Google/Microsoft etc use the excuse of spam/malware as the excuse to block self-hosted email servers with little to no email history/reputation yet most of the worlds spam comes from their servers.
I am not sure I agree. It does not need paragraphs of explanations but something that says the server you sign up for decides what you can see, should still be mentioned.
I have signed up for multiple servers in the beginning and found quite big differences in what I could see because of what was already blocked. Or servers that have not federated with each other yet. Then I stuck with lemmy.fmhy.ml and well, I guess you know the story.
So I think it definitely should mention server choice may influence content and one should try out several in the beginning to see whats best for yourself.
I saw this claim and signed up for a different instance just to see if it’s different. Nope, it’s the same. Unless you really go off and find an instance that curates, it’s really the same.
They can have an explaination below, but for 99% of people it really doesn’t matter.
Unless you say what two instances you signed up for we can agree to disagree.
I signed up on feddit.de, startrek.website and lemmy.fmhy.ml. I saw many communities only via fmhy, which we obviously now cannot test anymore. After that I signed up for ttrpg.network and was missing quite a few communities, and yes, of course I can search/connect to them to get them to federate, but the point is a new user does not know that and will not attempt it.
This might be different now, a month in after the big move from reddit where there is more extensive federation, so your experience is potentially more valid than mine now, I admit to that.
So long as the federation of servers is based on the whim of the few people who own the instances, the server you choose is most currently relevant. The people running these communities need to realize that cutting of groups just because you don’t agree with them or have personal issues with them is going to cause an extremely fragmented experience, alienating new users who don’t understand the landscape this ensuring nothing but monolithic servers and communities exist and no small communities will ever be populated.
I chose Mastodon to be my Reddit alternative. For one, I love the change of pace and how different it is. And secondly, I can post on Lemmy through Mastodon, which is the coolest thing ever.
At the moment, I login on kbin.social and lemmy.world interchangeably, since both are growing, and both are kind of unstable, but thankfully I can read the exact same posts on both. Will probably settle on one of these, or a different one eventually
I personally don’t like KBin’s UI. It’s an immediate turn-off for me. Text too small, vote buttons look weird. Also I just loaded the homepage and the top posts are “🤔🤔🤔”, “ich🚗iel”, “Every time I leave or enter the house”, and a generic meme. No thanks, there’s enough trash like that already on the Reddit homepage.
I’m building my own Reddit alternative zsync.xyz. I’ll open source it in a week. Hoping to federate it one day and make it into a pcmag article. I def respect the Lemmy dev(s). To an outsider a Reddit clone might look trivial to build but it’s actually a ton of work, and of course an enormous chicken & egg problem to overcome to actually get any users.
What’s unique or special about yours, as opposed to lemmy or kbin or any of the others? Especially if your issue with kbin is just the ui, it seems like making an app for an already established user base might be a better use of your time. If you’re just doing it for kicks that’s fine I’m not trying to bash that, I’m just curious. If you’re planning to federate eventually does it do anything differently to lemmy? What’s the use case?
I think the main thing that makes its nice is it federates with both Lemmy and Mastodon under one interface. While Lemmy can post to Mastodon instances and vice versa, it’s not a part of the Interface really, you have to manually copy URLs
They should just call them bins. It fits the sites name and works thematically (a bunch of stuff on a similar topic thrown into a storage bin or whatever). Magazine just feels aggressively old fashioned.
Same. This is just bizarre to me. Paper magazines aren’t as common in the world today as they used to be, but neither are they some ancient thing that has passed out of history, allowing the word to be used for pure metaphorical value. Maybe some people are young enough for it to be so, but certainly not me.
Just call them “clips.” /s Seriously though, the aesthetic of Kbin is its best feature, but the concept behind the threads seems. I dunno. Weird. Lemmy feels janky and basic, like old Reddit. 💗
Pretty cool, but I assume I wouldn’t be able to get my Subscribed RSS feed to work over there? There’s a login that ask for my username and password :/ No chance I’m actually trying that, does that actually work? I’m on SDFs lemmy, is it asking for those credentials? And, if so, who in the world thought that was a good idea in 2023?
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