Working Together to Improve /Kbin's Ease of Use for New Users

Dear not-so-techy KBeans ;)

While @ernest and the other instance admins are working on infrastructure, let's work together to improve the getting-started experience of users new to Kbin.

Share any graphics, FAQs, guides, or other valuable resources you've discovered (don't forget to give credit!) or created by posting them in this thread. Remember, not everyone's perfect, so if something in a resource isn't exactly correct, just point that out in your comment! A little clarification goes a long way.

These can later be congregated into a dedicated magazine for new users to reference (was thinking /m/GettingStarted? Lmk).

I'll start it off:

EDIT: @gettingstarted (mobile link) is up! Continue to use this thread for questions and content. Our goal is creating structured guides for users to follow over at @gettingstarted, but we need content to do that.

E: First, very sloppy intro guide is up here.

Eggyhead,
Eggyhead avatar

Perhaps an easy way to describe the federation to someone is that, rather than just one reddit with lots of subreddits, it's a bunch of reddits with lots of their own subreddits. You only have to join one of the reddits because from there you can subscribe to any subreddit you want across the whole spectrum the reddits. If you were subscribed to r/gaming before, now you can subscribe to r/gaming@reddit1, r/gaming@reddit2, r/gaming@reddit4, etc (you might want to skip r/gaming@reddit3 cause they're just a bit too authoritarian for you or something). And if your chosen Reddit's moderator ends up being a u/spez about everything and you don't want to support that site anymore, you have the freedom to just skip out to a different reddit without losing access to subs.

Czorio,

One thing that’s not quite clear to me is whether these individual gaming “subreddits” would effectively work as one to the subscribers or not.

I.e.: YeeAyy, the large game publisher, announces a new hotly anticipated instalment in a popular series, each /r/gaming@redditx.com would probably have a post about it. Would I, as a subscriber to each, see X amount of duplicate posts?

Eggyhead,
Eggyhead avatar

My understanding, and I'm still a complete noob at this as well, is that you'd end up with several posts about the same topic coming from different Reddits in your subs feed.

Since the federation is still burgeoning and many communities are so young, I've yet to actually see this happen, but I suspect when it gets to a point where we're seeing lots of duplicates, we might see a solution crop up as well. Perhaps people might converge on singular reddit communities for specific types of news, or maybe we'll see a smart feature that will group all posts with a specific link into a single, super-post. I saw someone mention an idea of using tags to do something like that, but I'm not in charge and I have no idea what's going to happen.

Pbody,

My recommendation over on Lemmy was a multireddit type of solution. It can be simply user customization so you can group together whatever you want but obviously this would take place once kbin can federate with lemmy etc.

20k,

Ideally in my opinion, comments from federating instances with mutually participating subreddits would also be federated together when duplicates are posted. Deduplication would operate on a same-link-and-roughly-the-same-time basis, or possibly as an option when submitting a post (hi! this has also been posted on the following feddits: check here merge comments)

kalipike,

You and @Pbody's points here make a lot of sense to me and I like the thought. I don't know a ton about the infrastructure and back end, but this sounds like it would potentially be a pretty good way to handle it.

kurgal,

Isn’t this the same if you do it on Reddit? I’m already seeing multiple duplicated posts on Reddit

Midgitsu,

Now it seems the problem is compounded because we're gonna have reposts across different related communities which will then be duplicated onto every instance/server. I'm also wondering how this will affect SEO and long term documenting of the internet. When I do a Google search for something, what will it return?

I'll give it to Reddit, nearly anytime I needed to search on how to do or fix something, those first 2 or 3 Reddit links almost always solved my problem or told me what I needed to know. Not sure how relevant or diverse the returned searches will be with kbin's system.

augere,

I don't think it will be a giant unmitigated disaster, though. If the userbase is spread among the different instances there likely won't be much more duplication than there were on the /r/. Especially if all users are seeing what we see. There aren't more users, they're just spread among the instances. Unless the same people are posting the same content multiple times, it will likely all average out to roughly what we're used to.

lunar2m7,
lunar2m7 avatar

Yes, you would, although each post may have unique discussion. I think it's about finding a balance between having quality discussion while not clogging up your feed.

Ashyr,

Is there any way like-minded communities could voluntarily have all their discussions automatically merged for identical links submitted within a 12-hour range or something?

That way the community isn’t fragmented with lots of very similar discussions occurring in repeated posts in the feed.

Oteron,
Oteron avatar

Beautifully explained! Thank you!

kernspalt,

out of all the explanations so far, this one was the most intuitive for me. thanks, mate :)

mightysashiman,
mightysashiman avatar

Unfortunately, this decentralisation of basically what used to be 1 thematic sub into multiple clones "because it's technically possible" is just not what most users are looking for. That is why Reddit was ONE website with such a large amount of knowledge. The human brain likes to centralise stuff in one place. That is why when we put away stuff and clean our own homes, we tend to put all the forks together, all the knives together, all the glasses together... Centralisation is a way to break down complexity of what would otherwise be chaos, by factorizing it.
If you've got 50 different "gaming" instances instead of one, basically the very "gaming" word becomes irrelevant, and users will have to memorise the names of the 50 different hosting instances instead.

Also, on a pure tecnical standpoint, the "federation" aspect is currently simply not true: I get "The magazine from the federated server may be incomplete. Browse more on the original instance." warning message when I try to access most magazines that are not hosted on kbin.social.

Glamposhim,

To use that example, I keep saying it but say gaming@reddit1, gaming@reddit2, gaming@reddit3 exists. If i'm on reddit4 and go on gaming there, to make this federation work I need the ability to see all the gamings across the fediverse.

Otherwise, I'll have to go on each "reddits" to see it. So yes, it is possible to get one thematic sub but it's not done yet

gunnervi,
gunnervi avatar

To be fair though, you don't need to see all the gaming "subreddits". That's just the fomo talking. I mean even back on Reddit, I was on r/games but not r/gaming, and certainly not part of all the general gaming groups across all social media

I think inevitably we'll see a couple of servers become the most prominent ones in a given community, and that's what people will flock to because of network effects. Or, smaller communities may hold on by cultivating their own identity, the way forums did

mightysashiman,
mightysashiman avatar

"games" may be a bad example for my case. For more specific thematics (I personally follow SonyHeadphones, SwitchPirates and VitaHacks for instance), the more central information is, the best chance people don't miss out on stuff and stay up to date, precisely, calling it "FOMO" is exactly that. on the other hand "that's just the fomo talking" implies it's a bad thing. That is up to each user to decide.

Aynway, the current state of the "federation" paradigm is imho pretty limited. It's even less curatable than RSS was back in the days. At the very least there should be a user defined way to create personal "portfolios" of arbitrary magazines. That would be the easiest way to somewhat allow users to consolidate clones across various instances.

QuantumFilament,

Yes, but the problem is that it becomes much harder to discover which ones are the best. It's not just looking for a needle in a haystack, but looking for one needle in many haystacks that are also in many barns that are also in many farms.

sourworm,

Also, on a pure tecnical standpoint, the "federation" aspect is currently simply not true: I get "The magazine from the federated server may be incomplete. Browse more on the original instance." warning message when I try to access most magazines that are not hosted on kbin.social.

Aside from the currently known issues with the kbin.social server messing federation up for it, my understanding of that message is that it is indeed how the federation between instances works for all magazines/communites/etc. A magazine from another instance doesn't exist here until the first person from here searches for it, at which point just the latest 20 (?) threads are pulled in initially. Once the first person from here subscribes to that magazine then all new threads, comments, etc from that point forward will be pushed here automatically as well. So older threads may not show up hence the message about it being incomplete.

sik0fewl,

I think what will happen - assuming this ever really takes off and given enough people and enough time - is that 1-2 communities will take off and become the de facto "gaming" communities, for example.

I don't think anyone is interested in subscribing to 50 gaming communities - or even 5 for that matter.

digitalrefugee,

Why if i go to my subs the site still shows magazines that I'm not subscribed for?

That's the thing that is very annoying, I can browse the site fairly easy, but every page is "r/all" instead of my curated set of magazines.

SirMorosis,

I'm having the same problem

lunar2m7,
lunar2m7 avatar

How are you getting to your subscribed feed? It should bring you to https://kbin.social/sub.

digitalrefugee, (edited )

Yeah,that way, but it shows me a lot of magazines I'm not suscribed at

It's confusing because the button and the link both say "subs" but it still throws me things like m/boardgames that I'm not subbed at.

EarlGrey07,

Is there a way to save a thread or comment so I can access them later?

Nougat,

Here's what I know on Day Two:

https://userstyles.world/style/10288/kbin-it

That resolves the problem of "The comment box is at the very bottom of all the comments," along with some other things. I just installed it, so it may resolve other things I am not aware of.

Remaining things I would like to modify:

  • Comment preview

I like being able to see what my comment will look like posted as I am typing it, so I don't need to circle back and edit syntax a bunch of times before posting.

  • Clicking a post takes me to the top of the comments on that post, and not to the top of the post itself, so I need to scroll up to read the post I clicked on before I read the comments.

Maybe I'm clicking the wrong thing here?

  • Comment threads are not collapsible.

If a particular thread of comments and replies goes off in a direction I'm not interested in, I would prefer to just collapse it in order to read the next top level comment, instead of having to scroll through the whole sub-thread.

  • No infinite scroll for comments.

Currently, there's a "next page" style set of links at the bottom of the first page of comments. I can't be arsed to do that; return my doom scrolling.

These are all relatively minor things, and I expect the interface to mature and become more adjustable, whether that be through the native site or through stylesheets like the one I linked to way above. I can be patient.

Lilkev,
Lilkev avatar

Is there an equivalent to /r/all and if so how do I access it?

EDIT: Maybe just the home screen sorted by "hot" is the equivalent?

MV,
MV avatar

Thanks for sharing !

b00m,
b00m avatar

Don't tell people "it's easy"
https://privacy.thenexus.today/kbin-lemmy-fediverse-learnings-from-mastodon/

mxh,

I’ll ask an UI related question then! How do I navigate from this post, back to my “frontpage”? Clicking the logo in the top left doesn’t do anything, so I’m currently manually removing the last part of the url to get back to https://kbin.social.

lunar2m7,
lunar2m7 avatar

I assume you're on mobile? When you click the logo, a menu should open, and there's a button in the menu with a home icon.

SirMorosis,

On mobile, I hit the logo/dots in the top left, then there is a home button on the right.

Shortcake,
Shortcake avatar

There is a three dot/line menu at the top that says subscribed, favorites, all. Pick subscribed to see a feed of threads from all subs. Or all to see everything from kbin (eventually federated instances will be there too).

In your settings you can select what hitting the kbin logo does, it can drop you at yours subs or all feed or some other things

digitalrefugee,

It should open or show some navigation window, there is a home icon at the right side of it.

20k,

Hello! I'm brand new to kbin, how do I subscribe to eg something on lemmy? Or fedia.io? And ideally have it pop up on my kbin.social page so I don't have to sign up to and visit like 8 different instances

zzmthesurand,
zzmthesurand avatar

You have to search for the lemmy/fedia community on kbin.social's website, it subscribe to it using the kbin.social website. That way that sub will appear in your subscribed feed. However kbin's federation with other instances is kinda broken right now because of cloudflare, but it'll be fixed soon.

Opticon,

So I can't find stuff outside kbin unless I already know what to look for?

Timwi,
Timwi avatar

At the moment, yes, but when the technical issues with federation subside, kbin.social will show plenty of posts from other kbins.

lunar2m7,
lunar2m7 avatar

Yes, but that's where tools like https://fedi.directory/ come in, as well as threads like the one Lazycog posted.

Eggyhead,
Eggyhead avatar

I think if you tap/click the "magazines" button in the top right, you'll find some Lemmy communities to subscribe to from there. That's good for browsing, but search is probably best if you already know the specific community you want to join.

20k,

How are magazines generated in that list across different federated instances, is it just purely the underlying user counts regardless of which instance the content is associated with?

Eggyhead,
Eggyhead avatar

I actually don't know how it works, and I wish there were better sorting functions. I just spent some time in there yesterday scrolling and subbing to things that interested me, and noticed several communities with @lemmy.lm and others tagged to them.

lunar2m7, (edited )
lunar2m7 avatar

You'd search their address in the search function, so if you wanted to follow the fedia worldnews magazine, you'd search "<at>worldnews<at>fedia.io" replacing <at> with @ and it'd pop up. BUT, kbin.social is currently not federating with other instances, so this doesn't really work right now, though it will soon once things are more stable. I suggest playing around with this on another instance or app like mastodon!

20k,

I'm mainly just curious in the long term - thank you for explaining, if I were to have to make a separate account per-instance or mess around too much to subscribe to other instances It'd be too annoying, but sounds straightforward enough. My ideal experience of this is that kbin.social is more of a meta aggregator so I can just treat it somewhat like subreddits have an extra level of granularity

Lazycog,
Lazycog avatar

I put up a thread on AskKbin to find all the new interesting magazine (communities) and think It would be a nice addition:

https://kbin.social/m/AskKbin/t/13198

Found a lot of cool new (and migrated from reddit) communities to join!

kurgal,

Thank you so much for this. It’s really helpful. I’ve added my list of magazines that I run and hope that you can check it out

Lazycog,
Lazycog avatar

No, thank YOU for creating these communities! You are one of the heroes we need to get communities together! Will definitely subscribe and checkout to microsoft and reactjs!

CatBookCat,
CatBookCat avatar

wait can we be called kbeans? that is so cute

also ok with kbees

LazaroFilm,
LazaroFilm avatar

I like kbiners like “karabiners”.

Eggyhead,
Eggyhead avatar

Karabiners is smart in that they can link and unlink to each other easily.

Eggyhead,
Eggyhead avatar

Beanies!

GiantOutBack,

kbin chickens

sgtlighttree,

Anything that doesn't exceed two syllables gets a vote from me

Binette,

I prefer kbinetters

For no particular reason...

CatBookCat,
CatBookCat avatar

you into kubernetes?

FixedFun,
FixedFun avatar

kbin = Kool B[ea]n?

Haus,
Haus avatar

I like beans much better than some of the monstrosities that have been suggested. ;)

eatmoregreenfood,
eatmoregreenfood avatar

I'd say definitely go ahead and make m/gettingstarted or whatever you name it and edit this post. Centralized location for this information would be convenient

lunar2m7,
lunar2m7 avatar

Just did 😁 Thanks!

eatmoregreenfood,
eatmoregreenfood avatar

Link didn't work. Not sure how to quick link to zines. Use this
https://kbin.social/m/gettingstarted

lunar2m7,
lunar2m7 avatar

Hmm, strange. It works on desktop, just not mobile. Hope that gets fixed soon.

artillect,
artillect avatar

@gettingstarted (or @gettingstarted@kbin.social if it's on another instance) should do the trick, like this @gettingstarted

Minion3665,
Minion3665 avatar

That's also failing for me on mobile (it's trying to go to a user page not a magazine I think)

LollerCorleone,
LollerCorleone avatar

@gettingstarted

@gettingstarted works

sab,
sab avatar

The difference between links to user pages and to magazines remains one of the great unresolved mysteries of kbin in my book. Lemmy solves it with using a ! instead of @ for their version of magazines, making the link !gettingstarted . Still curious how it is going to be solved (or is solved?) here.

cjerrington,
cjerrington avatar

I like this idea, just has no threads yet and looks empty so might deter new users from understanding where to start.

lunar2m7,
lunar2m7 avatar

I'm working on a post right now that should cover the basics, should be finished soon. Afterwards, we can start filling in the gaps :)

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