EnglishMobster

EnglishMobster, 2 years ago

There is. Lemmy.ml is currently shadowbanning kbin for unknown reasons.

Lemmy.ml is blocking the bots kbin uses for federation. The devs have ignored anyone asking why. It's been weeks and only applies to Lemmy.ml, so it appears to be intentional. They're running slightly different code on their flagship site than what all the other instances use (which makes me wonder what else Lemmy.ml has changed compared to what's publicly available).

EnglishMobster, 2 years ago (edited 2 years ago)

The article does kind of define it, but does a poor job.

An emotionally sticky node is a user who makes other users stay on the site. Examples of this for Reddit would be accounts like poem_for_your_sprog, ShittyWatercolor, Shittymorph, or wil.

There are others, of course, that you may not be able to name - /r/California was mostly kept alive by /u/BlankVerse, who posted 85% of all the articles to that subreddit. You'd never notice unless you paid attention to usernames. Similarly, a small percentage of people made a large percentage of Reddit's OC. Typically you couldn't name them, either, but you'd know if they weren't there because they gave Reddit a soul.

Reddit started off as a bunch of bots reposting links they found, without even a comment section. Eventually real people came and started posting nerd stuff (like programming articles) alongside the bots. Enough of a critical mass was created that a comment section was added, making old Reddit look like what HackerNews or Tildes look like today. The programming and porn were sent to different subsections of the site for the people who don't want to see such things (these became the first subreddits). The default subreddits were slowly created, then anyone could make their own subreddits for their own topics.

Still, it was largely posts to things found elsewhere. People went to Reddit as part of their trip through several other websites. They'd usually gather what they found during that trip and repost it to Reddit. OC wasn't expected; reposts were encouraged. By the early 2010s, a lot of the pictures on Reddit were mainly 4chan reposts. People who had a lot of stuff saved from other sites were the "emotionally sticky nodes" and people would come to Reddit to see stuff that was explicitly gathered from everywhere else - hence why Reddit was the "frontpage of the internet", an aggregate of what people had found elsewhere.

Eventually we started to see OC for the first time. Advice Animals sprung from 4chan memes and really started to go viral across Reddit. Reddit users started making their own native advice animal formats and now Reddit was no longer just "things from elsewhere on the internet" but new content you couldn't see elsewhere. Soon these people making OC became the "emotionally sticky nodes", keeping users on the site.

And, of course, there are other things who were "emotionally sticky" without necessarily posting memes. Reddit became a great place to aggregate news at-a-glance. This is because of the moderation of the news and politics subreddits, ensuring that things posted to their subs were actual articles, post names were real headlines (no editorializing!), and the page wasn't littered with random YouTube videos or self-posts or images or whatever. Good moderation meant that you could go to /r/news or /r/worldnews and trust that you were getting the same effect as looking at the headlines of a newspaper. Similarly, the 2012 election had /r/politics become a great source of information and discussion about the US Presidental Race. These sorts of things made Reddit a useful site and kept people coming back.

Even now, Reddit still has "emotionally sticky" places. They could be individual users like the ones I mentioned above, or they could be entire subreddits that aren't quite captured here on Lemmy/Kbin yet. Neither Lemmy nor Kbin have great mod tools, and a lot of mod teams here are inexperienced and not as aggressive as Reddit mod teams are. You can argue this is a good thing, but aggressive moderation really matters for places like the news communities where legitimacy comes from users avoiding editorializing. This means that these places aren't a good replacement for Reddit (yet) - subreddits where moderation is important are still "emotionally sticky" because nothing can compete with them. (This is why it's important that Lemmy develop good mod teams and good mod tools!)

There are oodles of niche communities that you've never heard of that haven't come over, either - for example, !modeltrains (@modeltrains) and https://lemmy.world/c/nscalemodeltrains are niche communities on Reddit, but neither of their fediverse counterparts have much activity (other than me). People on Reddit thus don't want to leave their niche community because it doesn't have any activity over here, and because there's no activity over here, nobody wants to come over here to start activity - meaning there's no activity over here. That's why it's important to make sure you contribute often to niche communities you care about, even if your content isn't "good" - there needs to be something to lure emotionally sticky nodes here and get people to jump over.

That said, some places absolutely have made the jump successfully (https://lemmy.blahaj.zone/c/196). But for most places there's a while to go before Reddit gets to the point where it can't maintain itself as a site.

EnglishMobster, 2 years ago

I love everyone always saying "Lemmy, what's XYZ?" or whatever not realizing there's a good chunk of people not on Lemmy.

It does get annoying when I see Lemmy-specific questions in my feed, though.

EnglishMobster, 2 years ago (edited 2 years ago)

So I'm on the /r/Disneyland mod team and we decided to move here to @Disneyland / !Disneyland during the blackout. We're still directing users here in the subreddit's sidebar, although the mod team collectively decided to reopen the sub on Reddit after the admins started threatening mods directly.

There were a couple options floated when we were considering the move:

• Make our own instance. Traditional forums like MiceChat have survived for decades; we'd effectively be a fediverse version of MiceChat. The main subject would be Disney, but we'd have Disneyland communities, WDW communities, Marvel communities, Star Wars communities, etc. This was shot down because we didn't have the funding, time, manpower, or legal expertise to host things ourselves at any kind of scale. All us mods have day jobs and we don't want to take on a full-time admin role; other Disney subs likewise didn't seem terribly excited about joining in. Shout-out to /r/startrek for starting https://startrek.website and /r/Android for https://lemdro.id/, but it wasn't in the cards for us.
• Join a Lemmy server. This was before Lemmy.world existed, so our options were limited. We basically had Lemmy.ml, Beehaw.org, or sh.itjust.works. We disagree with the admins of Lemmy.ml on a fundamental level; Beehaw doesn't allow new communities; sh.itjust.works was maybe doable but we didn't want to deal with that URL for a Disney-themed community. Waiting for a new general-purpose instance to appear (what Lemmy.world became) just wasn't in the cards since I wanted it to be open during the blackout.
• Join kbin.social. At the time, there were no other Kbin instances - fedia.io didn't exist yet. But Kbin seemed very flexible (direct Mastodon integration is a plus!), the admin team was just Ernest (but he had a good head on his shoulders), it was my personal fediverse site of choice, and it was growing quickly. At the time we made the call, federation didn't work as expected but it was promised to be fixed (and it has been; we now federate rather broadly).

We've gotten some organic activity on the Disneyland magazine over here on Kbin, which is nice because it shows we don't need to keep the community on life support. The big downside to Kbin (and Lemmy!) is that mod tools basically don't exist; it's going to be tricky without AutoMod long-term. Once Kbin has an API it should be trivial to remake AutoMod for Kbin though, assuming the API has moderation actions.

EnglishMobster, 2 years ago

There's also Century Club (more than 100k karma) and the 10 Year Club (account older than 10 years).

EnglishMobster, 2 years ago (edited 2 years ago)

I was surprised when I got one; it just appeared in my inbox one day. When my account turned 11 I decided to see if /r/11yearclub existed and it did, but I had to message the mods and join manually.

I had to request to join Century Club manually too; I didn't even notice I could do it until I had 200k karma...

EnglishMobster, 2 years ago

Century Club had good vibes. It was generally like the same 5 users posting, though. I'd comment occasionally but I didn't follow it closely.

EnglishMobster, 2 years ago

Digg didn't die all at once. It was a very slow, miserable death.

And even now, Digg still exists, with some users even. As long as the Threadiverse gets better and Reddit gets worse, we'll see continued waves of people leaving.

The real question is whether it'll look like Digg -> Reddit (where most everyone left eventually) or Twitter -> Mastodon (where large groups of people were "too confused" and didn't move).

EnglishMobster, 2 years ago (edited 2 years ago)

Reddit was the same way.

You have /r/gaming. /r/games. /r/truegaming. /r/videogames. /r/videogame. Etc.

Each community was slightly different in subtle ways, but some people were subscribed to multiple (basically identical) communities. Others self-sorted into different communities based on moderation style and community vibes.

Not to mention that your idea of how federation should work kind of ignores moderation and community preferences. Communities hosted on Beehaw are tightly moderated. There may be other communities that want something less strict. How do these two reconcile with one another? What happens if a conversation is removed on one instance but kept around on another?

If local mods only have local power, they can get quickly overwhelmed as you effectively need a mod team on every single instance. Smaller instances wouldn't necessarily have the manpower to have their own dedicated mods for literally everything.

EnglishMobster, 2 years ago

On Lemmy, if nobody is subscribed to a community on your instance, it doesn't appear in that view.

In order for it to appear, someone with an account has to go to the search bar at the top right of the page and type in the URL to the community manually. Then it'll appear after an initial search.

On large instances like Lemmy.world, you can almost guarantee someone has already done this for most popular communities - but newer/smaller communities may not appear because nobody on your instance has searched for them yet.

For smaller instances, there are likely multiple communities missing and you'd have no idea until you went to look for them.

EnglishMobster, 2 years ago

It will in the next update. See https://codeberg.org/Kbin/kbin-core/pulls/317

EnglishMobster, 2 years ago

For Lemmy, if nobody is subscribed to that community on your instance you have to copy the entire URL. E.g. you need to search for https://instance.social/c/sub in order to find !sub.

Once one person on your instance searches for it, then you can find it by searching !sub.

I don't know why Lemmy works like that. Kbin doesn't have the problem; you can find things by searching @sub@instance.social no matter what.

EnglishMobster, 2 years ago

Not necessarily? I guess it depends on what magazines you read.

A lot of the magazines I've read over the years are collections of things submitted by readers. Model Railroader magazine is a bunch of model railroads submitted by people across the US. They'll pick a few to feature, but they're all basically submitted by readership and it's fairly interactive.

Lego Magazine was the same way when I was a kid. While a lot of it was about upcoming Lego products, there was a significant section that featured Lego builds made and submitted by the community.

For newspapers, I'd absolutely agree that it implies an editorial staff and no input from readers. But magazines (to me) have always had a focus on community involvement.

IMO, it translates quite well to the web, and the fact that there's a big ol' "+" button with "add new article" as an option makes it pretty obvious that this isn't just a static read-only place.

My main hangup was "make new post" vs "make.new article". "Make new post" will make a Twitter-style short-form post in the "microblog" side; "make new article" goes as a Reddit-style self-post thread on the threads side. But once I understood that it was pretty straightforward, and I use both pretty regularly (articles for self-posts I'd normally post to Reddit, posts for little one-off thoughts or things I'd otherwise put on Twitter).

Kbin is planned to work with more fediverse stuff at some point as well. It already supports Pixelfed (Instagram) and PeerTube (YouTube). Mobilizon (fediverse event planner) support is on the roadmap, which would let event planning appear natively as well.

So if you ran a magazine based around a TV show, you'd be able to add a Mobilizon event that corresponds to when a new episode comes out. Then that event would serve as a "megathread" for episode discussion once the episode airs. It's a pretty neat idea, since it intuitively reminds people when things are and gives the community a place to discuss.

EnglishMobster, 2 years ago

Kbin doesn't have as much of this because it's simplified quite a bit. It's one reason why I recommend Kbin to newbies, because it gives you a giant "sign up" button immediately.

But to answer your question:

• Instance: a server that hosts everything. You and I are on Kbin.social, which is an instance. Another Kbin instance is fedia.io. Kbin has relatively few instances. Lemmy has oodles (Lemmy.world, Lemmy.ml, sh.itjust.works, etc.). Lemmy actively encourages people to spread out over many instances.
• Magazine/Community: If you're on Kbin, I'd hope you know what a Magazine is. Lemmy calls them Communities. Reddit called them Subreddits. They're all basically the same - buckets for people to make posts about certain topics.

EnglishMobster, 2 years ago

For Lemmy, if nobody has subscribed to a community locally, you need to search https://instance.social/c/whatever to get !whatever@instance.social. Once someone subscribes locally, searching !whatever@instance.social works.

It's pretty unintuitive, especially when Kbin lets you search @whatever@instance.social even if that community isn't on your instance yet.

EnglishMobster, 2 years ago

"All" shows every community/magazine that at least one person on your instance has subscribed to.

The different sort options sort then differently, of course.

EnglishMobster, 2 years ago

Yep, places with more people will have a wider range of communities in their "all" feed.

That said, the barrier to making an account isn't too high. My first account was on Lemmy.ml back in 2020, shortly after Lemmy was created (I never stuck around and left pretty quickly).

Last month I realized I don't trust Lemmy.ml, so I joined Beehaw.org.

Then I thought Beehaw.org was a little overzealous at times, so I came here to Kbin.social.

I've largely stuck to Kbin because I really like how it looks and feels, but I did make accounts on Lemmy.world, fedia.io, and sh.itjust.works as backups in case Kbin goes down.

EnglishMobster, 2 years ago

BaconReader was my first Reddit app, back when I had a Windows Phone. It was basically the only good way to browse Reddit on Windows Phone.

I haven't used it in many years, but I am sad to see it go.