For example, some of the complaints that people had about Mastodon early on were just odd to me. They made such a big deal out of "you have to pick a server, no one understands that" or nitpicking UI interfaces between Mastodon and twt. They didn't have logical arguments IMHO it was them just not being happy about change and not being honest about that.
Saying "I don't want to deal with different servers within a single website" is illogical? Seems entirely logical to me. Anyone used to Reddit is going to be turned off to the whole messy fediverse thing. Me included. Legitimately, it evokes feelings of the dead on arrival Metaverse.
People want simplicity. We're decades past the days of BBS boards.
It’s not a single website. And what’s with all the hate I see around here about BBS boards? BBS boards were great. I just want someone to loop me in about the hate. I just think with the fediverse we’re seeing a rise of a model that brings the best things about BBS boards to more modern web technologies
It took me a little while to figure out reddit. After migrating from reddit I actually found it easier to pickup this time around. I am sure some people might have some trouble but as long as we make this place welcoming and helpful for new users asking questions people will want to migrate.
This is correct. I'm also excitedly watching Sync for Lemmy as Lemmy and Kbin are pretty neat so far and will only get better. I have been finding myself using all of the above.
Although @ljdawson and I have been vicious blood rivals in the past in the Reddit third-party Android apps sphere, we've been interacting more lately and see eye-to-eye on a lot of things. Great person and great developer.
I don’t think that really justifies a lot of the comments I’m seeing in Reddit alternatives threads that it’s hard to figure out.
Haven't been back there and didn't read the comments...
But I think I can understand to a degree:
Too many choices: Picking an instance can be confusing for folks that are used to only having to remember 1 name. I personally think this is a bit like people trying Linux for the first time and getting confused by all the choices available. Basically, it's what some people call "analysis paralysis" but add to that the fact that you'll get 12 different recommendations from every 10 people you all (e.g. there's no clear consensus on the "best" one bc "best" means something different to each person). I think one list I saw on GitHub literally had over 200 instances... For non-techies, I could see that being a bit confusing
UI differences: some things like making a post on kbin are a bit different (IMO not bad but still different enough that I could see some folks getting confused). Doing searches on lemmy for specific topics (not finding communities but searching for something in a community) is done from a different area on lemmy than on Reddit and IMO is kind of a pain in the ass currently. And on kbin, frankly, I'm not even sure we have that feature at all.
Missing features: haven't tried mobile apps (which could again be another point of confusion) but for desktop at least, AFAIK we don't have anything comparable to RES yet. There's no analog to multireddits. And we don't have anything similar to reddit's Saved feature yet. All valid complaints in my opinion. And someone used to any or all of those, might spend a lot of time looking bc they just don't know if it's hidden or does not exist. So, yeah, I could see so confusion there too.
I think there are a lot of advantages they're probably missing too. I like that kbin/lemmy we can choose whatever fucking avatar we want instead of being limited to customizing our snoz or wtf Reddit calls their mascot thing. I saw one guy mentioning how there's no karma bullshit to deal with for new accounts and absolutely agree with that sentiment.
tealdeer; meh, I like the fediverse and it's not hard for me but I'm not shitting on people who don't get it. If they want help, would probably help but not going to push it on people either. It is what it is and that's good enough for me
I like that kbin/lemmy we can choose whatever fucking avatar we want instead of being limited to customizing our snoz or wtf Reddit calls their mascot thing.
I like that kbin/lemmy we can choose whatever fucking avatar we want instead of being limited to customizing our snoz or wtf Reddit calls their mascot thing.
You can still do that on new reddit. When looking at your own profile while logged in, there's a little camera with a plus in the corner of your current avatar/placeholder. (There's also a separate icon further to the right for uploading a banner image.)
Edit: Dang, I didn't expect that image to look so big, it's only 600x300
They are saying it’s hard to figure out as it’s hard to figure out. It, as you say, has a learning curve that isn’t really present in Reddit, Twitter, Facebook, Tiktok etc.
Choosing an instance seems important. Many of the large instances are overtly communist, quietly communist, piracy, porn, nsfw focused or a safe space for lgbtq+ people. Instances are changing hands and de federating each other. There doesn’t seem to be much in the way of GDPR type agreements about user data. If a server vanishes with all your data, can you legally retrieve it? Are they obligated to delete data on request? who is they?
Choosing communities is complicated. There is massive duplication of communities across instances most of which have have very little content or members.
The apps are all alpha quality from what I know. curious about accessibility options too, r/blind was hit hard.
Whilst I was trying to get a grip on how Lemmy & kbin interact, Lemmy seems to have blocked kbin access.
I think I could sell Lemmy to the average linux user but it appears I don’t have to as most of them are here anyway. It’s the other 99% of the user base that’s the issue.
Honestly I wouldn’t even bother trying to convince my meat space techy friends at the moment never mind a non-techy community with a few hundred thousand iphone and windows users.
Whilst I was trying to get a grip on how Lemmy & kbin interact, Lemmy seems to have blocked kbin access.
That was lemmy.ml, not all of Lemmy. Lemmy.ml is an important instance -- one of the larger Lemmy instances, and it is run by the Lemmy devs -- but it's still but one instance among many.
I feel like certain users are echoing others in terms of the “oh it’s too hard/complicated” - I don’t know, imo not really just sign up, subscribe to your mags of interest which will pull across the fediverse and engage (up/down/comment) as much as you like lol… really not that hard but I guess change is hard for people (but then it’s not really much a seismic change? I don’t know - I guess I like trying new things).
The only real issue I have is that searching for communities I know exist on other instances often fails, and opening them in their home instances doesn't offer a subscribe button to my host instance.
With you on that one. Some small youtuber I have followed for years setup over on lemmy.world. I know it exists, but searching on kbin, no matter what I try, doesn't yield it to me. Unless it hits the frontpage or I am accidentally looking at the new feed the same moment the guy posts there, I won't really have a way to subscribe. Also don't really want to wrangle multiple accounts.
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.
Declined the refund and picked up some shirts and pins from his merch store. $250k is a lot of income to lose out on, so hopefully any bit helps! Christian deserved it for all the work he’s put into Apollo the last decade. At least his legacy can live on through the influence he’s obviously had over the design of the Lemmy iOS apps.
Thanks for the heads up about the merch store! Sadly most of the pins were out of stock but I picked one of the remaining ones up. I wasn't an Apollo user, I used reddit is fun, but this seems like an appropriate memento to have, and I'm glad to support Christian.
As someone who designs software you are vastly overestimating users, they wake up with their shoes tied together and spill hot coffee on their lap before they even get to the website.
Having "add new post" in the header on kbin it's definitely something that will trip up people coming from Reddit. You need to add a new "article" which isn't very intuitive
Microblogs are like tweets. I think posts from people you follow on Mastodon and similar federated microblogging platforms should appear there. I wish there was the option to merge the microblog and magazine feed. I don't think having them separated is necessary on a platform like this.
It's for Mastodon compatibility. Articles are like Reddit posts and microblogs are like tweets. You can post either from Kbin. Your articles will show up as community posts on Lemmy, and your microblogs will show up as toots on Mastodon.
It makes no sense to me that there are separate forums for the same topic that have the same names other than "@instance". IMO there should be a single place that is /politics which has the same posts and comments regardless of which instance you're logged into. If these instances are "federated" with each other then they should act like a single shared space. Or at least that's how it seems like it should work to me.
Hell no, I do not want this to happen because then you have lemmy tankies and exploding-head fascists all dog piling into normal discussions, saying preposterously stupid shit to spoil what you read as you scroll through the comments.
I'm not sure how federation does anything to prevent that from happening, though. They can still do that on your instance, from their instance.
At most, I suppose an instance could defederate from a troublesome instance that's doing this, but the more that happens, the more fragmented the Fediverse becomes, and it starts to defeat the purpose of federation in the first place.
Then as a user you would be free to click to filter out comments from lemmy, and the top mod of /politics could choose to "defederate" from lemmy for that forum, and users at lemmie would be free to create /politics_tankies or whatever.
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.
Well, instances are all different, independent websites. As an admin, if I can't name a community whatever I want on my own website, I'm probably not participating in this ecosystem.
Plus, 1000 times more posts get posted to r/bigsub than you or anyone ever reads, and 10,000 times as many comments. It creates an environment where no one is actually discussing anything, and are just jockeying for attention.
You won't actually miss anything except for big vanity numbers by just choosing the community you like best for a topic and just... Ignoring the others.
KBin is actually the best reddit alternative I've seen in along time. The truth is though that reddit has a 15 year head start and giant conglomerate corperate backing. Even though federated sites like this are getting better and better all the time the user base is still small when you compare it to the internet monster that is reddit. This site still has along way to go in terms of users, content, and overall polish and ease of use. I look forward to the day when I site like this can scare the likes of reddit, but sadley I don't feel that today is that day. This is coming from a place of support for the fediverse btw.
RedditMigration
Oldest
This magazine is from a federated server and may be incomplete. Browse more on the original instance.