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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
In addition to the learning curve and the minor bugginess of Lemmy and Kbin, I feel like there may be some cognitive dissonance going on for users that are on the fence on whether they want to switch. To resolve the dissonance, one could either change their behavior (switch to Lemmy or kbin) or change their cognition (rationalize why they do not want to switch; for example by thinking that Lemmy or Kbin is too hard to use). Changing behavior can be hard especially if it is a habit built over a long period of time, so coming up with excuses for why one doesn't want to switch would be the easier thing to do.
I agree, and that is part of the cognitive dissonance between enjoying reddit for what it provided and wanting to switch to an alternative. However, if one is searching for a reddit alternative and will not switch to anything exactly like it, why should one even be looking for an alternative?
This is so sad for me. RIF was the first app for mobile for me. I ended up going with Apollo eventually but why did either of these awesome apps have to die? I can't believe they are willing to throw away everything they promised for money. I won't stand for corporate greed. I used Reddit to fight against that behavior and they literally became the exact thing I hate the most.
I don't even remember buying premium for it it was so long ago and its been my go fo app forever. I miss it but I just have to remember spez killed it not the devs.
You’re all good! I’m also an Ultra + Pro user and there’s no refund needed. Apple treats that kind of transaction as a one time payment. It’s only those who subscribe for a set amount of time (month or year) that are offered refunds.
Reddit has already showed how much it cares about its users. We've tried going private, we've tried going restricted, we've tried going NSFW, we've tried spamming John Oliver posts, we've tried asking nicely in open letters, and Reddit has consistently given its community the middle finger in every single situation. And now that we've seen the admins change rules, remove mods, ban users, and break privacy laws, the plan is to just do the exact same thing they did before in the hopes that it'll work this time?
If a blackout on the platform was going to get Reddit to change its mind, that would've happened already. The time to induce change was two weeks ago, when the protests had lots of momentum. But it didn't work, and trying to make another stand now is going to be even less effective.
I still think that the best move is to leave Reddit for alternatives like /kbin, Lemmy, and Squabbles. Thankfully, some of the comments on the /r/ModCoord announcement are also saying this. Instead of desperately trying to cling to a platform that doesn't care about you, go somewhere else.
Two reasons the ongoing Reddit protests are important:
the protests keep the pressure on reddit and can lead to ongoing news coverage (which also keeps the pressure on reddit) . Otherwise, reddit will be able to spin the narrative "see? we told you it would just blow over and it did"
kbin, Lemmy, and other alternatives aren't yet at the point where they're ready for millions of redditors. For example, the modCoord post makes the important point that a lot of reddit's moderation functionality isn't accessible ... but almost none of this functionality even exists yet on kbin and Lemmy. So most people aren't going to leave yet.
Don't get me wrong, leaving now is also a good option if you can find what you want elsewhere! But not everybody's there yet.
I think a LOT of folks overlook point 2. Kbin.social was a halting mess for a few days during the Blackout, because they had to enable Cloudflare to keep the servers from imploding on themselves. There still aren’t that many kbin instances yet, and more instances is how you handle large influxes. The platform needs time to stabilize before large groups of Redditors come over.
To be fair, if it wasnt for the blackout it wouldnt have given me the motivation to finally move on to kbin. Im sure this will push others to do the same. If all it takes is to slowly dwindle the reddit user by doing the same thing then im all for it.
Of course, i do see why there shouod be more creative protests to switch things up and see what else works.
To be fair, if it wasnt for the blackout it wouldnt have given me the motivation to finally move on to kbin.
Absolutely same here. Because I use Mastodon a lot, I heard about kbin when it first came out, and poked over to look at it, but decided it was a bit too empty and rough around the edges, and stuck with Reddit. Then came the Blackout, and I went ahead and made an account.
As Reddit gets more enshittified and kbin and lemmy get more polished and active, we’ll start seeing a bigger shift.
At this point any reddit protests need to sort focus on tarnishing the platforms reputation further. They've made it clear they won't course correct.
Top of mind, spamming the subs with content that looks bad for them to remove. The ideal would be dirt on spez (e.g comments he made on /r/jailbait), but it could even be something more reserved like a charity link or "why I'm leaving" memes.
July 1 is a good excuse to get another news cycle out of this, and warn potential investors skeptical of the future of the company.
Moving a community is hard, so at least some of those mods are likely thinking that moving would destroy the community they worked so hard to manage. Its not like Reddit is going to respect a request to close, so they would end up competing with themselves when Reddit replaces them with compliant mods.
I'm not saying they shouldn't move (they should) but it's definitely a hard road to re-establish elsewhere. Some communities will thrive, but others, well, its possible that their users will just stay put.
I agree: migrating a community is really challenging. I'm a subreddit moderator myself, and when we were initially discussing this stuff, there was a lot of doubt because of how daunting the task is. Mods from other subs see the challenges as reason to not even try. However, I think it's important that people at least make the attempt given the current state of Reddit.
Something that I think people should keep in mind is that this stuff is gradual and doesn't have to happen all at once, especially since the alternatives aren't fully polished yet. Even just establishing a small, active community outside of Reddit (like people have been doing with all these fediverse communities) is a big win.
Some of the best things we can do right now are
providing feedback and suggestions for alternatives
making sure alternatives are approachable (/m/quickstart is great)
simply being active and providing stuff to do here
some of those mods are likely thinking that moving would destroy the community they worked so hard to manage
they aren't wrong. It will massively deflate their community. That's an ineivtability of how lurkers on the internet work. They aren't there for community, they are there for easy passive browsing.
What can we do to help them transition?
"we" as in the common person? It won't be a fast track. There will need to be a steady supply of content for a certain topic, and a stream of discussion. Unfortunately the best way to help as a single person is to basically become that sweaty forever online person. The first step to the Network Effect is to generate enough content to engage with.
If "we" have developers or artists that can be one bigger step to help out. contribute to making apps and extensions to either bridge the gap or overcome current shortcomings of these federated instances. Even amongst techy communities there is a lot of confusion to how instances work. So some app to make it dead simple to browse and comment (while later allowing options for power users) is key. Sync committing to working with Lemmy/KBin is definietly a bit help.
Most of the rest is up to the instance admins. SEO, improving features, getting good moderatiors, etc. None of that is in out control, we can only give feedback
The business side of things will churn along divorced from the content which will become ever more generic and culturally irrelevant. The users who stay on Reddit will be of the unadventurous variety, not inclined to make waves or analyze their habits.
goood!
Reddit behaved in such a horrible way, that I feel like API pricing was the least of the bad...
One could argue about their fairness and aim to destroy 3rd party apps, and I had already closed my accounts at that very step.
But the way they treated mods, forced subs to open and behaved like pure evil assholes, I really see how companies or more "official" subreddits with a touch of interest in their users, would feel the desire to leave and close bridges
The underhanded, lying, victim blaming actions from reddit were so much worse than the shutdown on its own. If reddit had been more honest about their intentions of shutting down 3PA from the beginning, 3PA users still wouldn't have been thrilled, but we wouldn't be seeing this reddit meltdown.
I don't even care about the API prices and I used to use the official Reddit mobile app before migrating.
I've been looking for an open source Reddit like platform since the Twitter drama started and people started migrating to Mastodon, but there wasn't much content on them, until now, so I jumped on the band wagon.
I felt this. I just honestly needed another option and so star this seems to be it. I don’t understand the difference between kbin and lemmy. I’m hoping apps just end up supporting both platforms/instances.
I feel the same way.
As an Apollo user, I didn’t immediately leave since I wanted to see if some agreement would be done.
But the way they treated the devs is insulting, I work on IT and know a bit of how complex and time consuming this is; doing all this work just to be considered a parasite to be cut, and seeing how horrible the AMA was; really showed Reddit’s true colors.
Currently liking this federated initiative, big potential and less company ruining agenda. Very comfy here.
If Apollo works things out with reddit, I'd be willing to consider keeping reddit as a secondary source of content. But I think that bridge has been burnt so bad that that is highly unlikely
Artemis, an app in development for kbin, is also heavily inspired by Apollo (hence the name also being a Greek god starting with A and known for their skills with the bow)
I didn’t even use Apollo but the defining moment for me was when spez lied about his interactions with the dev. That shit is foul and I just do not want to associate with that.
Very much my experience. I used Relay for Reddit rather than Apollo (hadn't even heard of Apollo at the time), then learned about the entire debacle because that lie appeared in /r/quityourbullshit and that sent me to the AMA the lie was made in.
I went from not even knowing about any changes coming to Reddit to deciding not to give Reddit any more traffic until they back off and apologize in less than an hour. The blackout hadn't started yet.
By the time the blackout had started, I was already on both kbin and beehaw (well, I had applied to beehaw, approval might have been slightly after the blackout started) and the chances of getting me to ever use Reddit being above zero were already dependent on changes that no-one in Reddit leadership would ever accept, let alone come up with on their own.
Didn't even think about it until now, but a company could start their own lemmy service. Wonder if that's a thing already or will become a thing. The only issue for them is would other instances federated with them, if I'm correct? Still new and learning.
Ad Revenue. Someone paying for Reddit Premium gets an ad free experience which is fine but someone who gets gifted Gold also gets an ad free experience. They need as many people as possible to see ads so free loaders have to go…which means so do the coins.
I fully expect that within a year Reddit will start doing what many streaming services are where the lowest tier is free but ad supported, then there’s a paid “limited ad” tier, followed by an even more expensive “No Ads” tier. The current Reddit Premium program will transition to that mid-tier category and they’ll add “Reddit Ultimate” or some BS as the new Ad Free option. It’ll probably cost $10 a month too.
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