How would you explain Lemmy/Kbin to a Reddit person or to a social media person?
Trying to "recruit" more folks in Kbin but I think I lack enough information to describe Kbin effectively.
"It's like Reddit but it's in the fediverse world. It's a new thing, gaining speed fast and it has less chances to get corrupted because of the fediverse thingie compared to Reddit (lol)!"
Consider your specific audience you are reaching out to.
Honestly the biggest barrier for entry into the Lemmy content isn’t choosing an instance. You can easily tell someone to sign up for Lemmy.world or kbin.social without going into detail about what that means.
The issue is that most social media users don’t want to spend an hour or two searching for communities and blocking bots. They want a feed that is appealing at first, that they can tweak incrementally as they get more familiar with the service and its content.
With that in mind, what people want is to know what makes the experience helpful to them right now. I think that boils down to two primary concepts: Draw people in to specific communities that are more accessible than their Reddit counterparts, or convince them why Reddit is not a good experience for them
The latter is a tough sell to someone who already is happy with the Reddit experience. And the trouble with the former is there’s currently not a great deal of communities that are clearly better than on Reddit. The few that I would say count are fairly niche interests.
I think the Lemmy and kbin software needs a set of default subscriptions for guests and new users. Something curated by instance admins to provide the best new user experience, while still allowing them to customize it from there.
For what it’s worth, I would expect most social media users not to care about any of the decentralization aspects. Putting too much focus on the “it’s like email” thing is likely to fall on deaf ears at first.
Like Reddit, KBin and Lemmy are 'link aggregators’
This means, in subject driven Communities (sub-reddits), people post links or images or their thoughts and others comment on them
Reddit is software that’s installed in one central location (server). This means it is owned and controlled by one single commercial entity.
Kbin and Lemmy are both software that are installed in multiple locations (servers), owned and controlled by multiple people and can be installed by anyone. This means no one can ever own or control the entirety of Lemmy.
Reddit, KBin and Lemmy can be accessed by users via websites or apps.
Reddit is centralised. If it disappeared tomorrow, it would be completely gone.
KBin and Lemmy are federated. If one instance (server) disappeared tomorrow, all the others would be unaffected and carry on as normal.
All instances of KBin and Lemmy can talk to all other instances of KBin and Lemmy, as long as they are federated.
Rule breaking and/or toxic instances/servers can be defederated by other servers/instances.
Reddit, KBin and Lemmy are all free to use. However, with Reddit you must contend with invasive privacy and advertising. The way to support KBin and Lemmy is to donate to the development team and the server/instance your account is on.
If you’ve got just one app you use, and the admins go all Elon on the place, you either put up with it or you’re out in the cold.
If you have a hundred different apps - you don’t have that problem, but it’s a fragmented mess you can’t possibly keep track of.
But the fediverse gives you the best of both worlds. It’s hundreds of apps, but they each pull in the feed of all the others - and if the admins of any one app turn out to be evil clowns, the other apps can quietly snip them out of the feed, just like making a new groupchat with everyone but Karen in it.
It’s slowly coalescing into a handful of major cliques defined by the kinds of people they don’t want to talk to.
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