EnglishMobster

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.