this post was submitted on 21 Jun 2023
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Reddit Migration

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### About Community Tracking and helping #redditmigration to Kbin and the Fediverse. Say hello to the decentralized and open future. To see latest reeddit blackout info, see here: https://reddark.untone.uk/

founded 1 year ago
 

Most people aren't even thinking of moving to reddit alternatives. Users have a lot of power in this situation. Just move your community to Lemmy or Kbin. It's not that hard.

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[–] [email protected] 132 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (10 children)

We're early adopters. Early adopters have a higher tolerance for (and ability to deal with) things like bugs, confusing UI, uncertainty, and probably continual change for the short term.

But hey, someone's gotta do it. The end result of this will be an established community and a more polished product. Over time, more and more people will show up as this place gets better and better, and Reddit continues to worsen. (Everyone knows that old.reddit is going away, it's just a matter of when.)

[–] [email protected] 40 points 1 year ago (5 children)

We're early adopters. Early adopters have a higher tolerance for (and ability to deal with) things like bugs, confusing UI, uncertainty, and probably continual change for the short term.

Not to mention, a lack of content. While it's populating nicely it's still not like Reddit, especially for niche subjects. You definitely have to endure a lot of shouting in the wind situations while this builds up.

[–] [email protected] 19 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Yeah, I've certainly found myself subscribing to any and every magazine that looks even remotely like it could be interesting. Getting inundated isn't a problem around these parts just yet. But the volume definitely has gone up recently.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago (3 children)

I still am struggling with how to sub to a magazine. Poor guy running this needs a bit of help with ui so stupid people like myself can enjoy it

[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 year ago (3 children)

It's genuinely hard and needs to be improved. Subscribing to a magazine that someone else on kbin has subscribed to already isn't too bad. Go to the magazine (eg, click what looks like the subreddit name in the post) and scroll alllll the way down and there'll be a subscribe button.

But if nobody has subscribed yet in the instance, it's hilariously hard. You have to search in the general search (not the magazine search) for specifically "[email protected]" and you should see a subscribe button then. You will not content in that magazine that existed before you subscribed. If that sounds terrible, it's because it is. Thankfully, most of the time, you won't be the first to subscribe to a magazine and thus can just use the magazine search or browse the front page to see posts.

PS: the subscribe option is also as the bottom of each thread. So you can alternatively just open a thread in the magazine instead of the magazine itself.

PPS: I've mentioned the subscribe button being at the bottom because that's the placement on mobile and I think many of us are on mobile. On desktop, it's in the sidebar.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

thanks for the PPS as im on a laptop. I thought you were being dramatic at first as I was like. oh its not that far down. One scroll with my low rez screen. Im a smartphone luddite myself.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

That's the one thing that bugs me, federation should be automated, why does it need for someone to try to pull a community first before that starts? It should be like Usenet or DNS and self-propagate.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

It's probably a resource management issue. No need to sync with servers that nobody is reading yet, it just wastes bandwidth and CPU time.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

For mobile kbin users, you can tap the top left burger menu and scroll down just a little bit to subscribe to a magazine, instead of scroll past all the comments. The burger menu is just the side bar on desktop.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago

The way I've found it (on kbin) is that there's a column on the right-hand side of comment thread pages. One of the boxes in the right-hand column is labeled "Magazine" and there should be a black button that's labeled "Subscribe" somewhere.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

It seems almost exactly the same as the view from old reddit. right hand side sidebar with a box that says subscribe until you hit it and then it turns into unsubscribe. The only difference I see is the subs are consistent so like in reddit it was not consistantly in the same location but here it is.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

I hope we get a way to easily access our followed list or like shortcuts like RES. Can sub to a lot and just shortcut the ones I really want to check out on their own.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 year ago

Also historic threads that probably will never be feasible to create anymore. Eg, I loved to read TV show episode discussions right after I watched the episode. That includes for older shows. As long as it didn't predate reddit, basically every notable show had a decent sized thread for every single episode. But a lot of those were only able to take off because they were created when the episode aired. Rewatches don't get the same kinda discussion.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 year ago (2 children)

I think a lot of my reddit usage boils down to searches.

"Best pregnancy lotion reddit"

"Bed gouging ender 3 pro reddit"

"Submarine disaster askhistorians"

Are the main ways I used reddit this week.

Before all the drama I had pointed to many friends that most discourse and live interaction on my regular subreddits had already moved to discord. The unified ui and functioning search make it more useful.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

Before all the drama I had pointed to many friends that most discourse and live interaction on my regular subreddits had already moved to discord. The unified ui and functioning search make it more useful.

But discoverability is zero for that content. discord is "deep web" which is not indexable at all by search engines.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

for me discord is just not organized. There is no way im scrolling up on conversations when I have not been on for three days much less a week. I think discord only works if you are looking to be on social media all the time or at least daily.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

Agree. No matter what discord is still essentially just a chat room imo. Even with bots, read only channels, pinned messages, etc., navigating and searching for stuff that I want is still as painful as any other instant messaging services.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago (3 children)

Yeah, and just googling something will be completely useless with a project named after a famous rock musician.

„How to upload pictures lemmy“, yes, thank you google, I know how Lemmy Kilmister looks, thank you.

That’s (among other things) why I hope kbin will be the victor of that race…

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

im not sure I want a victor or even see a race as long as the federation survives we all win.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

although, I'm sure, google results will adjust accordingly eventually.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

If I'm not wrong, kbin right now isn't allowing for web crawlers. So using kbin for searches like for Reddit isn't possible for now as well.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

Yep. The battletech comunity on reddit is like 45k subscribers and stays active. Kbin's /m/battletech has 56 subscribers. There are 5 threads. It's gonna be quite a while before niche communities actually have any momentum.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Well damn, thanks for talking about it, another community to sub to!

Time to find a Shadowrun one as well.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Personally I was getting a bit tired of not having one of my interests here so I created the magazine for it. We'll just see if it takes off.
For some other niche interests...I'll wait and see, I don't feel invested enough to create the magazines for them.

(For those interested in vegetable gardening @VegetableGardening )

[–] [email protected] 21 points 1 year ago (4 children)

Yep, Reddit will be a dumpster-fire even more. Probably worse when old reddit goes away. right now old reddit its living on borrowed time!

[–] [email protected] 15 points 1 year ago

The decline is happening really fast. They're in a race with Twitter to see which one can die sooner.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago

They’ve already started removing mods from subreddit

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

The Snoo Platform is currently a chaotic mess, with purge of moderators being shown publicly...

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

yeah when the api thing happened I assumed old reddit was on borrowed time. So many folks where complaining of the jesus gets us ads that I never noticed.

[–] [email protected] 19 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Out of all the social platforms, Reddit is probably the easiest to copy. The moderation was all handled by users in the first place, and I don’t think Reddit employees are as needed as Twitter or Facebook.

Reddit is just shooting itself in the foot right now. I understand the need to make money, and I can understand the API becoming a revenue stream. They just handled it so poorly. There were tons of ways to open a dialogue with app devs about charging them. They could have made their users move to a subscription model. I just don’t get it.

This is my first comment on kbin!

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago

Yeah, spez has really shot the golden goose (the free engaged moderation staff).

And welcome!

[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Admittedly, I am only a casual user of Reddit (or I should say was). Seeing all this happen over the past few weeks, I have come to realize just how crazy moderation can be in a forum like this or Reddit.

Seeing everyone come together and log issues, problems, work on iOS and Android app accessibility for kbin and lemmy is phenomenal...an eye opener. It's an exciting moment for sure, and the collaboration between everyone is humbling.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago (1 children)

300% this. People like us can navigate our way through all those drawbacks, but are deal-breakers for people like mom who lurk Reddit from time to time.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

You can make the same comment between Facebook being 'easier" than Reddit. Or forums being easier than IRC.

A natural order is as user mass increases, ease of use improves. I think it's fine to acknowledge the challenges while continuing to spread the message and leveraging early adopter influence with folks comfortable doing some reading to understand vs a casual "mom" internet user that needs a very safe, templated app experience without many (or any) customization options.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I got reminded of IRC a bit ago, wonder if that's gonna get a resurgence. I was thinking maybe something like lemmy/kbin with a built in IRC like how kbin has the microblogs.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

In the workspace Slack is very big and is very analogous to a supremely polished IRC. Discord outside of professional workspaces is similar, though a bit more detached.

To me, these are the mass market evolutions of IRC from back in the day.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I got into reddit about ten years ago ... I wasn't part of the first wave but back then it felt like the site was new and things were happening. Then it just slowly devolved into what it is now

I really don't mind the change as it just gives me a new perspective on things and people ... change is good ... any time we are caught standing still, we always seem to lose something, especially in the digital world.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

Same here, ten years ago, Vulcan also discovered Reddit and later hop into it.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago

Yeah, this is my feeling. I was willing to put up with kbin.social using Cloudflare and being slow as all else, plus the random site breakages, and there not being an app - but a lot of folks I know wouldn’t be, especially the ones who couldn’t be bothered to figure out how to pick an instance for Mastodon to leave Twitter. Not to mention that right now, people have too many choices and don’t know what’s actually going to take over. They’ll wait until there’s a critical mass at one of the many Reddit alternative sites.

Most folks go where the other people are. We have to make the fediverse into the place where people want to come, and then this will be the place where people are.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago

Yeah, the trigger event that basically started all this was reddit deciding they don't want third party apps anymore (and people not wanting to use reddit's app). Well, there isn't much for apps here either.

Also, the network effect is still in play. Despite the fact I'm using this fully for all my posting, I still searched for reddit threads when I finished Tears of the Kingdom, because I wanted to read people's thoughts on various topics and those reddit threads already existed. Kbin and Lemmy threads don't yet exist in the large enough numbers for the various topics I was searching for (like if other people thought the sky islands felt too copy-paste or what people thought the lore of the depths were or how many people did the story out of order). I know I can make discussions here, but at the time I just wanted to read existing discussions. It's gonna take some time for the Fediverse to catch up to that.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

Yup, as an early adopter (and someone who loves bleeding edge thing), Vulcan can tolerate the lack of features at Kbin (and Lemmy).

Trying to convince some friends, and they complained about lack of activity in #threadiverse. Alright then, we can use this momentum to build and grow #threadiverse to be as competitive as the Snoo Platform.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

But hey, someone’s gotta do it

When the going gets tough, the tough get going