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/

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I don't understand why people still want to use reddit instead of moving to Lemmy or Kbin (sh.itjust.works)
submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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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] 13 points 1 year ago (3 children)

Here are the issues for me:

  • The fediverse is still below an active user threshold that makes it an effective replacement. I'm not saying that it needs to match reddit's size to function, but I joined reddit about 6 months before the digg v4 migration, and it felt more alive then than the fediverse does now.
  • Much of the activity here seems to be about the reddit protests and migration away from reddit. This, combined with activity below a threshold necessary to make it feel like an effective replacement for reddit's core functionality is a little off putting. (Yes, I realize I'm in /m/RedditMigration, but I'm subscribed to a wide variety of magazines/communities and reddit migration content still dominates my subscription feed) The fediverse needs to show that it is capable of supporting itself with actual content, and I don't think it's proven that yet.
  • I still don't feel there is any fediverse instance which feels as clean, elegant, and unclaustrophobic as the old.reddit.com UI. Whether that's just my own aversion to change or a legitimate comment on the quality of old.reddit I'm not sure, but there are some aspects of the UIs that are unquestionably rough, like full page loads which could be replaced with AJAX.
  • The UX in general is a little rough in ways. The entire way the fediverse works is a little intimidating. If you're just looking down the barrel of the kbin registration form that's not a big deal, but if you need to choose an instance, or you're subscribing to communities/magazines and you you see 3 different communities with the exact same name, things can get a little overwhelming.
  • The jargon which has developed around the fediverse is kind of awkward. Needing to differentiate between kbin and lemmy, magazines and communities... even just "fediverse" is a little weird.
  • Even if all of the above problems are fixed, I wouldn't see myself abandoning reddit, just due to the sheer size of its activity. However, I would be likely to use reddit as a readonly site.

I think most of these problems have relatively straightforward fixes. As for the UX issues I'd like to see two things:

  • an instance which combines communities/magazines into "hubs" which users subscribe to simplify the UX. Users could can then tweak their hub experience by toggling which instances feed into their hubs. So instead of having kbin.social/m/news, lemm.ee/c/news, lemmy.world/c/news, etc... you just have something like /h/news and you can configure what's included in /h/news. The mods of the instance's community would determine which communities feed into the hub by default, but users could customize this as they wish.

  • Better cross-site user and reputation management. I'm not sure exactly how to make this work... but if, when you created an account on once instance, every instance its federated would somehow reserve or automatically create a matching account for you, then the anxiety around which instance to join can kind of melt away. The different instances could become windows into, effectively, the same account and same system.

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

I strongly agree about the content on this site needing to not be about reddit. So much of my front page is news about reddit. And what's more it's so damn repetitive. Often the exact same stories posted over and over in half a dozen different instances because apparently everyone wants to create their own sub about the topic and doesn't want to say "oh, this is a duplicate, just go use so and so sub instead". And they get upvoted like crazy, too.

The posts often don't contain anything new, either. Sometimes they do, but so many posts are just another major news site covering the ongoing events. I think many people upvoted that because they like the idea of this getting more press.

Honestly, I get it. I am having a lot of schadenfreude at reddit cannibalizing itself. But at the same time, I only want to discuss that a bit. I want to see the site have a diverse amount of interesting content. And I have tried to practice what I'm preaching here. I don't upvote most reddit related threads anymore and I've posted a lot more than usual.

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

I still don't feel there is any fediverse instance which feels as clean, elegant, and unclaustrophobic as the old.reddit.com UI. Whether that's just my own aversion to change or a legitimate comment on the quality of old.reddit I'm not sure, but there are some aspects of the UIs that are unquestionably rough, like full page loads which could be replaced with AJAX.

+1 on that. old.reddit (combined with the sub-specific CSS) is something that somehow needs to be ported over to the lemmy/kbin side, too. new reddit was too much wasted space and non-loaded stuff for me (old had more comments loaded by default)

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

Im sorry but your hubs point screams for https://xkcd.com/927/ but personally I find kbin a little nicer in ui than old reddit but im an old school person.