Preface: I am not an engineer. I am not a software guy. But I play games and use websites, and have since i was 8.
If you make the website usable, people will use it.
Reddit and Twitter had a symbiotic dichotomy where they were the embodiment of “causal brainfarts and reactions” vs “long thoughts and thorough argument”. One tweet with an exclamation and some emojis, vs a 7 paragraph breakdown or tutorial in a technical subreddit with hyperlinked sources. Both platforms had just enough to give what people needed in an easy to digest manner.
Kbin (and by extension the Fediverse, which I still do not understand after using this website for a week) just doesnt have that easy to drop in rabbit hole experience that these major platforms do. BUT IT CAN.
But right now pictures are smooshed and theres still huge empty space. It feels old, theres weird bugs like the UI flashing light mode on refresh, and other problems that make a user go “ick”.
Fill my screen with content and let me touch it, interact with it, react to it, let me repost it, let me subscribe to that community or user, and maybe preview THEIR feed or posts so I can get MORE content.
The major companies are at a plateau and know they have to start farming our clicks: thats why we see trends like Tiktok’s “knock on the screen to keep engagement” or “satisfying” videos pasted together with political opinions. Its why every company refuses to innovate while maintaining they deserve more money when they are already the monopolistic hegemony. If kbin can provide a more honest, more personal, more legitimate content sharing experience anonymously, it can explode into the new “front page” as reddit likes to call themselves.
I really like the idea of an integrated Twitter/Reddit alternative, that shares content across “front ends” like Mastodon and reformats information to be readable based on the users preferences. If we (and by we I mean you, the coder who can actually help this open source project) can come up with a design ideology that fosters curiosity, and enables connections, instead of force feeding you ads and sponsored content, that will be the future.
Im really, really hoping the internet heals from this huge burning that Elon and Spez have put on us. I know it can be done.
EDIT: i want kbin to the the place where Iranian women go to be heard. We should strive to be a platform for sharing an education. For connection, not profit, and not propaganda either. #womenlifefreedom #slavaukraini #freepalestine #fucktheccp #beexcellenttoeachother
EDIT2: also NOTIFICATION?! like there is no indication when i go to kbin that this post has any interaction. I have to manually go to the post.
You say you’re not a software engineer, but your intuition is sound. You know a rough website when you see it, and you can articulate how, and that’s valuable information to a developer.
But as a software engineer, I can tell you why. And it is because making software is hard, and damn anyone who tells you it’s easy. Ernest, as anyone who would be in his position, is probably overwhelmed with core programming, fixing security vulnerabilities, and keeping the site online. I’m sure UI updates are on his mind, just not at the forefront.
No piece of software is a utopia on its first major outing. And kbin has many technical hurdles it must overcome before it worry about it’s presentation. A sculpture cannot be polished before it has been shaped.
Second this, while user feedback is important and it’s great to see such passion for this project, hopefully we can all keep just as much patience.
Honestly the progress we’re seeing so far seems pretty astoundingly fast considering how few people are working on it.
There’s a number of small enhancements already out there waiting to be merged into the main code line. I submitted one myself. :)
No piece of software is a utopia on its first major outing. And kbin has many technical hurdles it must overcome before it worry about it’s presentation. A sculpture cannot be polished before it has been shaped.
I agree in principle (devops engineer), but a user retention issue has abruptly entered the fray due to the recent spike of interest. While I’m the sort of person who prioritizes core functionality and stability almost every time, this is one of those rare situations where I’d consider it important to triage usability and aesthetics alongside those. That’s way more than Ernest can handle on his own, but it’s up to him to recognize it as a potential priority and start reaching out for help so that the problems can be solved in tandem.
Not everyone is going to agree with me on this one. Pretty sure a lot of people predating the Reddit surge are happy to take a “when it gets done” approach to this sort of thing and aren’t worried about permanently retaining the Reddit crowd and sticking it to /u/spez. A significant portion of users do though, and there is a non-negligible amount of IT talent to be tapped from those enthusiasts.
(Yes, I put my money where my mouth is, but 1) coding is not one of my top vocations and 2) it’s up to Ernest whether he wants any assistance on the things that I’ve offered to help with.)
I’m with you on this one. I had to push through a bunch of initial confusion and learning curve to even figure out how to find things on this site. Subscribing to magazines from other instances is a chore that seems to require some trial and error? What? Subscribing to subreddits is one click. I’m patient enough to deal with it and I like it here now, but this place needs to be idiot proof soon if federated reddit is going to take off.
I’ve taken a stab at a client-side theme here that should be easy for people with zero technical literacy to install. The main goal was to parameterize the options and create a more forumlike layout. This is merely a stopgap measure, but has greatly improved the readability for me.
It feels old, theres weird bugs like the UI flashing light mode on refresh, and other problems that make a user go “ick”.
No one told ya?
Keep in mind though that kbin is actually newer than lemmy, (only a month old?) so it truly is more barebones than reddit. The developers are working hard though :) 2 days ago, becuase of the server load, I couldn’t even stay logged in on kbin, it was that buggy, but a day later it was stable
For me, part of the reason that the concept of the fediverse is hard to grasp comes from there not being any good visual representation of how it works, like a “metro transit map.” It also doesn’t help that the way you “get to” other instances’ content is by using awkward @ notation. Kbin’s top left info next to Threads is handy but only if you know how to read it. I’d prefer to see something more like:
Host: <instance name>
Magazine: <magazine name>
rather than the current cumbersome “/m/<mag-name>@<inst-name>”
Also, and this may be a culture thing that I’m not privy to, but I find it weird that there’s no quick way to tell which instance a user is commenting from (without interacting with the page in some way) [1]. It seems that there’s this default intent to make the federated nature of the fediverse somewhat invisible, and I think the better option would be the exact opposite. By making the different instances (and their users) immediately and easily recognizable, it will condition new users to better understand what the heck is actually going on under the hood, and lead them to discover things about the fediverse that they wouldn’t otherwise have known was even stuff to know.
[1] Right now I can hover over a username and get a pop-up card telling me what instance they’re from - indicated as @<user>@<instance>. I feel it would be considerably more helpful (and habituate new users more easily) if the username above the comment gave that info explicitly without having to hover over. Maybe something like “<user> from <instance>”.
That’s one of the things the excellent Kbin enhancement script fixes. User names and communities all display as <item>@<instance> everywhere, unless they’re local to the instance you’re browsing.
I find that change alone makes things much more navigable, and it really should be implemented by the devs sooner than later.