I’m not asking to be snarky or anything… I’m subbed to plenty of magazines that I enjoy reading.
It’s just that the front page has the “random magazines” section, and the top bar is full of a seemingly random list of unrelated magazines… and 99% of what shows up in these two places is just empty. They seem like magazines that were made as placeholders and have been sitting empty for 6 months.
These two spots seem like prime real estate that should be filled with useful subs; or at least that magazines under a certain threshold ought to be filtered out of these locations to keep them relevant.
Or am I missing something?
This place is very new still. It will probably take reddit doing some other anti-user policy before you get the numbers. The best thing you can do is share OC and let it build organically.
None of the communities I actually need ever migrated here; most people just did not care. I still go to reddit for things relating to Japanese residency topics, finances, etc. as it is the only place I know of. I only visit those subs, though.
There are also people like me who post like one thing a year (though I comment much more).
Japanese residency topics
You’re a braver person than I. The Reddit Japan subs are just far too toxic for me, and several of the mods are monsters.
Of toxicity? Or of the mods being monsters?
I don’t have specific examples, since I stopped using the Japan subreddits several years ago. But they are swamps of toxicity. Everyone is mad at each other and seems to hate their own lives. The new users ask the same 3 basic questions every single day, while the old users seem like new users are the only thing they hate more than Japan. The mods are ban happy and will punish people like tyrants for the slightest mistake, and while I sympathize with them for the crap they have to sift through, they themselves are some of the sub’s most toxic users. It’s just a terrible place.
It’s still not perfect, but there were some changes in recent years. The main residents-only sub split into two with different moderation policies. I’m subbed to both. I also think some people generally chilled out more, and the removal of certain trolls also increased. Just my opinion, but I also don’t spend nearly as much time there.
I want to post but I ran out of willpower due to other conditions on top of the whole reddit thing. Still meaning to…
But I comment as usual. I see and have the same issues, though I don’t go back to reddit unless I’m specifically searching for something online and it directs there, and I use libredirect to not give direct traffic.
Honestly if you see kbin magazines that are just empty and unused (as you said, lots of people have made placeholder magazines during the Redditpocalypse and then it took time to see if people would stick around, or settle on a specific magazine)), check if the owner is awol for more than a month and if so, claim the magazine and set it to delete. Ernest goes in and will clear them out (tho he’s a bit behind I assume due to all the work he’s doing right now on the software) but it will help with getting the unused ones cleared out. I got well over a dozen of em scheduled to be deleted myself, as well as 10 or so others already deleted.
A lot of people came here, then went back to Reddit immediately.
i wanted to add my personal experience, as someone who tried kbin and then ended up on lemmy
when learning about fediverse, i was first introduced to kbin. i assumed that kbin was a close match to reddit, and this was why i was being introduced to it. turns out, nope! it also has some microblogging thing? active people? boost vs favourites? i was bamboozled to say the least.
i’m sure the dual-purpose threads + microblogging is good for some, but i’m really, really not into twitter. and i also found it to be confusing when i was tagged in something as to whether i was reading a thread, or a microblog. i.e, kbin wasn’t a good fit. then i discovered most of the actual content i was reading on kbin was being posted from some “lemmy” service? i clicked to find out more and… yeah, i made the switch pretty quickly.
basically, not all of us went back to reddit. i can’t speak for all former reddit users, but one of the detracting points for kbin was the mixed purpose. like, for example, if i was to list places like facebook, twitter, instagram, even mastodon - these are all “people” focused places. you post about people, and the focus is more skewed towards following individual people and trends. if i was to list places like reddit, hackernews, something awful, even… 4chan… - these are “things” focused places. you post about things, and the focus is on following things. lemmy is firmly in the “things” camp, whereas kbin is trying to be both “people” and “things” at once, and so it just wasn’t for me. 🙂
I’m going to present the opposite opinion to yours here. Kbin represents the best way forward for social media, to me. If we can get a working PeerTube integration after Threads federates, I’m all set. It’s what Google Plus was supposed to be, it’s why I first (as a user) used TweetDeck back in the day. It puts everything in one place again. I was a LiveJournal user back in the day, which was another place like this - communication & community, but individual places for your thoughts. I tried Tumblr for a while and it was close to an LJ replacement.
Everything since then has fractured and fragmented so we have very aggressive echo chambers, but no private places. This might be able to give that back to the users.
I accept that it can feel like drinking from the firehose at the start. It was to me at first too, but I was aware of Lemmy early on, and I was on two Mastodon instances that didn’t cofederate. I knew what I was going in for. I stepped back from Kbin when a known tech issue degraded my experience, and it’s been fixed. I think the thing is that Kbin allows you to curate your own experience, rather than be tied into doing one thing or another all the time.
I think when Kbin is ready for prime time and when the major issues are fixed, there might be a need to look at the first-timer experience, maybe even a tutorial. Because it’s not a beginner focused interface. It’s meant for us who want it all back in one place, and accepted the burden of experience that means.
I’d say it’s three different things:
-
Many of the people who came from the initial Reddit migration left pretty quickly. This was always going to happen. Reddit alternatives are relatively undeveloped and lack the sheer amount of activity that Reddit has, so people were inevitably going to lose interest and leave after the initial rush of wanting to stick it to Spez.
-
Kbin development stopped for about a month. This was due to the developer, Ernest, having real-life stuff to deal with and thus very little time to work on Kbin. Development has since started back up since then, and you can take a look at the progress over on @kbinDevlog, but that long period of silence led a lot more people to lealve.
-
The people who are here aren’t posting a ton. There are a lot of magazines where threads will get tens or hundreds of votes and comments… when someone decides to actually make a thread. Any social media site is going to have more lurking and commenting than posting, but if all the people who want to see content were to post a bit of their own, many of these magazines would be a lot more alive.