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.
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.)
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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…
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.
Well damn, thanks for talking about it, another community to sub to!
Time to find a Shadowrun one as well.
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 )
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!
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I still don’t feel there is any fediverse instance which feels as clean, elegant, and unclaustrophobic as the old.reddit.com UI.
For the time being that can be solved with this userscript. But it should definitely be added as an actual setting.
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)
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.
The answer can be many things if you go into detail but the summary is change is hard.
Just move your community to Lemmy or Kbin. It’s not that hard.
No, it is that hard.
- You have hundreds/thousands of community members accustomed to a certain user experience that have to start that learning all over again when they move platforms.
- You have teams of moderators that have to learn a new set of tools for a new platform.
- Less content and inferior experience for everyone until there’s headway made on 1 & 2.
Anyone whose worked on a team that had a management shakeup can appreciate this. Anyone who has a friend that refuses to migrate to windows 11 can appreciate this.
Never underestimate the power of comfort and convenience. “It’s just too HARD to move!,” people will say. “Everybody I know is here!,” they’ll say. I’ve heard people say this a lot since the social media collapse sparked by Elon Musk. It’s their choice, but I’m not comfortable staying. Maybe in time they’ll realize that it’s the right time to leave as well.
