Here (kbin), Lemmy, Tildes… I hear Mastodon had a user spike. Is there something obvious I’m missing?
I ask because I haven’t felt the same mass of users that Reddit had. Obviously users have spread out, servers have been hammered, UIs have a learning curve and so on… But there might be other alternatives I haven’t looked at that are worth that look.
After reddit my needs from a social book marking website are simple:
- Completely open source
- Moderators can be recalled by the communities they mod.
- Not for profit (ads are not the primary source of funding)
The internet needs to have something like reddit as core infrastructure. A digital public square. This requirement is incompatible with profit motive. This is why time and time again social media sites fail.
This exactly. Before this whole thing, I had no idea that social media could be open source. Now that I do, it’s what I need.
Ironically, reddit was open source. Here’s the python source code repo for what the site was between 2005-2017. They have it preserved in an archive, and reddit the company still does contribute a lot of open source code and to open source projects, but I don’t think the react rewrite of the site is included in that list.
If reddit simply wanted to sustain its userbase, it’d be in a much better place.
That’s fundamentally the problem with the internet (and corporate culture as a whole, really). When a site takes off, the expectation isn’t to sustain the status quo, it’s to continue that growth. It inevitably reaches a point where maintaining exponential growth becomes more and more difficult, but even more profit still needs to be made. They find ways to squeeze every last goddamn drop out of it, almost always to the detriment of the users, the user’s experience, and everyone’s privacy.
The never-ending growth model is fundamentally the problem here, and that’s why I completely agree with you. Like you said, “This requirement is incompatible with profit motive.”
I second your list and I’d add my personal preference: the public square shouldn’t be ginormous.
Reddit feels like trying to have a conversation at the she time with all the people that could fit in St. Peter’s Square.
After these few days on Kbin I realised I’d rather be in a small town’s square where maybe I recognise some people and my voice isn’t drowned.
As far as funding goes, Diaspora (Fedi facebook, I think) runs off of an ?$8? a year model.
Not unreasonable pricing. The estimate I saw for reddit is about 30 cents a year per user is their current take. Would I have paid $5 a year for ad free access? You bet your ass I would, but it wouldn’t be nearly greedy enough for Reddit.
I’m using kbin.social mostly, I will just follow Lemmy communities from kbin once federation is re-enabled. It doesn’t make sense to me to have an account for Lemmy AND an account for kbin if they’re both part of the Fediverse.
I am also using Mastodon, even though it’s part of the Fediverse. I’m doing this because it’s more like Twitter, and the tweet equivalent on Mastodon is the same as a “Microblog” on kbin.
Ditto on the last point. I understand other Fediverse platforms like Mastodon and such should just work with others like Kbin/Lemmy, but the UI’s are so massively different. So I’ve went with the idea of having separate accounts. One for my existing Mastodon instance and one here on Kbin. To me it feels like the best way to manage it.
As a bonus to all of this, I should be able to easily follow my Kbin account and boost posts over on Mastodon if needed once federation is all sorted.
One additional plus to using kbin over Lemmy is there’s no “Microblog” feature on Lemmy. So if you follow Mastodon accounts on Lemmy, you won’t see anything. Whereas if you follow Mastodon accounts on kbin, their posts will come in as Microblogs!
I tested the waters at several sites:
- Mastodon felt too much like Twitter my taste, too many angry people and too much politics; the UI is slick, though
- Squabbles UI felt weird
- Lemmy had some problematic stuff around the person who runs it, and it felt more confusing on which instance to pick
- kbin has been my favorite; familiar UI, and people seem mostly friendly and chill
Nice thing about Lemmy instances is you can pick and choose the communities across any random server and sub to them from kbin, without directly interacting with that server. Once an app comes along that lets you browse and discover across lemmy/kbin/tildes the same way you could just search subreddits I think it could take off.
Yeah right now there’s https://browse.feddit.de/ to browse communities, but putting that in an app (and adding some sorting/filtering options) would be a killer feature
edit: that site only shows Lemmy communities, not kbin ones
There’s also Tildes.net, although it’s invite-only which limits things a lot right now, but I really liked the UI there.
Getting an invite for tildes is relatively easy, but if kbin can keep up with massive number of users, it will likely become much more popular.
Know any good ways to get a Tildes invite? I’ve been lurking there for a while but I’m keen to join properly
What makes Tildes.net different? Does it do anything differently than Reddit, or is it mostly just a clone?
I haven’t browsed it for more than a few minutes nor do I have an invite so it would be nice to hear if there’s anything that makes it stand out from other alternatives.
No, it’s centralized, basically a dude trying to re-create reddit with some twitter-like functions and a tweaked UI. So far he’s been diligent, responsive, and willing to (eventually) ban racist trolls, but he has his eye on maintaining control and moving towards monetization. IMHO he’s also in a bit over his head, for instance spending a large amount of time working on local image uploads to spur engagement on meme subs before listening to his user base, who were reminding him of the bandwidth, costs, and legal oversight he’d incur.
The simplicity of it has attracted people though, and engagement seems good. It’s not a bad site; it just has more potential failure points than something open-source, decentralized, and not-for-profit.
What you said about Mastodon would surely differ from instance to instance, unless you’re referring to the global feed where everything is federated.
What I personally like most about Mastodon, Lemmy and Kbin is that they don’t use an algorithm to decide on my behalf what I should or shouldn’t see. If I subscribe to another user, I will see their posts, and I will see them in the correct chronological order. Not this hidden secret “personalization” algorithm that randomly decides to hide something from me because it wouldn’t draw engagement, and decides to show me something I didn’t ask for because it would.
I just need certain tech groups, automotive groups and fuzzy kitties so I think kbin will probably be fine. I use RIF for reddit and it’s just plain stupid to kill 3rd party apps and screw with the API after all this time.
We really need a functional app for lemmy/kbin/tildes stat. There’s lots of UI polish needed to get to the point where people can find and check their communities as easily as they’re used to.
Also, as a mod, my biggest reticence around trying to bring my communities here is the lack of any equivalent for wikis. I think in a few weeks we could be in a place where it’s a real replacement but by then the blackout may be forgotten and it might be too late.
I feel like liking squabbles.io is a more controversial opinion than it really needs to be, but I have been! This is my other corner.