Does federation have a bit of a learning curve? No doubt.
Is Lemmy buggy as heck? Absolutely.
But I don’t think that really justifies a lot of the comments I’m seeing in Reddit alternatives threads that it’s hard to figure out. The front page feed and sort options are very similar to Reddit. Searching for same-instance communities is not too difficult. Posting, commenting, and voting are all quite intuitive. What’s the problem?
Anything new is scary
Reddit is complicated, they just forgot.The digg users said reddit was ugly and they would never use such an ugly site.
I tried explaining reddit to a diehard forum user, why are all the replies out of order? why are upvotes changing the posting order? this is so complicated!Don’t explain, tell them where to start and how to start. then it explains itself.
I can’t help but think that people who describe the Fediverse as complicated joined reddit after the redesign…
Kbin is exactly like an old, stripped down version of old.reddit.
I think this is also the cause of the squabbles.io Vs kbin/Lemmy split. Squabbles is like new Reddit, kbin is like old Reddit. And people like what they know
This last sentence is the crux of the matter. People don’t like change, but quickly forget that they spent time learning the site that they’re so familiar with.
In kbins case you actually have a responsive admin and can actually find devs on here working on new features and tweaks (hey there!)
Super happy with how kbin has been going so far
This is 100% it. Also some people have only ever used iOS with the Reddit app and Twitter and Tiktok which are so easy to use a literal 3 year old can use it
As a forum user, it was absolutely crazy to me when I first signed up on Reddit a decade ago that the replies would be out of order and sorted by popularity. But I grew to understand that it was a crowdsourcing effort in most ways and that the cream rises to the top. It was really quite good to get the information you needed out of the thread.
Anything new is scary
Agreed. Most people just want to settle into something comfortable.
I feel it, and if I had another chance to explain it would have just told her(forum user): make an account, go to /r/horses, start commenting.
People also forget that Reddit wasn’t built in a day and digg didn’t die in a day
I’m just coming over from Reddit and finding Lemmy a little difficult, but I think it will smooth out a lot over time. Right now communities are not really established, apps are buggy and there’s a lot to get used to. More users and developers making their way to Lemmy should solve a lot of these problems
It isn’t hard to sign up for. No one is saying that is the case. It gets confusing when people start talking about adding subscriptions from other instances and how you can copy and paste the link and subscribe. That right there is where 95% of the people on the internet stop caring.
If the developers of Lemmy and the wider Fediverse ever get that fleshed out in an intuitive way I think popularity will go pretty fast.
That and long term if there is a way for information to be collectively backed up so that if some owner shuts down an instance everything isn’t gone.
The first step is completely different from anything else you’ve ever done
“Pick an instance to sign up for”
This does not compute. What is an instance? Why do I have to pick? Which one should I pick? Compared to
“Create an account at reddit.com” makes sense and is something everyone has done before.
It doesn’t matter how simple the answers to those questions are, the fact that the very first step requires multiple explanations is huge, and will always be a barrier to entry.
The first step is completely different from anything else you’ve ever done
This isn’t really true, you already had to do this for email. Never heard of that being a barrier of entry.
My parents prefer to opt for local privacy/security focused email providers, while I go with gmail for the feature set and design. But I used to try out a few different ones to figure out which one works best for me. Still use a hotmail email for my Windows account.
I fail to see how this is different to the situation with lemmy/kbin instances.
99.9% of people just use gmail, and before that 99.9% used hotmail, etc. There’s always been ‘the one’ that effectively everyone is on.
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You’re describing an internet that doesn’t exist anymore and hasn’t for decades.
Even a low barrier to entry tends to significantly improve the signal-to-noise ratio in discussions.
So, I’m fine with people that can’t get past making a simple, almost irrelevant, decision as step 1 of gaining access… not gaining access.
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Agreed. It still is a pain to follow subs on other instances, especially within Jeroba. I know you’re supposed to copy the !sub@instance into the search field, but it never comes up.
For Lemmy, if nobody is subscribed to that community on your instance you have to copy the entire URL. E.g. you need to search for
https://instance.social/c/subin order to find [email protected].Once one person on your instance searches for it, then you can find it by searching [email protected].
I don’t know why Lemmy works like that. Kbin doesn’t have the problem; you can find things by searching
@sub@instance.socialno matter what.Kbin doesn’t presently auto-hyperlink the !sub@instance text.
I expect that it will in the future.
It will in the next update. See https://codeberg.org/Kbin/kbin-core/pulls/317
You don’t need to do that if that community is already federating with your instance. If its not, it might take a little while for the federation to actually start after you make the search (based on the server infrastructure of your instance and the remaining queue). Try searching again after a bit and it should be there. These quriks should be solved as instances become more stable, and Lemmy/kbin gets further developed.
What is this about having to copy and paste a link to find subscriptions from other instances? I literally just pull up the community browser and set it to “all” and then search.
Yes, that will show you all the communities/magazines that your instance has already discovered and have started federating with. But if it is a community that hasn’t been discovered by your instance yet, you will need to search with the link for it to start federating. And once even a single user from an instance does that, the community will be visible to everyone else as well.
Yeah. Really, new admins should understand that they should be seeding their new instance, but the last couple of weeks have been… Kinda nuts? So, this won’t really be an issue for most users long term. It’ll be a thing for admins on small or niche sites that want to ensure they’re discoverable and that their users can access the best communities.
Huh. TIL.
On Lemmy, if nobody is subscribed to a community on your instance, it doesn’t appear in that view.
In order for it to appear, someone with an account has to go to the search bar at the top right of the page and type in the URL to the community manually. Then it’ll appear after an initial search.
On large instances like Lemmy.world, you can almost guarantee someone has already done this for most popular communities - but newer/smaller communities may not appear because nobody on your instance has searched for them yet.
For smaller instances, there are likely multiple communities missing and you’d have no idea until you went to look for them.
Just be careful. That only works because your instance already knows about those other instances because someone already interacted with them. If you ever want to join a community on a non-popular instance, you might have to be the first person to search for it by copying and pasting.
That’s cause over time people have added communities to your instances repitoire over time. Network effect, essentially, making it easier for each new user. Tbh, if new users are on a bigger instance this should be a non issue.
The question everyone was really asking was if will they will be able to make these quality of life changes before the Reddit API changes come into effect. The answer seems to be “no” unfortunately. It’s a huge missed opportunity that may never come again.
Oh I have all the faith in the world that someone will come up with a solution eventually. I just assume it was never a major priority because of the userbase. With an explosion of users I’m sure they have a 100 things they want to improve and it is just a matter of time.
This can be alleviated a bit. If one person searches for an other-instance community by URL, it will become available for all other users through a normal search. So over time this becomes less of an issue, particularly if someone takes out some time to seed a bunch of these for their instance.
It makes no sense to me that there are separate forums for the same topic that have the same names other than “@instance”. IMO there should be a single place that is /politics which has the same posts and comments regardless of which instance you’re logged into. If these instances are “federated” with each other then they should act like a single shared space. Or at least that’s how it seems like it should work to me.
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Then as a user you would be free to click to filter out comments from lemmy, and the top mod of /politics could choose to “defederate” from lemmy for that forum, and users at lemmie would be free to create /politics_tankies or whatever.
That’s a matter of moderation, not the technology behind the platform.
Wait so do communities not have mods?
I don’t know about other places, but at kbin each forum has mods.
I’m not sure how federation does anything to prevent that from happening, though. They can still do that on your instance, from their instance.
At most, I suppose an instance could defederate from a troublesome instance that’s doing this, but the more that happens, the more fragmented the Fediverse becomes, and it starts to defeat the purpose of federation in the first place.
Reddit was the same way.
You have /r/gaming. /r/games. /r/truegaming. /r/videogames. /r/videogame. Etc.
Each community was slightly different in subtle ways, but some people were subscribed to multiple (basically identical) communities. Others self-sorted into different communities based on moderation style and community vibes.
Not to mention that your idea of how federation should work kind of ignores moderation and community preferences. Communities hosted on Beehaw are tightly moderated. There may be other communities that want something less strict. How do these two reconcile with one another? What happens if a conversation is removed on one instance but kept around on another?
If local mods only have local power, they can get quickly overwhelmed as you effectively need a mod team on every single instance. Smaller instances wouldn’t necessarily have the manpower to have their own dedicated mods for literally everything.
Well, instances are all different, independent websites. As an admin, if I can’t name a community whatever I want on my own website, I’m probably not participating in this ecosystem.
Plus, 1000 times more posts get posted to r/bigsub than you or anyone ever reads, and 10,000 times as many comments. It creates an environment where no one is actually discussing anything, and are just jockeying for attention.
You won’t actually miss anything except for big vanity numbers by just choosing the community you like best for a topic and just… Ignoring the others.
Kbin was trivial to figure out. Mastodon I still struggle with a bit.
What part of Mastodon do you struggle with, if you don’t mind me asking?
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Reddit has been around for quite a while. There are those of us who used to be tech-savvy “back in the day” that don’t handle change either quickly or well. For a casual social-media only user, this can be similar to the experience of a cave-person discovering fire. There are bound to be questions, especially when dealing with multiple types of instances on the fediverse. If we want this to grow into its full potential, we NEED to be patient and welcoming to even the most technologically illiterate.
There are those of us who used to be tech-savvy “back in the day” that don’t handle change either quickly or well.
I feel personally attacked, lol.
The problem I find with the technologically illiterate is that they immediately blurt out what’s on their mind. They ask the same fucking questions over and over, without searching first. The signal to noise ratio drops way down and every day is the same shit.
I am more than happy to interact with people of all walks of life but the internet is very “Groundhog Day” compared with when techies were the only ones on here. I’m not sure what the solution is that gives us perpetual cake.
For those that enjoy using Reddit, they are perfectly happy to remain… so why try to force the issue?
Their criticisms of this place are most often correct - it does have less functionality, it does have a barrier to entry, starting right from the beginning in picking an instance to join, and if you later switch then you have to make a new account and start over (I think? although your old content would still be accessible, it wouldn’t be “yours” anymore without logging into the old one). We prefer it anyway, but it’s up to them what they want to do.
this platform doesn’t have search and as far as I understand, doesn’t want to have search. so where are you thinking people are supposed to search exactly?
I would love to see your tutorial about how to search for information here.
Um, unless I’m misunderstanding you, no, there is a search here. At the top of kbin pages is a magnifying glass icon that does search.
Yep, this. I’m old, and I used to be super technically literate, but not anymore. Now I’m happy to keep my kids alive, use my smartphone to run my life, and ask a lot of questions. It took me embarrassingly long to figure out how to subscribe to something, and I’m not even 100% sure I did.
I’m cranky for at least 2 days if I have to get a new work computer for any reason. I don’t want to lose my reddit communities, so I’m trying, but I won’t if people are just rude to start.
Average internet user doesn’t understand internet
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don’t forget fiber optics!
A greater percentage of reddit is younger than some of them realise. So many redditors are going to be used to new reddit, and plug-and-play services in general. Kbin and Lemmy look like old.reddit, and they require them to understand the concept of what a ‘server’ is to even get started. This is knowledge they’ve never needed before to use the services they want to use.
Imagine spending all your life eating McDonald’s and then somebody told you homemade burgers are way better quality, taste better, cheaper, etc; then when you ask how to get a taste of those bad boys they start with informing you that you’d need to grill them. It’s not hard, it’s just new.
they require them to understand the concept of what a ‘server’ is to even get started.
I’ve known 5 year olds start minecraft servers. And understand that each “world” is an “instance”. But that’s aside the point, as you’re right that even Help-Desk IT people struggle to understand the difference between computer and server.
It’s not hard, it’s just new.
The “new” part is what gets people. All of this is new. Even the implementation of all of this “fediverse” is new. It will come with time! People probably didn’t understand email vs snailmail, and probably had an even harder time with SMS/IM vs email when all of that came about just over 20-30 years ago. Most of these “complications” are from people that grew up knowing that the “internet” is basically 5 or 6 social media sites for very specific uses, and those 5 or 6 sites are older than most of the people using them, so that’s all they know. Even for a dude in IT, the fediverse was a new concept to understand, and even difficult to understand how it could best be implemented for the masses.
In addition to the learning curve and the minor bugginess of Lemmy and Kbin, I feel like there may be some cognitive dissonance going on for users that are on the fence on whether they want to switch. To resolve the dissonance, one could either change their behavior (switch to Lemmy or kbin) or change their cognition (rationalize why they do not want to switch; for example by thinking that Lemmy or Kbin is too hard to use). Changing behavior can be hard especially if it is a habit built over a long period of time, so coming up with excuses for why one doesn’t want to switch would be the easier thing to do.
that is so dismissive.
people don’t want to switch because they had a thing that they liked and this thing is nothing like that.
This whole thread is pretty dismissive. This might be simple in theory, but I’m sitting here using an app (Summit) that doesn’t let me view my profile or subscribe to communities (yet). I’ve used RIF for about ten years now and got way too used to a smooth, easy app that I knew backwards and forwards.
I agree, and that is part of the cognitive dissonance between enjoying reddit for what it provided and wanting to switch to an alternative. However, if one is searching for a reddit alternative and will not switch to anything exactly like it, why should one even be looking for an alternative?
As someone who designs software you are vastly overestimating users, they wake up with their shoes tied together and spill hot coffee on their lap before they even get to the website.
A lot of people don’t really understand computers. We mostly know how to manipulate the user interface (UI) to get the computer to do what we want, but if you switch up the icons or install a new desktop environment, I guarantee you that 99% of users will be completely lost.
This is because the UI abstracts the complex process of running a computer so that the user can just think about getting things done. The user doesn’t need to know what it means to “go to the start menu and click the Notepad app.” Practically, this is Windows-speak for “open the default text editor”. However, if you take a Windows user and drop them into a Linux and ask them to open up the default text editor, they probably won’t know how to do that unless a Windows-like desktop environment is chosen.
Basically, a lot of people don’t “know how to use Reddit” so much as that they know how to get the Reddit website to do what they want it to. Lemmy is even slightly different than Reddit, cosmetically different. Although we usually use the phrase “cosmetically different” to imply that the difference is not important, because we rely on GUIs to understand computers, cosmetic differences are really important in UIs.
Go look for posts on Lemmy discussing Jerboa and the other apps. The apps mostly differ in how the user is able to interact with the site. They should all have the full functionality of Lemmy (or are working towards it), but the ways of presenting that functionality to the user are different.
One of the most important groups that moved to the Threadiverse were the blind community. It is because of the inaccessible user interface in the Reddit app that they decided to move over.
And let me be very clear that the fact that computers abstract away their complexity is very much a good thing. That’s why we have computers: to do tedious, complex work automatically and simply. Not everyone needs to be a computer expert, but I do think that developers need to resist the urge to make cosmetic changes that don’t improve functionality. I realize that this is an ill-defined tall order. Regardless, we need to be aware that most people don’t know how computers work.
I think that, in order to get people joining our communities, we should try to be compassionate and helpful when it comes to users learning how to use site. Actually, this is a special case of my more general position that we should try to be compassionate and helpful in the face of people who are confused and trying to learn, whatever the subject. I know it can be hard; if I’m being honest, I have a bad habit of getting annoyed at people who don’t look like their listening. But we need to unlearn that.
For me, I can easily pick up on design language through inference and just exploring UIs, but I realized that most people don’t have that skill. It took me only a few seconds to understand the Lemmy UI and the other third party clients’ UIs. Kind of interesting
not gonna lie, the “magazine” thing did really confuse me at first. I thought it pulled magazine articles at first, lol
Honestly I just understood the term right now while reading this thread :D
I don’t think that really justifies a lot of the comments I’m seeing in Reddit alternatives threads that it’s hard to figure out.
Haven’t been back there and didn’t read the comments…
But I think I can understand to a degree:
- Too many choices: Picking an instance can be confusing for folks that are used to only having to remember 1 name. I personally think this is a bit like people trying Linux for the first time and getting confused by all the choices available. Basically, it’s what some people call “analysis paralysis” but add to that the fact that you’ll get 12 different recommendations from every 10 people you all (e.g. there’s no clear consensus on the “best” one bc “best” means something different to each person). I think one list I saw on GitHub literally had over 200 instances… For non-techies, I could see that being a bit confusing
- UI differences: some things like making a post on kbin are a bit different (IMO not bad but still different enough that I could see some folks getting confused). Doing searches on lemmy for specific topics (not finding communities but searching for something in a community) is done from a different area on lemmy than on Reddit and IMO is kind of a pain in the ass currently. And on kbin, frankly, I’m not even sure we have that feature at all.
- Missing features: haven’t tried mobile apps (which could again be another point of confusion) but for desktop at least, AFAIK we don’t have anything comparable to RES yet. There’s no analog to multireddits. And we don’t have anything similar to reddit’s Saved feature yet. All valid complaints in my opinion. And someone used to any or all of those, might spend a lot of time looking bc they just don’t know if it’s hidden or does not exist. So, yeah, I could see so confusion there too.
I think there are a lot of advantages they’re probably missing too. I like that kbin/lemmy we can choose whatever fucking avatar we want instead of being limited to customizing our snoz or wtf Reddit calls their mascot thing. I saw one guy mentioning how there’s no karma bullshit to deal with for new accounts and absolutely agree with that sentiment.
tealdeer; meh, I like the fediverse and it’s not hard for me but I’m not shitting on people who don’t get it. If they want help, would probably help but not going to push it on people either. It is what it is and that’s good enough for me
‘teal deer’ lol
Great points!
I like that kbin/lemmy we can choose whatever fucking avatar we want instead of being limited to customizing our snoz or wtf Reddit calls their mascot thing.
“Snoo”. It’s a space alien.
Been here a week. Still no idea what the words you just said mean. Lemmy wont become super popular unless it becomes super simplified so even a caveman could do it.
Kbin doesn’t have as much of this because it’s simplified quite a bit. It’s one reason why I recommend Kbin to newbies, because it gives you a giant “sign up” button immediately.
But to answer your question:
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Instance: a server that hosts everything. You and I are on Kbin.social, which is an instance. Another Kbin instance is fedia.io. Kbin has relatively few instances. Lemmy has oodles (Lemmy.world, Lemmy.ml, sh.itjust.works, etc.). Lemmy actively encourages people to spread out over many instances.
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Magazine/Community: If you’re on Kbin, I’d hope you know what a Magazine is. Lemmy calls them Communities. Reddit called them Subreddits. They’re all basically the same - buckets for people to make posts about certain topics.
I think I understand the terms you have explained, but I am still a little confused on viewing by “all”, when I view “all” am I seeing posts from every instance that is federated with the one I’m on or only the communities/magazines that users on my instance have visited before?
“All” shows every community/magazine that at least one person on your instance has subscribed to.
The different sort options sort then differently, of course.
I see, thank you! This makes the choice of instance when signing up more significant than I thought.
Yep, places with more people will have a wider range of communities in their “all” feed.
That said, the barrier to making an account isn’t too high. My first account was on Lemmy.ml back in 2020, shortly after Lemmy was created (I never stuck around and left pretty quickly).
Last month I realized I don’t trust Lemmy.ml, so I joined Beehaw.org.
Then I thought Beehaw.org was a little overzealous at times, so I came here to Kbin.social.
I’ve largely stuck to Kbin because I really like how it looks and feels, but I did make accounts on Lemmy.world, fedia.io, and sh.itjust.works as backups in case Kbin goes down.
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Fear and an unwillingness to try new things.
For example, some of the complaints that people had about Mastodon early on were just odd to me. They made such a big deal out of “you have to pick a server, no one understands that” or nitpicking UI interfaces between Mastodon and twt. They didn’t have logical arguments IMHO it was them just not being happy about change and not being honest about that.
Saying “I don’t want to deal with different servers within a single website” is illogical? Seems entirely logical to me. Anyone used to Reddit is going to be turned off to the whole messy fediverse thing. Me included. Legitimately, it evokes feelings of the dead on arrival Metaverse.
People want simplicity. We’re decades past the days of BBS boards.
It’s not a single website. And what’s with all the hate I see around here about BBS boards? BBS boards were great. I just want someone to loop me in about the hate. I just think with the fediverse we’re seeing a rise of a model that brings the best things about BBS boards to more modern web technologies
Having “add new post” in the header on kbin it’s definitely something that will trip up people coming from Reddit. You need to add a new “article” which isn’t very intuitive
Took ne a few tries to figure that out. And what is a microblog even and why do we have it?
Microblogs are like tweets. I think posts from people you follow on Mastodon and similar federated microblogging platforms should appear there. I wish there was the option to merge the microblog and magazine feed. I don’t think having them separated is necessary on a platform like this.
It’s for Mastodon compatibility. Articles are like Reddit posts and microblogs are like tweets. You can post either from Kbin. Your articles will show up as community posts on Lemmy, and your microblogs will show up as toots on Mastodon.
