Does federation have a bit of a learning curve? No doubt.
Is Lemmy buggy as heck? Absolutely.
But I donāt think that really justifies a lot of the comments Iām seeing in Reddit alternatives threads that itās 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. Whatās the problem?
Edit: I do think terminology is a bit of an issue. I can tell a lot of people donāt understand āinstanceā vs. ācommunityā at first. āMagazineā is the biggest offender here. Thatās a very unintuitive term.
I feel like certain users are echoing others in terms of the āoh itās too hard/complicatedā - I donāt know, imo not really just sign up, subscribe to your mags of interest which will pull across the fediverse and engage (up/down/comment) as much as you like lolā¦ really not that hard but I guess change is hard for people (but then itās not really much a seismic change? I donāt know - I guess I like trying new things).
This is my first postā¦if my dumb old ass can figure it out, anybody probably can.
I canāt either, but Iām also on the border of donāt care and actively glad. Maybe there wonāt be such an Eternal September here. That would be a win.
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 āserverā is to even get started. This is knowledge theyāve never needed before to use the services they want to use.
Imagine spending all your life eating McDonaldās 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 youād need to grill them. Itās not hard, itās just new.
they require them to understand the concept of what a āserverā is to even get started.
Iāve known 5 year olds start minecraft servers. And understand that each āworldā is an āinstanceā. But thatās aside the point, as youāre right that even Help-Desk IT people struggle to understand the difference between computer and server.
Itās not hard, itās just new.
The ānewā part is what gets people. All of this is new. Even the implementation of all of this āfediverseā is new. It will come with time! People probably didnāt 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 ācomplicationsā are from people that grew up knowing that the āinternetā 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 thatās 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.
I canāt put aside my sneaking suspicion that canāt figure out any of these tools: kbin, lemmy, mastodon, etcā¦ Is more or less code for, āI have reach and influence on platform x, and I need canāt figure out how to be that person here.ā
Can they setup an account? Can they read? Can they write? These seem to all be achievable. Can they influence? Wellā¦ should that be the goal?
āMagazineā is the biggest offender here. Thatās a very unintuitive term.
Lmao what? For people born after 2010 maybe? Magazines have been a thing for decades and anyone over 20 is going to associate āmagazineā with āseries of articles about a topicā
āMagazineā implies little if any input from readers (letters to the editor being the exception). It doesnāt sound very interactive.
Not necessarily? I guess it depends on what magazines you read.
A lot of the magazines Iāve read over the years are collections of things submitted by readers. Model Railroader magazine is a bunch of model railroads submitted by people across the US. Theyāll pick a few to feature, but theyāre all basically submitted by readership and itās fairly interactive.
Lego Magazine was the same way when I was a kid. While a lot of it was about upcoming Lego products, there was a significant section that featured Lego builds made and submitted by the community.
For newspapers, Iād absolutely agree that it implies an editorial staff and no input from readers. But magazines (to me) have always had a focus on community involvement.
IMO, it translates quite well to the web, and the fact that thereās a big olā ā+ā button with āadd new articleā as an option makes it pretty obvious that this isnāt just a static read-only place.
My main hangup was āmake new postā vs āmake.new articleā. āMake new postā will make a Twitter-style short-form post in the āmicroblogā side; āmake new articleā goes as a Reddit-style self-post thread on the threads side. But once I understood that it was pretty straightforward, and I use both pretty regularly (articles for self-posts Iād normally post to Reddit, posts for little one-off thoughts or things Iād otherwise put on Twitter).
Kbin is planned to work with more fediverse stuff at some point as well. It already supports Pixelfed (Instagram) and PeerTube (YouTube). Mobilizon (fediverse event planner) support is on the roadmap, which would let event planning appear natively as well.
So if you ran a magazine based around a TV show, youād be able to add a Mobilizon event that corresponds to when a new episode comes out. Then that event would serve as a āmegathreadā for episode discussion once the episode airs. Itās a pretty neat idea, since it intuitively reminds people when things are and gives the community a place to discuss.
I guess generally online the term magazine hasnāt been used often. Then again subreddit wasnāt either and thatās a made up word.
I was just thinking that. Subreddit is a dumb made up word that a corportation invented. Community and magazine are descriptors. Sublemmy or subbin are just people trying to map experiences from on platform to another, and are understandable, but Iād personally prefer to see us call them communities and magazines in the long term.
Bottom line. Subreddit. Dumb word. If you were able to learn that, you can learn āmagazineā
In terms of people who didnāt fully understand the fediverse, there are two kinds of people:
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those who want to fully get their head around it first so they can make optimal decisions
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those who are happy to just jump in and learn by doing
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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 āyou have to pick a server, no one understands thatā or nitpicking UI interfaces between Mastodon and twt. They didnāt have logical arguments IMHO it was them just not being happy about change and not being honest about that.
Saying āI donāt want to deal with different servers within a single websiteā 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. Weāre decades past the days of BBS boards.
Itās not a single website. And whatās 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 weāre seeing a rise of a model that brings the best things about BBS boards to more modern web technologies
Having āadd new postā in the header on kbin itās definitely something that will trip up people coming from Reddit. You need to add a new āarticleā which isnāt very intuitive
Took ne a few tries to figure that out. And what is a microblog even and why do we have it?
Itās 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.
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 donāt think having them separated is necessary on a platform like this.
I donāt think that really justifies a lot of the comments Iām seeing in Reddit alternatives threads that itās hard to figure out.
Havenāt been back there and didnāt read the commentsā¦
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, itās what some people call āanalysis paralysisā but add to that the fact that youāll get 12 different recommendations from every 10 people you all (e.g. thereās no clear consensus on the ābestā one bc ābestā means something different to each person). I think one list I saw on GitHub literally had over 200 instancesā¦ 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, Iām not even sure we have that feature at all.
- Missing features: havenāt tried mobile apps (which could again be another point of confusion) but for desktop at least, AFAIK we donāt have anything comparable to RES yet. Thereās no analog to multireddits. And we donāt have anything similar to redditās 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 donāt know if itās hidden or does not exist. So, yeah, I could see so confusion there too.
I think there are a lot of advantages theyāre 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 thereās no karma bullshit to deal with for new accounts and absolutely agree with that sentiment.
tealdeer; meh, I like the fediverse and itās not hard for me but Iām not shitting on people who donāt get it. If they want help, would probably help but not going to push it on people either. It is what it is and thatās good enough for me
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.
āSnooā. Itās a space alien.
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.
You can still do that on new reddit. When looking at your own profile while logged in, thereās a little camera with a plus in the corner of your current avatar/placeholder. (Thereās also a separate icon further to the right for uploading a banner image.)
Edit: Dang, I didnāt expect that image to look so big, itās only 600x300
Ah my bad then. I really hated new reddit so I avoided it like the plague. Havenāt really been on there since either.
It isnāt 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 isnāt gone.
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 āallā and then search.
Agreed. It still is a pain to follow subs on other instances, especially within Jeroba. I know youāre supposed to copy the !sub@instance into the search field, but it never comes up.
Kbin doesnāt 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
Reddit has been around for quite a while. There are those of us who used to be tech-savvy āback in the dayā that donāt 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 āback in the dayā that donāt 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 whatās 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 āGroundhog Dayā compared with when techies were the only ones on here. Iām not sure what the solution is that gives us perpetual cake.
Iāve also noticed a pattern of people asking for the fediverse to just behave exactly like reddit and thinking ant architectural decision that differs from a users perspective is an antipattern
this platform doesnāt have search and as far as I understand, doesnāt 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 Iām misunderstanding you, no, there is a search here. At the top of kbin pages is a magnifying glass icon that does search.
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!Donāt explain, tell them where to start and how to start. then it explains itself.
People also forget that Reddit wasnāt built in a day and digg didnāt die in a day
I canāt help but think that people who describe the Fediverse as complicated joined reddit after the redesignā¦
Kbin is exactly like an old, stripped down version of old.reddit.
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
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 donāt like change, but quickly forget that they spent time learning the site that theyāre so familiar with.
It makes no sense to me that there are separate forums for the same topic that have the same names other than ā@instanceā. IMO there should be a single place that is /politics which has the same posts and comments regardless of which instance youāre logged into. If these instances are āfederatedā with each other then they should act like a single shared space. Or at least thatās how it seems like it should work to me.
Hell no, I do not want this to happen because then you have lemmy tankies and exploding-head fascists all dog piling into normal discussions, saying preposterously stupid shit to spoil what you read as you scroll through the comments.
There is no problem with similar communities. It wasnāt a problem on reddit and it wonāt be a problem here.
Well, instances are all different, independent websites. As an admin, if I canāt name a community whatever I want on my own website, Iām 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 wonāt actually miss anything except for big vanity numbers by just choosing the community you like best for a topic and justā¦ Ignoring the others.
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 wouldnāt necessarily have the manpower to have their own dedicated mods for literally everything.
