Think about things from the point of view of someone who has never used Reddit or the fediverse, but you’ve heard about them both from recent news articles and want to see what they are about.
Reddit:- You Google Reddit and your first result is Reddit.com. You click the link and are presented with the front page. You from scroll from a few hours and end up signing up and staying.
Lemmy:- You Google Lemmy and your first result is a wiki article for Lemmy Kilmister… Your second result might be join-lemmy.org, which you’re smart enough to realise it’s probably more likely what the news is about.
You click join-lemmy.org and are presented with a page of information about the fediverse, links to set up a server and pictures of code…
There is very little chance you’re going to investigate further.
If we want the fediverse to replace Reddit then either
A) Lemmy needs to improve its initial impression and Search engine optimization
B) We should be promoting a different platform with a better initial first impression.
I’d recommend kbin personally as it gives the same sort of experience as Reddit from the initial interaction.
kbin is newer and less polished. But yeah I personally recommend kbin over lemmy for exactly the reasons you posted.
Also, the Kbin dev expressly stated he isn’t ready for a massive migration, and the current influx has caused him no end of stress. We want to keep him around and not drive him insane.
I would argue we also don’t want to be in a place where we rely on any one individual. Thankfully @ernest seems to understand that as well.
I appreciate the concern, and it seems to me that kbin is no longer just one person ;) Currently, kbin is a team of wonderful people who handle development work, devops, project management, and more. Additionally, Piotr helps me with administering kbin.social. There will be significant changes here soon, things are happening quickly. But to be honest, I wasn’t fully prepared for such substantial growth, and it will probably take some time before everything stabilizes. But… this is just the beginning ;) What’s important is that the snowball starts rolling, regardless of whether kbin, Lemmy, or Mastodon gains the most users. We all win in this situation.
@Fizzee @abff08f4813c @tbird83ii @BedSharkPal
Given that Kbin has more active users in the past month than any lemmy instance, I’m sure it’s been wild for you considering this was a side project.
The thing that helps Kbin the most is that it is, by far, the easiest to understand. Googling “Lemmy fediverse” gives a bunch of various links to other Lemmy instances, which are presented in a way as if they are separated from one another. Kbin appears as one site, one location for content aggregation. Although that “goes against the idea” of decentralization, most users are currently looking for their “one home to replace their old one home”. The more users flock to one area and learn how it works, the more things will begin to take their proper shape, so to speak.
A feature we’ll definitely want to have with kbin in the future is the ability to migrate accounts to other instances. That would mean that even though we’re centralizing on kbin.social right now, people could move to other instances and spread the load across the fediverse without losing their history
I’m still learning the ins and outs of this place and the others, but part of me thought that was the feature of being federated. User accounts could seamlessly transfer from one instance to another.
Looking further into it, it looks like that feature exists for content, but not so much for accounts.
Yeah, the pace is still crazy, but it’s a completely different mental comfort when you’re aware that you’re not alone ;)
Java Dev here if there’s anything I can contribute with a couple hours a week!
kbin is written in PHP, but if you want to contribute, it’s opensource on codeberg.
Java Dev
My condolences
Assuming we coalesce around Kbin, 5-6 years down the road when Kbin is a lot more polished and has a significant user-base,h ow do we prevent a repeat of Reddit?
It’s inherent in human nature to coalesce, to form a community, which ultimately creates a centralized hub that is ripe for control by a few people.
Less polished, but the browsing experience is better and more customizable than any Lemmy instance I’ve been on so far.
Me, reading this through lemmy (feddit): hmmm yes
But for real, I see what you mean with the first impression at join-lemmy.
You’re absolutely right that we have a bit of a terminology issue here, but one slightly advanced and techy thing to understand about the fediverse is that the fediverse itself is the “platform”:
Lemmy, Kbin, Mastodon, Calckey, etc., are software projects or processes that are running on some server somewhere, and ActivityPub is the protocol (kind of like a language) that all these processes use (to varying degrees) to speak with each other. As users, we interact with a specific server or service (like beehaw.org or kbin.social) that is running that software and sharing info with other servers through a protocol.
This is totally different to Reddit or Twitter, which are both the names of the service AND (probably, but we don’t now) the software that the service is running behind the scenes. Naturally that makes it a bit easier to talk about, because we don’t have any access to or knowledge about the software or protocols that they use, and we can just talk about the services.
This is all a long-winded way of saying that Kbin and Lemmy are replacements for Reddit (the software) while servers like kbin.social or beehaw.org are replacements for Reddit.com (the service), except they also talk to each other somewhat seamlessly. I’m logged into the server “kbin.social”, which runs a software called “Kbin”, which communicates over a protocol called “ActivityPub” to a bunch of users who are on other servers running other software.
In other words, Google searching for “Lemmy” isn’t exactly a good metric, not only because Reddit is one of the biggest websites around and Google knows this, but also because “Lemmy” isn’t the actual name of the service that we are using right now, just the software. If you tell someone to go over to a specific server (like beehaw.org, kbin.social, etc.) then they’ll have a much easier time finding something that they can actually use.
Most of us are guilty of kind of glossing over all this stuff to keep things simple and easy to understand, but there are some layers of nuance to the fediverse here that make this a little bit more complicated than you’re making it out to be imo.
Fediverse really needs onboarding pages that hides some of the wires.
Join Lemmy for example should highlight the content and UI, and a big “Join the Lemmy Fediverse” button. Click the button and it asks 3 questions and send you directly to account creation for an active instance matching your answers.
Frankly instance choice should be something people think about after they’ve been involved for a while, at least until we have a few multi-million active user instances to choose from
Reddit:- You Google Reddit and your first result is Reddit.com. You click the link and are presented with the front page. You from scroll from a few hours and end up signing up and staying.
I don’t think this is the path most people take to becoming new Reddit users.
I think most people end up using new social media sites because they get linked to content already on a given site that they like. This could be from friends sharing links, or through Google results from the site.
The thing that worries me about kbin is that everything is located on one single instance. You guys are building a lot of centralization over there which might lead to a Reddit 2.0 scandal at some point
- posted from Lemmy
I recommend kbin just because some of the people behind Lemmy are vocal far left wing. I want to support more moderates in the world.
Turns out people who work on open source in their free time to make the internet a better place for all are usually left wing, while the righties try to make money and fail.
It worries me that you get a bunch of downvotes for this. People are way too accepting of political biases if they’re in the direction they prefer.
I think part of it is that leftists (myself included) don’t like being lumped in with tankies. I didn’t downvote though.
The lead devs of lemmy are tankies, basically meaning authoritarian communists of the genocide-apologist variety. They also run the lemmy.ml and lemmygrad.ml instances.
This is also why I signed up on kbin instead of on lemmy. The other lemmy instances are fine, but I don’t want to contribute to the influence of the lemmy devs any more than necessary. Hopefully they try to pull something stupid and get forked off the project.
Why would anyone downvote for that reason though? That reason is why I upvoted. I’m firmly left-wing but absolutely not far enough that I can support their BS views.
Oh don’t even get me started on the downvote brigades from angry leftists around here. Don’t you dare hold a moderate opinion around them, or they call you a nazi and tell you to go back to 4chan. You can read my post history. All I’ve ever expressed is the same sentiment expressed here, and I’ve been met with nothing but absolute vitriol.
Your post history shows you are solidly on the right end of the spectrum based on your expressed opinions while trying to justify yourself as moderate.
How? Why would you resort to lying? I’m pro choice, I despise Trump, I’m pro gay and trans rights, I believe in UBI for everyone (as well as keeping the free market in place), pro legalization (of every drug), pretty anti gun but I still believe it’s peoples right to own them, I think police should be completely reformed and prisons fundamentally changed to be places of rehabilitation. What opinion of mine shows I’m on the right end of the spectrum? Because I believe in nuance and civil discourse? That I think all humans deserve forgiveness and a chance to grow and become better? Please, do enlighten me.
The forced distillation of every single position to being somewhere on this “left” to “right” spectrum is the single worst thing to happen to modern political discourse, IMO.
I’m a fan of the “8 Views” test, which tries to position views along four different axes instead of just one. Four is still too few but it’s way better than what we’ve got now.
agree. Part of why I liked reddit was that I could customize my feed to ignore political diatribe (left and right) and just read the feeds that interest me. Lemmy is so infested with leftists that it spills over into every part of their community
One is the instances is owned by people who praise Stalin. Lemmy.world is not. And the code is open source so Lemmy is not really owned by anyone. All you have to do is switch instances.
