I don't understand why people still want to use reddit instead of moving to Lemmy or Kbin
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.
Im not sure how much I want people to leave reddit. There was a lot of garbage users and bots and such. Even if all actual individuals left reddit the corpo, bot, other things from some organization elements I bet would be a fairly large populace.
I would prefer if only those who wants to leave reddit left. That this would be an option only for those who are prepared to migrate, and not the redditor who likes their new UI and their official app. I think this place might be the wrong place for them. At this point Lemmy gives me the feeling of a web forum, which in all fairness is pretty cool tech wise (I really like the federated part) but also more or less just a web forum. I can't imagine what kind of negative experience the average redditor would have here..
"It doesn't look like reddit" "What are communities?" "Where are all the people?" Etcetera.
Which is fair, I think Fediverse has a bit of growing to do still. That being said, I can live without that kind of content here, and I'd rather have more quality over quantity here. That's just me though, I'm looking forward to seeing where this place ends up.
The communities I browse are either small (behavioral science/school) or full of elders who aren’t interested with switching platforms. So that’s a pretty big reason. Some of them have organizations that still have large presences on things like fb. Not having an account hamstrings a persons ability to stay current with professional topics…not great for a lot of fields. Now, this is just my particular instance. But I’ve heard a lot of the same from colleagues and adjacent professions. As for me, my account is deleted and I don’t contribute content meaningfully anymore. Which I suspect is another major downside to all of this, brain drain.
It's similar to playing MMORPGs and then switching to another game. You create an account with a lot of karma that people are proud of, you acquire those avatars and milestones, and you make friends. Then you start in a new place which is not user-friendly as the old one, and you lose everything from your previous account.
Many others, of course, are like me and do not care, but I believe the majority of people do.
Because it still lacks content, is pretty unpolished, and the nature of fedi makes it complicated for a lot of people. That's a lot of barriers, so it's going to be a slow growth from here while these issues get worked on.
Most people just want things to work, and once they've become accustomed to a platform, they're reluctant to learn a new one. Especially if it's just getting off the ground. It wouldn't surprise me at all if a lot of the early adopters here have gone through this before and know that things will get better (in terms of functionality as well as content) as time goes on.
Well, after what happened with /r/MildlyInteresting and others, more of us have are starting to feel as if Reddit, the company, has metaphorically declared a wanna-be "war" on the mods. Toss in the statements by Spez the other day about users, who gave the company loads of data for free, somehow being wrong to expect a certain degree of reciprocity and, I might expect a certain increase in migration rates. After all, I am now here. (Hello!)
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.
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.
There’s probably a large percentage of Reddit users that are still getting everything they’re looking for with the official app and what’s left of the site. Quick hits of memes are fun, and I do take some pleasure in correctly guessing the top comments in a thread.
The level of conversation on Kbin/Lemmy reminds me more of what old Reddit used to be like back in the day, and I think I’m okay with that being a smaller community than Reddit at large. I keep reminding myself and others that these communities don’t ever need to be as big as Reddit, they just need to be big enough.
Kbin and Lemmy are still fairly new so I do not anticipate everyone would be willing to make the jump if it means putting up with relatively small member counts. We just have to put in the extra effort ourselves to keep these communities fresh and active.
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.
It's genuinely hard and needs to be improved. Subscribing to a magazine that someone else on kbin has subscribed to already isn't too bad. Go to the magazine (eg, click what looks like the subreddit name in the post) and scroll alllll the way down and there'll be a subscribe button.
But if nobody has subscribed yet in the instance, it's hilariously hard. You have to search in the general search (not the magazine search) for specifically "[email protected]" and you should see a subscribe button then. You will not content in that magazine that existed before you subscribed. If that sounds terrible, it's because it is. Thankfully, most of the time, you won't be the first to subscribe to a magazine and thus can just use the magazine search or browse the front page to see posts.
PS: the subscribe option is also as the bottom of each thread. So you can alternatively just open a thread in the magazine instead of the magazine itself.
PPS: I've mentioned the subscribe button being at the bottom because that's the placement on mobile and I think many of us are on mobile. On desktop, it's in the sidebar.
That's the one thing that bugs me, federation should be automated, why does it need for someone to try to pull a community first before that starts? It should be like Usenet or DNS and self-propagate.
For mobile kbin users, you can tap the top left burger menu and scroll down just a little bit to subscribe to a magazine, instead of scroll past all the comments. The burger menu is just the side bar on desktop.
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.
for me discord is just not organized. There is no way im scrolling up on conversations when I have not been on for three days much less a week. I think discord only works if you are looking to be on social media all the time or at least daily.
Agree. No matter what discord is still essentially just a chat room imo. Even with bots, read only channels, pinned messages, etc., navigating and searching for stuff that I want is still as painful as any other instant messaging services.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Same problem as with any social network migration: the network effect.
Sometimes the largest equivalent Lemmy community for a subreddit is tiny, or worse, nonexistent. Sure, you can go create one, but unless you can also convince other people to join with you, it won't be much fun.
I don't think you understand the benefits of the Fediverse. With multiple sites you have alternatives to go to if the site goes to shit. Lemmy and kbin sites also appeal to different tastes, rather than having to endure one size fits all mentality. Being federated means you can subscribe to and access and post on other federated sites from kbin. No more monopoly abuse.
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