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.
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.
Kbin doesn’t have the ability to sort comments by top. To me, that is the #1 most important feature, and not having it when it’s easy to do shows some real ignorance. The reason I come to these sites is to see the best comments on news of the day.
Top sorting is already available on the testnet. It will be further improved over time.
https://lab2.kbin.pub/
@Fizzee @abff08f4813c
It’s new, it takes time… Reddit wasn’t Reddit at first, either
“…shows some real ignorance”?
Brother, acting like a douche to people who are working and paying for you to be here shows some real arrogance. You’re not a customer here. There’s no ad revenue, no data collection, no money. If you want it so bad then do it yourself. Beauty of the fediverse is you can go make your own instance that does what you want it to do.
“No money” well, there can be some if you donate to https://www.buymeacoffee.com/kbin as per the About page at the bottom of the page.
3 of the top 4 results for me are fediverse related when searching for “lemmy”.
I don’t think its the signing up, its the lack of centralization/community. reddit was a singularity, the community is protesting en-masse because they felt they were all part of the same thing.
to me, the fediverse is a segmented… oddly connected group of overlapping communities. it lacks cohesion.
Agreed, and honestly this is why I don’t think these federated platforms will ever truly get to a large scale. The amount of disconnection on a service that is meant for connecting people together. Unless its changed, the fediverse will be only for the group of people who are quite comfortable with technology (beyond just downloading an app and creating an account). The complexity needs to be hidden.
The Fediverse is just the world wide social web. It lacks cohesion just the same way that the regular web does.
That’s going to limit its appeal for the people who see the internet as 3 cellphone apps. But that’s also ok. It doesn’t need to be for them.
If kbin/lemmy/the fediverse are to be something the average reddit user wants to migrate to, then a lot of ground has to be covered still. There is no “reddit migration” possible or remotely likely without significant change, as much as I want the fediverse to succeed and as cool as I find it
“If” is doing a lot of heavy lifting there, to be honest.
The average internet user has been ok with everything collapsing into a monolithic search engine and 4 giant social websites owned by 3 guys.
Maybe we accept complexity and expect a little more out of the people who end up here. People whole like what things have become can stay where they are.
The average user doesn’t want to migrate here, though. The average user is either content to keep their Reddit account or thinking on migrating to another big centralised platform.
Open-source decentralised platforms like the fediverse and its projects aren’t remotedly interesting for the average user.
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.
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.