2y ago

Fediverse won't replace Reddit as long as Lemmy is the main platform being promoted

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.

84 comments

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.
- 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.
- 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/
  
  @PlagueShip
  @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.
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...
Not sure what universe you are from but in my reality that's just bullshit. What you said is there but right next to the "set up a server" button is a "join a server button". And right above the scary code pictures is another "join a server button".
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.
- It's also a hell of a lot clunkier. For all the talk of federation, it can be a total pain in the ass to view content on a non-native instance. Edits not loading, boosts/upvotes not taking, some posts just not showing up at all...
- 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
- 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.
I do like a lot of things about Kbin, and visually it's much better than unmodified Lemmy in a browser, but it also has its own share of problems, not least with intuitiveness. I don't understand why communities are called Magazines, and the terminology of "Favorite", "Reduce" and "Boost" are very confusing to me. Trying to make a new thread might lead you down a microblogging path instead since "Post" sounds more like a new thread than "Article" to a newcomer.
There also seems to be much slower sync between Kbin and various Lemmy instances compared to intra-sync between lemmy instances themselves. Kbin also doesn't have an API (yet?), but a more tech savvy individual than me will have to say how big of a deal that is.
Both Sync and Boost have large and loyal userbases and will probably attract plenty of users to Lemmy, and good Third Party Apps might help with first impressions and onboarding for new users.
Ultimately though, content is king. I liked Kbin better when I first made my accounts, but then we had a Race Week in Formula 1 and the community here was dead while discussions were happening on Lemmy, and since the sync was slow so I ended up over there.
Me, reading this through lemmy (feddit): hmmm yes
But for real, I see what you mean with the first impression at join-lemmy.
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
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.
Reddit is almost 20 years old now?
Do you expect Lemmy and Kbin to be an immediate replacement or an replacement at all?
Until search engines and LLM companies start crawling the fediverse, this will continue to be a niche of the internet, albeit perhaps large one at that.
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.
- 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.
  
  Because it implies that basic, milquetoast progressive values are "far left".
  
  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.
  
  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.
- 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.
- 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.
- What's the moderate position between "trans people should not be allowed to exist in society" and "trans rights are human rights"? You have to understand every time you or anyone else says some shit like this you're basically crying that people are taking a position instead of just watching the right wing try to ruin peoples lives.
  The supreme court literally ruled to allow businesses to discriminate against people based on sexuality yesterday.
  
  The problem is that nobody (or at least very few people of actual influence) are legitimately saying that trans people shouldn't get to exist. I have yet to see any politician, for example, express such a belief.
  
  I firmly believe everyone has the right to live freely and to find their own path, provided they don't harm others. Hate speech and violence have no place in our society, and I wholeheartedly stand with the trans community in advocating for their protection.
  Nonetheless, here's a viewpoint I have that I know is not accepted, but I'll share it anyway. I believe the compulsion of speech, particularly insisting that all of society adapt their language to accommodate individual identities, is a terrible approach. The notion of forced speech is problematic to me, and worries me greatly.
  That said, I believe it's important to work towards a society that respects every person, but without mandating how we perceive them. Life's journey is all about confronting adversity, and part of this involves learning to navigate the world as it is, not necessarily as we'd like it to be. Instead of dictating specific definitions, it might be more beneficial to cultivate a culture of empathy, understanding, and open dialogue around these issues. This perspective is unpopular and contentious, but it is a conversation that we should be willing to engage in.
  Anyways that's what I see as the moderate take, and it's what I believe. I had to tiptoe pretty hard there and I'm sure what I said still comes across as hate speech to some but I don't feel it is. It's just my opinion. I wish there was a place I could express it and have an open debate with people about it. We can't eliminate half of society, and we're going to have to learn how to empathize with people we disagree with in order to actually see where they are coming from.
- I came to kbin hoping for exactly that, a moderate platform, and these upvote-downvote patterns are extremely concerning.
  
  This you?

84 comments