What is the best way to make sense of the alternative federated communities?
kavides@kbin.social to 
Reddit Migration@kbin.social – 56 points – It's a little daunting to me that in some cases there are 2 or more communities between the federated alternatives; what's the best way to corral these? I had thought I could perhaps subscribe to Lemmy instances on kbin; is that correct? If so, how? Thank you in advance.
Edit: Well, this is sort of embarrassing but when I was searching for the other communities, I was accidentally searching threads instead of magazines and of course not finding anything so that's the answer as to HOW to subscribe [when it comes to kbin]. My point stands, though, that having so many communities is a bit cumbersome. I guess I will let it percolate a bit and see how it feels.
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So, back 15 years ago or so, most people who wanted to discuss topics on the internet, and who didn't want that discussion to be ephemeral, found forums dedicated to those topics.
There were thousands of forums. Millions of them. Some had dozens of users, while others had 10s of thousands. Many of them discussed similar topics.
Browning Lemmy or kbin is like browsing thousands and thousands of subforums across dozens of websites. Some of those websites have similar subforums, but they might be populated by very different people having very different customs and discussions.
Reddit kind of pushed everyone into a single room, and in a single room only the loudest people get heard. Hundreds of thousands or millions of subscribers just leaves most people shouting into the void, having no meaningful conversations, and rewarding performative antagonism and biting sarcasm.
You know, toxic shit.
The best thing to do with multiple communities here is find one that you like best, and engage with it. If there's something actually interesting going on in one of the other ones, trust someone to cross-post it. Some of these communities may not take root and grow, but some will, and they'll each take on their own flavour, and serve their members, not the machine.
This was one of the communities I came from, a Star Wars fan site Blueharvest.net. I was a moderator for a couple sections of its forum back in its waning days. The site admin devoted a lot of time and energy to the project (amazing person...love her to death), and eventually as people began to migrate to Facebook she decided to close the website's door.
Still miss that place a lot. I made some lasting friendships there because we were a very tight-knit community of about 100-150 active users.
I'm really curious to see if we start to see separate instances dedicated to separate topics like that. Imagine that forum you used to participate in on its own instance with all the same subforums/categories. The difference now is that you can federate that niche forum with the wider fediverse if you want to engage with a larger audience.
People are used to that singular reddit feel. I never started new posts on reddit because I would rarely get a response. If nobody catches your post in the new section of a semi-popular sub within an hour or so, it's gone. Or on a large sub, I had a post removed for being too similar to other posts even though a search didn't yield any results. When I asked which post it was similar to, I get a snarky comment from a power tripping mod about "not being a librarian" and muted for a week so that I can't respond as punishment for daring to question them. Come to think of it, reddit is kind of a shitty place with the exception of a few niche subs.
Now, I'm feeling much more inclined to start new threads since I feel I'd actually be able to have a conversation here.
This is so true. Not only the promotion of toxic behavior but also just the shouting into the void part.
I used to play EverQuest back in the day, and I frequented probably dozens of forums at the time. My guild had one, there was one that somebody set up for the server I played on, there were forums for all the different classes, unofficial pre-wiki forums (anyone remember AllahKhazam?), and of course the official forums on the EQ website.
Your comment just brought back a bunch of memories from those days. After using Reddit for so long, I had kind of forgotten what it was like back then. The biggest difference between then and now, I think, was how much more personal it was.
Of course, everyone on my guild forum knew each other because we all played together. But even on the server-wide forum that had a few thousand people, you saw a lot of the same names over and over again in different threads each day. It made it a lot easier to remember the person on the other side of the screen, rather than just a username. You'd actually get to know people, to an extent.
We celebrated birthdays and new jobs. We knew when someone had a death in the family. There were friendships, and even long-distance romances that happened in the game/forums. And drama, of course. There were always the loudmouths who liked to argue with everyone, but everyone else already knew that, so when the loudmouth tried to start something people would just say, "Oh shut up, So-and-so. No one wants to fight with you." Sometimes people would leave our guild to join one of the bigger guilds on the server, and it was legitimately heartbreaking.
It really felt like an honest-to-God community, rather than a bunch of anonymous commenters who happened to be talking about the same thing. Even in the smaller, more niche subreddits, I never got that feeling. Maybe that's on me for just habit-scrolling most of the time and not engaging. But I really do think that the sheer volume of people on a platform makes it difficult to form real communities.
I don't know if the federated structure will help to bring that back or not. But I agree that the "fractured" nature that some reddit refugees seem to worry about is likely more of a blessing in disguise.
I really wish there was a save feature, this is a great take I want to remember when people ask something similar later.
This is the sort of echo-chamber romanticism you can expect in miniature silos. Fostering meaningful heartfelt individual conversations, person-to-person relationships, and small communities was never the intention. Its first-order focus has always been about a singular aggregated place for links on topics of interest, voted on by the followers of a tag/community, and sometimes spawning interesting discussions about those links in a peer-voted manner. Kbin and lemmy are both "aggregators", like Reddit, not "social networks" or "forums". [Edit: ability is not the same as intention]
Subscribing to hundreds of forums and RSS feeds with slightly different foci just to try to find the actual interesting stories, in most peoples opinions given Reddit and Diggs success, was decidedly not the "best" experience.
No one is preventing you from using things how you want, to seek our miniature echo-chambers so that your personal voice can be louder, but it is hardly the appropriate response to espouse how "great" microcosms are when someone is asking about how to better aggregate in a... checks notes... a "content aggregation" system.
Fascinating that you feel like having discussions with orher people is tantamount to being in an echo chamber.
Here's the thing, Lemmy isn't a content aggregator. Lemmy-UI is, but Lemmy-UI is not the only front end to Lemmy. LemmyBB also exists, and it gives you a front end that looks like a phpBB forum. The API also let's people make other front ends, to suggest other uses as well.
Lemmy is just an ActivityPub user and group manager. There are lots of AP groups out there. Friendica, which looks like Facebook, uses them for their "forums" , and you can follow Friendica forums from Lemmy. Importantly, you can also follow Lemmy communities from Friendica, where they're indistinguishable from a Friendica forum. You can also follow chirp.social and a.gu.pe groups on here, which are third party groups for Mastodon and other Fediverse microblogs. They're full of people just having microblogs discussion threads, without titles and everything.
Lemmy is however we use it. It's all just Fediverse down here. But if all you want is to aggregate links, what do you need comments and non-linking posts for? Just use Pocket.
I like how you stated that big platforms like Reddit encourage toxic behavior such as performative antagonism and biting sarcasm, and then someone immediately shows up to defend big platforms by using performative antagonism and biting sarcasm.
I'm quite glad that you find missing the entire point fascinating.
Yes, I concede that you're right. You can certainly use lemmy/kbin only as a forum. You could certainly use Reddit as your "chat" platform too.
My entire point was that this person asked a question about trying to aggregate content; your toxic response was instead to talk about how terrible wanting that is and that they should just not want the thing that they were happy with. This is the type of high-quality "discussions" one can expect to bubble to the top in these silos.
Not to be diminutive to your point, but reddit discussion weren't high quality either and I have a feeling they won't be here too. They might be friendlier on here, written more 'eloquently' to give them a sheen of informedness, but unless people start from similar knowledge bases on topics, then meaningful discussion will never materialize.
I predict any technical/political topic on here will be a dumpsterfire of uninformedness just like it was on reddit. You can already see reddit-tier responses to popular topics. In the end the same few talking points will be repeated over and over again, right or wrong (mostly wrong or incomplete).
It's why I personally stay away from these completely and stick to sharing art/game stuff. It's far more sane.
Oh, if that was your point, then maybe you should have actually, I don't know, articulated it instead of waxing bitterly about "echo chambers" like someone who's never attended a party where they haven't been asked to leave.
An active community with a manageable number of people in it won't actually surface less content, it will just bury less of it, because people are only able to take in so much at a time. The only things a larger number of smaller communities does is make you aware of how much you might actually miss in a large, monolithic space.
That's not feeling a loss of meaningful content aggregation, that's just FOMO.
And you know, reading the top 10 posts in a subreddit that gets thousands of them a day doesn't make you well informed, and being the person in the room everyone else regrets meeting doesn't make you intelligent. Being a chronic assholes only correlates with being unhappy.
At the end of the day, social media is entertainment and socialization, not education. If you want to actually be informed about shit, go back to college and start reading academic and trade journals.