This feels like a forced reddit detox.

glennglog22@kbin.social to Reddit Migration@kbin.social – 195 points –

I, much like basically everyone here, have been avoiding Reddit when possible, and the content here just doesn't hit the same. My fried dopamine receptors were certainly screaming for stimulation early on but now I feel an urge to touch grass and breathe fresh air. What is this? Am I dying? I still hate the angry lightbulb in the sky.

In all seriousness though, I'll admit that I was kind of addicted to Reddit and now I don't want to go near it. Maybe this will turn a new leaf for me. If not here, I'll probably find some other way to satiate my dopamine receptors through more productive means.

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I'm not going to lie, I don't really use any 3rd party reddit app, and I like the official app and all that, but I've made the switch because I'm not going to support the CEO of the company doing the same thing that reddit mods get made fun of for. However, kbin is a bit more user unfriendly and it certainly is a learning curve. I haven't figured out how to see which magazines I'm subscribed to except for hunting them down from the list of mags. I haven't had any issues with the community yet, and I get how the federation works and all that, I just think kbin is missing some of the features that really made reddit a breeze.

It‘s not intuitive, but you can find your subscriptions in the settings

In terms of features kbin is kinda lacking, but considering that it‘s basically existed only for a few months and has been developed by a single guy it‘s pretty impressive

I‘m sure new features will be added relatively quickly now that a lot of people are willing to help out

I’m really impressed with all the work earnest has done and now is extremely busy doing.

look up top left of your nick on top of the site, there you will see a list icon (three dots with lines after them) Click on that, and then on subscribed I hope I uploaded a picture in my comment correctly :)

How to find your subscribed magazines:

  • Hover on your name at the top right of Kbin
  • Click on "settings"
  • On the bar at the top, select "subscriptions"

How to see your subscribed content on the home page

  • Hover over the icon to the left of your name (the icon is 3 rows of 1 dot and 1 dash)
  • Select "subscribed" to see subscribed content only

OR

  • Visit /sub on the server you're on (e.g. kbin.social/sub)

OR

  • Click on the "gear" icon just below your name
  • Look for "Show top bar" and click on "yes"
  • This will show an old school reddit style/reddit enhancement suite style top bar, with "All", "Subscribed", "Moderated" and "Favourites" buttons on the top left corner.

To see the magazines you're subscribed to, you have to go to your profile. There is a small bar (at least on mobile) next to your username, that starts with overview, threads,... And all the way at the back is subscriptions.

Try out lemmy too. Maybe the UI will fit you better. I made a kbin account too and I actually hope that kbin is the one that catches on, since it supports interaction with mastodon.

That said, I also really miss the subscribed subreddit bar on top of the page like old.reddit.com had.

It's available. Click on the gear icon below your name at the top right. A menu appears.

Look for "Show top bar" and click yes. Although it's not fully working yet; but it has the All/Subscribed/Moderate/Favourites buttons. The Mags listed seem to be random at the moment.

Depending on what you're using, but on PC if you go to the menu bars by your username there's an option to filter your feed by different categories including subscribed.

I agree though, would be better to have that in a more noticeable place eventually because it's not super intuitive.

Go to settings and at the top click on Subscriptions. It lists them all there.

Same, really. on Reddit, I mostly used the desktop interface so the third party app issue did not affect me directly. Still, Reddit emulating Twitter with the whole effectively killing third-party apps and likely putting everything behind a login-wall, combined with their CEO's tone deaf, smarmy responses... pushed me to jump into the fediverse after contemplating a move for months.

There's a lot of work to be done here, but I like what I am seeing so far. The best thing is that no one entity controls this, so bad actors' impact can be mitigated.

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I'm finding I post and comment at like ten times the rate I did on reddit. The actual user interactions over here are MILES better.

Agreed, Reddit was needing a culling, I’m all for this fresh start even if it’s less people. Hate to sound like a internet hipster but something can become too mainstream lol

Quality over quantity. Not a slight to reddit users still on reddit. I guess the lack of a karma system doesn't encourage karma farming. The lack of bots also help, i guess.

There's also the fact people on new reddit and the official app have "recommendations" in their feeds. The whole point of reddit to me was self-curation. Now it's just yet another algo-driven doom-scrolling hook.

yet another algo-driven doom-scrolling hook

This is such a brilliant way of putting it

you nailed it. Even when I went to reddit to read tech tips or check in with my gardening community, I got sucked into outrage topics that were pinned everywhere. It was slow how it happened too

Same thing over here. It seems that karma being absolutely irrelevant makes us more confident and more prone to participate in discussions and content. That, or maybe the lack of toxicity and vitriol.

That much is true. I love how the upvote/downvote system works on Kbin much better, since there isn't just one total karma sum number.

I'm not having any problems at all with my dopamine fix. The Fediverse has reached that critical threshold where there's no shortage of typos to make fun of with snarky replies and people willingly walking into dad jokes.

So yeah, I'm good 👍

I’m definitely more of a lurker, and I was commenting and posting on reddit here and there. But being on Kbin (for myself) i’ve felt like i’ll put my two cents down and actually have a conversation instead of getting a copy paste chain. Or i’ll see someone with a question and other users will actively be trying to help. to me it feels good to be somewhere where there is a lot of room for growth as opposed to being somewhere that’s plateaued.

I found my productivity went up as my doomscrolling went down, win-win!

Spez and the rest of the admins did a great job at chasing me away from the platform early. I'd wait for Apollo to die first, but I just can't handle the toxic air suffusing the entire platform lately. Not to mention, it's all but useless right now thanks to the protests.

Thanks to the forced hiatus, I've come to realize how bad the platform was for my mental health. Honestly, even if they fire spez and fix the whole API thing, I might end up taking an extremely long break from Reddit.

I used to go to bed after 3am sometimes reading that damned site. I think I did 1:30 last night. I really desperately needed to get away from there. Nothing about it was healthy. I can get my stupid depthhub and TIL style information from Wikipedia. I will miss the professionals chiming in until that starts to happen around here.

I definitely welcome the detox. I think I might have even felt it for real the first couple of days.

I am feeling the same thing. I left Reddit completely but Kbin and the Fediverse does not have the same addictive qualities. I see it as a good thing though I think it’s only a matter of time before it gets there.

My biggest issue right now is that Kbin does not seem to hide or blur NSFW content. It’s getting awkward to explain to my wife why the occasional hard core porn comes across my stream.

It might get more addictive but there's still not the same incentive to design for more engagement like on mainstream social media.

About NSFW content randomly popping up, I actually haven't seen any of it yet.
But still I wouldn't scroll any of the fediverse (or Twitter if I was still there) around people. Never know for sure what will pop up.

Aside from the hide NSFW toggle, another workaround is to simply toggle off thumbnails.

There are Kbin styles and scripts being shared.

This one blurs NSFW domains which helps a bit (among many other features): https://kbin.social/m/kbinStyles/t/27201/kbin-enhancement-script-QOL-updates-for-the-kbin-UI

There may be others in that Mag: m/kbinStyles/ (I'm on kbin.social so the link goes direct to there; I'm still not sure how to share fediverse links in a less server specific way!)

Also obviously you need to tick "Hide adult content" under settings, but that currently relies on people flagging content appropriately when posting. Hopefully Kbin and Lemmy will move rapidly to autoflagging content in whole communities as NSFW to make that better.

I think Hide adult content hides everything completely, even NSFW text posts

I posted maybe two or three times a day to Snoosite. Over here the community feels much friendlier. Sure, go touch grass if you wanna, we'll be here when you get back. Or… you could take us with you, using your phone and your third party app of choice ;)

Well, going outside is a good thing.

But if you still want online conversations then Kbin/Lemmy/Fediverse seems to be a viable ecosystem for that. Apparently Lemmy now has 370,000 users and Kbin has 43,000 users.

I actually like the UX of this site better than reddit it doesn't have anything to do with politics

It's been refreshing. Kbin and the Fediverse feel way more interactive than Reddit felt.

It feels like people actually want to chat a bit here as opposed to either ignoring or simply arguing like on Reddit.

Agreed, less people makes it also feels more personal, and less daunting to interact sometimes.

Exactly. While there are certainly spaces here we're people are vying for an argument, there are plenty more spaces where people just want to interact and discuss whatever topic is on thread.

It's quite nice, and does feel more personal as you say.

I feel that the "small" bump it has to be accessible makes it interesting for people that really want to access it. The 15 likes on a post feel like 15 real people, engaged, interested, and hit completely different from the 1.5k likes a post in reddit would get.

Agreed. On Reddit you'd routinely see posts with 1,000s, even 10,000s of likes, even absolutely garbage posts would have 100s just from lurkers scrolling through upvoting everything they see.

Even 1 like here feels more real than 100s over there.

I as well feel more engaged in every fediverse community I'm part of.
I've even been tooting on mastodon, when I don't even have a twitter. It's fascinating how a welcoming community can make you feel at ease.

feels like people actually want to chat a bit here as opposed to either ignoring or simply arguing like on Reddit.

That's been my issue with Reddit for a while now. People are extremely polarized on everything. You can't have a conversation about a casual disagreement without being downvoted to oblivion and people interpreting it as a personal attack. The smaller, focused subs are better, but still fall firmly into the groupthink dynamic of the rest of the site.

Exactly. Debating with people is fun, but it isn't enjoyable when literally everything but the most milquetoast of opinions ends up starting a viscious argument

Yesterday I sat outside in the yard with my dog and read a book for like six hours. One of many reasons I'm not going back to reddit.

I am liking not being on reddit. I am seeing no intrusive ads, No ads really.

And I am still figuring out how to do and find stuff. But that is expected.

Honestly, I've been off reddit for a long time. Reddit made casual lurking so hard I stopped bothering.

That being said, the fediverse has probably been the first time in some time where I've had fun on the internet. It has somewhat recaptured the old spirit of finding new interesting things and communities online, even if most of them are just lemmy instances, and the same kind of content that was on reddit.

This is how it was for me in the Twitter migration. I'm now a regular Mastodon user and it's a much less stressful community than Twitter was. I think kbin and lemmy may end up the same, the functionality of Reddit but without the ads and algorithmic cruelty and pileons. A healthier social media.

The fediverse is the way. But there's nothing wrong with browsing reddit, just as long as you remember to keep coming here. We need to get more reddit posts mirrored to fediverse communities. There are scripts that will update a lemmy community when its reddit counterpart gets a new post. This is great because it encourages conversation here even if a post started on reddit.

I felt that way last week when I started forcing myself to use Lemmy and deleted the RiF shortcut on my phone's home screen. But now it feels better.