Fediverse won't replace Reddit as long as Lemmy is the main platform being promoted
Reddit Migration@kbin.social – 241 points – 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.
@ernest
@Fizzee @abff08f4813c @tbird83ii @BedSharkPal
Given that Kbin has more active users in the past month than any lemmy instance, I’m sure it’s been wild for you considering this was a side project.
Yeah, the pace is still crazy, but it's a completely different mental comfort when you're aware that you're not alone ;)
We're all with you!
Yup, we are all with you dude!
Java Dev here if there’s anything I can contribute with a couple hours a week!
kbin is written in PHP, but if you want to contribute, it's opensource on codeberg.
My condolences
r/ProgrammerHumor.. Oh oops, old habit.
We have an m/ProgrammerHumor !
hashtags work in the fediverse #ProgrammerHumor
And my axe!
Let me know if you need some more coffee!
;)
To everyone who may wish to, if you want to support ernest see below link.
https://www.buymeacoffee.com/kbin
The thing that helps Kbin the most is that it is, by far, the easiest to understand. Googling "Lemmy fediverse" gives a bunch of various links to other Lemmy instances, which are presented in a way as if they are separated from one another. Kbin appears as one site, one location for content aggregation. Although that "goes against the idea" of decentralization, most users are currently looking for their "one home to replace their old one home". The more users flock to one area and learn how it works, the more things will begin to take their proper shape, so to speak.
A feature we'll definitely want to have with kbin in the future is the ability to migrate accounts to other instances. That would mean that even though we're centralizing on kbin.social right now, people could move to other instances and spread the load across the fediverse without losing their history
I'm still learning the ins and outs of this place and the others, but part of me thought that was the feature of being federated. User accounts could seamlessly transfer from one instance to another.
Looking further into it, it looks like that feature exists for content, but not so much for accounts.
You can access content from an account anywhere, but not migrate the account.
I think it exists in Mastodon, it just hasn't been worked on yet for Kbin / lemmy.
Love you, Ernest 💕
Don't become like those overlords. Stay down to Earth with the rest of humanity.
Wishing you the best of luck, hoping Kbin succeeds! It has everything to be a great platform for the long run.
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/
Well good news, friend! Here is the kbin source code. Since it's so easy to do I look forward to seeing your pull request sometime today 😀
@PlagueShip
@Fizzee @abff08f4813c
It’s new, it takes time… Reddit wasn’t Reddit at first, either
12 years ago reddit would crash all the time. To make it worse they always told me I was the one who broke reddit personally by putting a message on my screen. My bad yall.
Yeah, I always thought it was a little unfair when it popped up telling me that "Briguy24 broke reddit!". But I never held it against you, don't worry :)
reddit used to not have comments or even subreddits (Among the first ones were r/programming and r/NSFW, fwiw).
"..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.
Even with the donations I doubt there's that much of a profit to being made. Servers are expensive, and there's no way that servers are the only overhead that ernest is dealing with.
Ignorance? Seriously?
To each their own but sometimes it's nice to just scroll through comments and see the varied replies instead of just fed the top/earliest on some posts. Imo it increases user engagement.
@plagueship Just so you know, the main dev @ernest replied to your concern
There is a bar at the top of the feed where you can switch how your feed is shown.
Rome wasn't built in a day
@BestOf might be of interest. The community sifts through the junk to share the most insightful comments.
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.
my first non-reddit hit is kbin.pub which is probably worse than join-lemmy
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.
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.
This. While things are new, and nothing has taken the place of "service that everyone uses", LGBTQA+ people are going to avoid the unsafe places which is going to push discussions further and further right. A "moderate" position that treats the bigots the same as people who just want to live and feel safe isn't moderate at all.
An actual moderate position there is to just not go out of your way to be an asshole. But some people want to be assholes and vilify those who may not be able to protect themselves. I can't stand the people who want to 'debate' human rights. No, that line of thinking isn't welcome going forward.
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.
Is this the fucking Jordan Peterson position? Whose speech has been compelled? A man walked into a Philosophy of Gender class this week in Canada and stabbed three people, so sorry if I'm a lot more concerned with the constant hate speech being levied against LGBTQ+ people than I am with the anomalous concept of "compelled speech" which has not as of yet been an issue and only exists in the fever dream of transphobes who want to actively misgender people while working in public positions in Canada.
That's a lotta words for "I don't respect what people want to be called". When you call someone by the wrong name and they correct you, is that also compelled speech to you? Because that's all pronouns are. By your definitions all of language is compelled speech, because you're being forced into using specific words to communicate.
It can be your opinion all you want, but it's one you should evaluate and change, because it doesn't make any goddamn sense.
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.
Michael Knowles called for the "eradication" of transgenderism at CPAC this year. Please shut up (E: corrected the wording he used, because he said "eradication" not just that it shouldn't exist)
Was he talking about the people themselves, or the phenomenon of being transgender? That is a very important distinction.
No, it's not an important distinction. If you remove the ability of trans people to transition to their identified gender then you're relegating many of them to suicide.
What if they never wanted to transition in the first place?
What the fuck is that supposed to mean? Trans people exist, so "eradicating" transgenderism only really has a couple options:
detransition all trans people and do not allow any other trans people to transition, socially or medically
kill all trans people
Maybe if you're really stretching the definition of "eradicate" you could add an additional option:
Then they don't transition. Unless you want to make up some imaginary enemy to validate your hate.
You haven't been listening.
Trans rights are human rights because trans rights are rights to bodily autonomy.
If you think bodily autonomy is a human right, then you think trans rights are human rights.
If you don't think bodily autonomy isn't a human right, then I guess have fun licking boots.
I mean, you don't have to be a tankie that defends North Korea or the uighur genocides, to respect those values? Which is the main problem with Lemmy devs and main instances.
You're gonna need to be a bit more specific than that, because "defends" often does a lot of heavy lifting when it comes to issues like that being discussed from a leftist perspective. Did they outright say North Korea is perfect or there was no human rights issues with the treatment of the Uighur people in China? Or did they say the situation in Korea is more complicated than is presented by the west because we've embargoed them for more than half a century at this point and point out how the Uighur genocides are not that different from what happens in ICE camps in the US to this day?
Bad things happen all over the world, and I don't think China or DPRK are perfect by any measure of the word, but presenting them as the axis of evil and ourselves as the good guys is just silly. It's not that they're good, it's that we're cartoonishly evil too.
What rights do trans people not have?
The Supreme Court ruled to give businesses the choice to turn down customers. I thought you guys were all about choice?
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".
No, no there are literally tankies. Lemmy.ml the ml means marxist-leninist and lemmygrad.ml is just straight up tankie CCP apologists
What's left wing about simping for dictators? Just because they called their countries "communist" to keep people from realizing, they were both effectively totalitarian dictatorships, and that's about as right as it gets.
@Crankpork they're left wing dictators? The wings are about economic policies. Communism is an ultra far left economic system like pure laissez-faire capitalism is an ultra far right economic system. You can be authoritarian or libertarian in either group. Or you can have more moderate economic views and still also have more authoritarian enforcement or extreme libertarian/anarchic lack of enforcement
Communism almost inevitably leads to dictatorship though. History has proven this. Capitalism can at least coexist with democracy to a degree. For all practical purposes, communism and dictatorship are a package deal.
I mean, that's exactly my point though. People seem to be knee jerk assuming that the "leftist" accusations against the .ml instances are standard issue right wing hyperbole against progressive liberals and that's not the case. It's just as much that progressives are complaining because we have no interest in associating with tankies.
I think the only real way for anyone to get it is to experience it. I thought it was bullshit propaganda too and I also thought I was relatively far left before first arriving at the .ml domain and further lemmygrad. I am still kind of surprised that we have a community out there that large that seems to legitimately identify with the 'tankie' ideology.
It's a bit of a culture shock realizing that you might just be a progressive moderate.
That's actually really good thing. In the U.S. not wanting to kill trans people makes you a "far left" person according to right-wingers. real "far left" people are pretty nuts, man. The vast majority of us are moderates who are now labeled as "far left" in the U.S. political discourse.
I'm liberal, but I'm not at the "censor users criticizing the Chinese government because they're communist" level. I was also skeptical of what people were saying about the lemmy.ml admins (the original lemmy devs), but they're anything but miquetoast progressive.
That doesn't represent all of Lemmy though. I just wouldn't recommend joining .ml
You need to do a little research before you get up on your high horse. They’re literal, self proclaimed communists. Lemmy was made because Reddit wasn’t left enough. They enjoy censorship and deny basic human right violations, and parrot CCP propaganda. They’re tankies. That’s why the devs instance isn’t federated with many of the major ones.
This is partly why kbin exists.
Wtf. I accidentally deleted my comment two times. Lemmy mobile UI fail!
Thought I was getting déjà vu while reading your comments lol. Glad you explained why I saw it so many times!
I agree with your foundational stance on using kbin vs. Lemmy due to the political beliefs (‘Tankies’) of those on Lemmy.
But, I’d never heard of them referred to as far left before. In my mind, Bernie is generally considered far left in the US (even though I wish he wasn’t).
I am glad that others provided their explanations of left vs. progressive because it helped me to better understand why you said left (instead of right).
In my experience, lemmy.ml and feddit.de (for example) are in more left wing then milquetoast progressives. It's faszinating and refreshing, and I don't mind people speaking their minds. But I prefer moderate, too.
I would rather say that the average Redditor is milquetoast progressive. Heck, I start to really enjoy this phrase 😉.
As my feed is populated by a lot of German threads it is worth to note that moderate depends a lot on the country you are from. Bernie Sanders would probably be considered part of the moderate left in most of Europe while he is considered to be far left in the USA.
It also depends about what specific topic we are talking about.
In many places in Europe, being a social democrat when it comes to economy (like Bernie) might be considered pretty moderate. But then certain attitudes about non-binary pronouns or supporting special considerations for specific groups of people, are seen closer to "far left".
You don't see the amount of virtue signaling in Europe that you see in USA media productions, for example.
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.
Why would anyone downvote for that reason though? That reason is why I upvoted. I'm firmly left-wing but absolutely not far enough that I can support their BS views.
Most likely because American politics frequently pound the talking point of "far left politics" when talking about the political opposition (moderate left at best from an overseas PoV), to the point where American liberals have been conditioned to assume that they are being spoken down to when this type of language is in play. American leftists are also very anti-authoritarian on average and do not appreciate being lumped into the same category as tankies by simple virtue of people only discussing left versus right.
It gets weird when we talk about this stuff on only one axis (left-right) rather than two (left-right/libertarian-authoritarian, though that's still a simplification). Specifically, I'm an anarchist, which means I'm part of the "far left". Anarchists, along with "ultra"-communists, are seen as being to the left of Lenin/Stalin-style communists. Saying that the problem with the lemmy devs is that they're "far left" implies that people like me are the same as tankies, and we kind of resent that.
@cacheson This exactly. It’s why I didn’t join there and wound up here instead. Communism is a misnomer at this point - all that is left is the authoritarian/totalitarian/Putinistas. Tankies and Putinistas are the same to me. Trumpists are the same to me. The only time I’m associating with those people is across from them at their next US insurrection.
@Fizzee @bluGill @hydro033
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.
Because we saw what happens with Reddit. People come in claiming to be “moderate”, and very quickly shit like T_D starts popping up. Also center of the road politics in the US has had rights taken away from millions of people in just the past year, and it’s going to continue to erode them from more. I’m not telling you to change your political stance, but I am telling you that people see them as an attack because they have literally been attacked by “moderates”.
It's fair to want to ostracize those who claim to be "moderate" who are anything but, absolutely. Concerning civil and political rights, there should BE no moderate. Either you support people's fundamental rights or you do not. Either you support everyone's right to love, sex, and associate with consenting adults or you do not. Either you support people's right to choose what to do with their bodies or you do not. There's little left to discuss.
Having said that, the US (and the world generally) has a terrible record, left or right, in supporting people's civil and political rights. I'm overjoyed that at least left leaning folk now support those rights, but it wasn't a decade or two ago that those on the left of the political spectrum were parroting many of the same things that the right now parrots. "Marriage is between a man and a woman." "Don't ask, don't tell." So while I am glad they've shifted, I'm always concerned that if the political winds shift again, those in power will sacrifice individual rights in the name of maintaining said power as they did before they decided that advocating for our rights was going to keep them elected.
"Moderate" doesn't necessarily mean centrist or unalienable, it's antithesis is extremist. Being moderate and supporting peoples rights to be who they are just means taking a more practical and slow approach.
You need both moderate and more extreme views of progressivism, otherwise you get drowned in either. They support each other, they don't necessarily oppose each other.
Your post history shows you are solidly on the right end of the spectrum based on your expressed opinions while trying to justify yourself as moderate.
How? Why would you resort to lying? I'm pro choice, I despise Trump, I'm pro gay and trans rights, I believe in UBI for everyone (as well as keeping the free market in place), pro legalization (of every drug), pretty anti gun but I still believe it's peoples right to own them, I think police should be completely reformed and prisons fundamentally changed to be places of rehabilitation. What opinion of mine shows I'm on the right end of the spectrum? Because I believe in nuance and civil discourse? That I think all humans deserve forgiveness and a chance to grow and become better? Please, do enlighten me.
The forced distillation of every single position to being somewhere on this "left" to "right" spectrum is the single worst thing to happen to modern political discourse, IMO.
I'm a fan of the "8 Views" test, which tries to position views along four different axes instead of just one. Four is still too few but it's way better than what we've got now.
What you call "moderate" is likely viewed very differently by other people, since I assume you're from the US, and US politics has become a far-right fucking shitstorm. The overton window has shifted so much over there that "moderates" are degenerate cunts to more reasonable people.
Yeah, I'm with you. I'd say it's a serious problem that will drive potential users away.
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.
Well of course it is, do you want to emulate reddit or not?
You're being downvoted because people don't understand you're not talking about "far left" like some Trumper. You mean literal tankies, which absolutely yes some of the Lemmy Devs are as well as Lemmy.ml. It's also a reason I selected Kbin.
While I'm quite left wing, I have huge problems with them (as well as the main dev) being authoritarian, genocide-defending tankies. That praise China, Russia and DPRK. It's maddening.
What is your definition of moderates? As I see it a moderate in Europe is vastly different to a moderate in the USA.
I think it is hard to figure out what you understand as moderate without seeing knowing about what you political opinions are.
And lemmy has a commie problem too.
I came to kbin hoping for exactly that, a moderate platform, and these upvote-downvote patterns are extremely concerning.
This you?
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.
Then pick a server that’s not run by “the people behind Lemmy”. Solved.
Reddit is almost 20 years old now?
Do you expect Lemmy and Kbin to be an immediate replacement or an replacement at all?
Agreed. I am very confused by most of these types of comments. “Why isn’t this newer thing with a smaller user base as robust and efficient as a 20yr old platform?” Things take time. Not to mention it SHOULD also take time, since these instances would not be able to hold the amount of users Reddit has. I’m sure many people complained about Reddit when they jumped from Digg.
I dont, but i understand people expecting kbin or Lemmy to be replacements bc people have said that theyre replacements for Reddit and to move there. And tbh kbin is not bad (havent used Lemmy much)
I'm on kbin now because I have no idea what I'm doing.
based, me too
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.
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.
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...
This is a great take on the whole thing. Well said. But maybe the lack of centralization is why is seems so much more welcoming and friendly. Or maybe it’s just new and small. I almost never posted on Reddit in 6 years, but here I feel more part of the conversation because it isn’t one big overwhelming behemoth that I get lost in. Instead of a little fish in a big pond it feels more like a regular fish in a bunch of puddles.
I tried signing up on various instances of lemmy for 2 weeks prior to the shut down. it failed over and over, kbin was recommended if I didn't have any particular reason for choosing lemmy instead. I'm grateful. I hope we don't kill Ernest though.
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.
From my own experience as a user, it doesn’t matter whether you choose kbin or Lemmy in terms of what content you see. However, yes the look and feel for new users is much better with kbin (especially on iOS). Lemmy has some amazing front ends in development though that will eclipse kbin very soon. It’s just a matter of time.
I disagree, with lemmy there seems to be no activity in my subfeed and I dont understand how to add more "subreddits", with kbin I just go to "magazines" and subscribe to the ones I want
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.
It doesn't need to replace Reddit.
And it won't, for many reasons. The biggest being that people don't like change.
But it can give, and has given, people a place to go who are ready to be done with Reddit. People who are ready for something new, not just "Reddit, but with a different name".
Until Reddit's website disappears, Reddit will march on. Those of us here are just those who can no longer tolerate feeding that beast.
Lemmy devs have also said they aren't interested in replacing reddit
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
If the devs coming from the 3rd party apps killed by Reddit can integrate like they say they're going to then it'll REALLY help with all this. Just have to wait and see.
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.
We don't want the fediverse to replace reddit. Specially in term of popularity. What made reddit collapse in quality is the amount of people on the platform. The 3rd party app thing was only a trigger for many people. Many others have seen the quality of the content of reddit nosedive with time. The festival of memes and one liners has been described again and again. We didn't have this during those few weeks here. We will have it if the platform becomes too popular. How could it be otherwise? How can you picture a popular platform without the popular content? The platform filtering through some hurdles is a good thing.
Even now you can already see the bad behavior of redditor being reflected in the content. And it's only starting.
People have to come out of interest. Otherwise your platform will be filled with 1-click meme posters, and that's probably not what you want.
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.
I don't care if it replaces reddit. I care that it remains free of corporate control.
More or less exactly what happened with me. Bounced off of Lemmy 4-5 times trying to decide on an instance and when this and Squabbles was recommended it seemed more intuitive.
Another option would be a lemmy instance becomes dominant and that hits the top SEO spot. Then most people use that to browse until they want to sign up and then either choose that or look around for others.
I choose kbin over Lemmy because most Lemmy instances don’t work for me. I made accounts on Lemmy.world, beehaw, and here. Kbin is the only one I can log in on all of my devices. The Lemmy instances only work on my Mac, when I try to log in on my iPhone or windows machine the login just spins.
So this is my home now
Lemmy and kbin are still very much in their infancy while Reddit has been around for nearly 20 years. There's definitely going to be growing pains since it's still so new and for right now at least most people that are going to join are people that are leaving Reddit so it's probably going to remain a fairly niche thing at least in the short term.
Secondly, I don't think they have to necessarily replace Reddit and they both could go on and do their own things. Honestly, even during my time on Reddit I found the smaller communities were better than large or default communities IMO. I just find that smaller communities have better engagement where ones that are too big your post or comment will end up getting buried.
Even if Lemmy or kbin don't overtake Reddit, I think there's still a place for them.
All the android apps don't have support for kbin, I'm assuming its same for iOS. So kbin probably won't go anywhere really until that changes...
I don't want the fediverse to replace reddit. I just want a place to post and share stuff without corpo baggage.
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".
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.
I am fine with that. Fediverse is good as it is without all the reddit simpletons.
Me, reading this through lemmy (feddit): hmmm yes
But for real, I see what you mean with the first impression at join-lemmy.
User experience is an extremely important part of on going growth. I feel like even with the migration under the circumstances, the onboarding and learning curve for new users is very difficult on kbin or lemmy vs reddit or other mainstream socials.
This may seem trivial to motivated users to go through the setup and learning required but for further migration and adoption the UX definitely needs significant improvement. I haven't seen or heard much being said on this subject regarding the fediverse in a serious way.
Products that are already simple to understand and use, spend time refining and reducing friction for growth and retention. I know these products are in their early stages but while the fediverse has its pros, I am concerned that the rate of improvement of UX for the fediverse will be very slow. But I am hopeful that people will keep pushing to make it better.
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
I agree woth all your points except for one
I see no problem here. RIP Lemmy, fucking legend
I tried Lemmy yesterday but today, probably thanks to the influx of new users, it's been extremely slow to the point of unusability. So now I'm trying out kbin which seems to be running faster (although still slower than old.reddit). Ignoring those issues, I can't decide yet which I like more.
I'm also still kinda confused about all the Federation stuff. So supposedly you should be able to interact with kbin hosted stuff on lemmy and vice versa and I can indeed see posts from lemmy on kbin's "front page" but what if I happen to come across something directly on the lemmy.world website (or any other Fediverse instance for that matter, where I don't even have an account), is there an easy way to access it from kbin.social?
I feel like the decentralized nature of Fediverse is at the same time its strength but at the same time makes it harder for users to switch.