Here are the issues for me:

• The fediverse is still below an active user threshold that makes it an effective replacement. I'm not saying that it needs to match reddit's size to function, but I joined reddit about 6 months before the digg v4 migration, and it felt more alive then than the fediverse does now.
• Much of the activity here seems to be about the reddit protests and migration away from reddit. This, combined with activity below a threshold necessary to make it feel like an effective replacement for reddit's core functionality is a little off putting. (Yes, I realize I'm in /m/RedditMigration, but I'm subscribed to a wide variety of magazines/communities and reddit migration content still dominates my subscription feed) The fediverse needs to show that it is capable of supporting itself with actual content, and I don't think it's proven that yet.
• I still don't feel there is any fediverse instance which feels as clean, elegant, and unclaustrophobic as the old.reddit.com UI. Whether that's just my own aversion to change or a legitimate comment on the quality of old.reddit I'm not sure, but there are some aspects of the UIs that are unquestionably rough, like full page loads which could be replaced with AJAX.
• The UX in general is a little rough in ways. The entire way the fediverse works is a little intimidating. If you're just looking down the barrel of the kbin registration form that's not a big deal, but if you need to choose an instance, or you're subscribing to communities/magazines and you you see 3 different communities with the exact same name, things can get a little overwhelming.
• The jargon which has developed around the fediverse is kind of awkward. Needing to differentiate between kbin and lemmy, magazines and communities... even just "fediverse" is a little weird.
• Even if all of the above problems are fixed, I wouldn't see myself abandoning reddit, just due to the sheer size of its activity. However, I would be likely to use reddit as a readonly site.

I think most of these problems have relatively straightforward fixes. As for the UX issues I'd like to see two things:

• an instance which combines communities/magazines into "hubs" which users subscribe to simplify the UX. Users could can then tweak their hub experience by toggling which instances feed into their hubs. So instead of having kbin.social/m/news, lemm.ee/c/news, lemmy.world/c/news, etc... you just have something like /h/news and you can configure what's included in /h/news. The mods of the instance's community would determine which communities feed into the hub by default, but users could customize this as they wish.

• Better cross-site user and reputation management. I'm not sure exactly how to make this work... but if, when you created an account on once instance, every instance its federated would somehow reserve or automatically create a matching account for you, then the anxiety around which instance to join can kind of melt away. The different instances could become windows into, effectively, the same account and same system.

Is there an easy way to shift an account between instances? Or do you need to start from scratch with a new account on each instance?

Is kbin a good place to set up shop? I don't really understand the advantages/disadvantages of different instances. I made an account on lemmy.world first, but I remade my account on kbin a few hours later because I like the kbin interface a little more.

Also, if there's no karma, what are the "reputation points" in my profile?

That makes sense, but why isn't kbin defederated then? I didn't need to do anything other than supply an email when signing up for kbin.

on top of that, beehaw has recently defederated with two of the biggest instances, lemmy.world and shitjustworks, meaning that moderation will probably be able to keep up more again

Why did beehaw defederate from these two instances in particular?

Thanks! I'll look into making mobile tweaks eventually. Right now mobile should be identical to vanilla, other than the vote color changes.

Thank you! :)

I'm using the mobile web version of kbin for the first time right now and it's pretty dang solid... I honestly might like it better than the desktop web interface. I spent this morning writing a stylus script to get something closer to old.reddit. (less whitespace, mostly, but a few other changes too)

Would be pretty cool if magazines/communities could form hubs around their subject. You could subscribe to the hub, and remove/add communities in the hub from other instances. And the community on your instance would control what instances are included by default in your hub sub.

Sure! Thanks for giving me a heads up, I haven't looked at microblogs at all with this stylesheet yet. Luckily it doesn't seem to break anything, but I'll work on making it a little cleaner like the rest of the sheet tomorrow after work.

I believe that option turns avatars off when looking at entry summaries (like when you're on the main page, or on a page for a mag) but there isn't a way to turn them off in the comments section.

I did actually end up making the comment section avatars larger so that I could put the voting controls under them right before I went to bed last night... thats one of the few places where my changes use up more space, but they give more of a reddit "feel" since doing that puts the vote controls close to where they were on reddit (old and new) and looks cleaner despite using more space...

idk how I feel about it, its technically less "slim" but looks a little prettier.

tagging @Lantech so they see this too

Stylus is awesome! I recommend checking out DarkReader as well. Even if you don't like dark mode, you might find it useful. It automatically recolors sites (by default, to a dark mode), but its highly configurable through various sliders and options that effect how themes are autogenerated.

When I go to a new website/app from desktop, the first thing I always do is tinker with darkreader, stylus, and whatever site settings exist to get a look and feel I like. :)

Hmm... no matter what I do I can't seem to replicate this... I'm going to make a top level comment in this thread later tonight or tomorrow and tag everyone who's said they're using the this stylesheet to ask for feedback on a few changes I've made that I keep going back and forth on. I'll also include this issue, maybe someone else has experienced something similar or can figure out how I can configure my settings to replicate the issue... I'd really like to figure this out

Yeah! I don't know how the new interface handles it, or how phone apps handle it, but on old.reddit I still see my list of multireddits on the left side of my main feed when I'm logged in.

I was kind of envisioning multimagazines and hubs as being two different things, where hubs would be created and joined by magazine mods, and then users would subscribe to hubs by default, where multimagazines would be user created and specific to that user, but one system could maybe do both...

@dannekrose thanks!

Yep! It should look good with any of the 5 kbin color themes.

So, I threw that together right before bed as an experiment. As I mentioned in this comment it actually uses MORE space, but looks a little nicer imo... but yes, I had to do some really hacky stuff with the positioning to get it to work with the grid used for comments.

If you wouldn't mind, could you provide a screenshot of the issue you're experiencing and/or the code you changed to fix it? That way I could fix if for everyone :) Do you use a non-standard font-size?

I'm not sure if you can install stylus in mobile safari. However, even if you could, I left the mobile (portrait) view largely unchanged. I'll eventually take a look at doing a proper mobile view, but I didn't want to deal with that headache yet lol

sweet, thanks!