Preface: I am not an engineer. I am not a software guy. But I play games and use websites, and have since i was 8.
If you make the website usable, people will use it.
Reddit and Twitter had a symbiotic dichotomy where they were the embodiment of “causal brainfarts and reactions” vs “long thoughts and thorough argument”. One tweet with an exclamation and some emojis, vs a 7 paragraph breakdown or tutorial in a technical subreddit with hyperlinked sources. Both platforms had just enough to give what people needed in an easy to digest manner.
Kbin (and by extension the Fediverse, which I still do not understand after using this website for a week) just doesnt have that easy to drop in rabbit hole experience that these major platforms do. BUT IT CAN.
But right now pictures are smooshed and theres still huge empty space. It feels old, theres weird bugs like the UI flashing light mode on refresh, and other problems that make a user go “ick”.
Fill my screen with content and let me touch it, interact with it, react to it, let me repost it, let me subscribe to that community or user, and maybe preview THEIR feed or posts so I can get MORE content.
The major companies are at a plateau and know they have to start farming our clicks: thats why we see trends like Tiktok’s “knock on the screen to keep engagement” or “satisfying” videos pasted together with political opinions. Its why every company refuses to innovate while maintaining they deserve more money when they are already the monopolistic hegemony. If kbin can provide a more honest, more personal, more legitimate content sharing experience anonymously, it can explode into the new “front page” as reddit likes to call themselves.
I really like the idea of an integrated Twitter/Reddit alternative, that shares content across “front ends” like Mastodon and reformats information to be readable based on the users preferences. If we (and by we I mean you, the coder who can actually help this open source project) can come up with a design ideology that fosters curiosity, and enables connections, instead of force feeding you ads and sponsored content, that will be the future.
Im really, really hoping the internet heals from this huge burning that Elon and Spez have put on us. I know it can be done.
EDIT: i want kbin to the the place where Iranian women go to be heard. We should strive to be a platform for sharing an education. For connection, not profit, and not propaganda either. #womenlifefreedom #slavaukraini #freepalestine #fucktheccp #beexcellenttoeachother
EDIT2: also NOTIFICATION?! like there is no indication when i go to kbin that this post has any interaction. I have to manually go to the post.
You say you’re not a software engineer, but your intuition is sound. You know a rough website when you see it, and you can articulate how, and that’s valuable information to a developer.
But as a software engineer, I can tell you why. And it is because making software is hard, and damn anyone who tells you it’s easy. Ernest, as anyone who would be in his position, is probably overwhelmed with core programming, fixing security vulnerabilities, and keeping the site online. I’m sure UI updates are on his mind, just not at the forefront.
No piece of software is a utopia on its first major outing. And kbin has many technical hurdles it must overcome before it worry about it’s presentation. A sculpture cannot be polished before it has been shaped.
Second this, while user feedback is important and it’s great to see such passion for this project, hopefully we can all keep just as much patience.
Honestly the progress we’re seeing so far seems pretty astoundingly fast considering how few people are working on it.
There’s a number of small enhancements already out there waiting to be merged into the main code line. I submitted one myself. :)
Nice, I need to check the git maybe try help do my part too.
No piece of software is a utopia on its first major outing. And kbin has many technical hurdles it must overcome before it worry about it’s presentation. A sculpture cannot be polished before it has been shaped.
I agree in principle (devops engineer), but a user retention issue has abruptly entered the fray due to the recent spike of interest. While I’m the sort of person who prioritizes core functionality and stability almost every time, this is one of those rare situations where I’d consider it important to triage usability and aesthetics alongside those. That’s way more than Ernest can handle on his own, but it’s up to him to recognize it as a potential priority and start reaching out for help so that the problems can be solved in tandem.
Not everyone is going to agree with me on this one. Pretty sure a lot of people predating the Reddit surge are happy to take a “when it gets done” approach to this sort of thing and aren’t worried about permanently retaining the Reddit crowd and sticking it to /u/spez. A significant portion of users do though, and there is a non-negligible amount of IT talent to be tapped from those enthusiasts.
(Yes, I put my money where my mouth is, but 1) coding is not one of my top vocations and 2) it’s up to Ernest whether he wants any assistance on the things that I’ve offered to help with.)
All points well made.
I’m with you on this one. I had to push through a bunch of initial confusion and learning curve to even figure out how to find things on this site. Subscribing to magazines from other instances is a chore that seems to require some trial and error? What? Subscribing to subreddits is one click. I’m patient enough to deal with it and I like it here now, but this place needs to be idiot proof soon if federated reddit is going to take off.
I’ve taken a stab at a client-side theme here that should be easy for people with zero technical literacy to install. The main goal was to parameterize the options and create a more forumlike layout. This is merely a stopgap measure, but has greatly improved the readability for me.
That’s gorgeous
No u r
It feels old, theres weird bugs like the UI flashing light mode on refresh, and other problems that make a user go “ick”.
No one told ya?
I mean, no, “they” didnt!
Its a frustrating but special moment, being early enough that your dissatisfied but can watch it grow. Well just have to see what happens.
And yet it already feels much more stable and pretty than Lemmy.
Although we still get the occasional server 503’s.
Pretty sure Ernest said there’d be some instability here and there as they rolled out back-end changes they could only test at scale over the next few days.
You’re absolutely right. Taking a page from Steve Jobs, the intuitiveness of the interface can make the difference. However let’s remember that a few weeks ago these platforms were just niches, experimental, few even knew about them. Many bugs that have come up in the past week or even few days ago were because they didn’t occur when only a few people used the UI. This is indeed a trial by fire.
Most definitely. But all it takes is one visionary with one repository of a good idea to inspire a community.
The growing pains will hurt, but being open source alone gives me more confidence than I have in CEOs of competitors. Im still trying to figure out this whole “Federation” business with fediverse. If they can make it more digestible it will certainly eclipse the current lot.
And, uh, a good amount of time and effort. Good software doesn’t happen overnight, and often goes through at least a dozen revisions before something good enough to release to users actually comes out.
I don’t even know why the user needs to be exposed to the Fedivere. A “normie” interface would group all of the related subs in the server’s federation and display them as one sub. It doesn’t ask the user which server to join, it asks what the user’s interests are and plops them into a server that matches their interests.
If someone is coming here from Reddit to post their butthole they really don’t want to have to go through a sign up process that throws so much technical “yuck” at them they’re probably just going to take their butthole pictures and go back to Reddit because this looks like geek stuff that requires too much “figuring out” at this Lemmy thing.
Won’t discourse in the Fediverse be better off if butthole posters are discouraged from signing up?
For me, part of the reason that the concept of the fediverse is hard to grasp comes from there not being any good visual representation of how it works, like a “metro transit map.” It also doesn’t help that the way you “get to” other instances’ content is by using awkward @ notation. Kbin’s top left info next to Threads is handy but only if you know how to read it. I’d prefer to see something more like:
Host: <instance name>
Magazine: <magazine name>rather than the current cumbersome “/m/<mag-name>@<inst-name>”
Also, and this may be a culture thing that I’m not privy to, but I find it weird that there’s no quick way to tell which instance a user is commenting from (without interacting with the page in some way) [1]. It seems that there’s this default intent to make the federated nature of the fediverse somewhat invisible, and I think the better option would be the exact opposite. By making the different instances (and their users) immediately and easily recognizable, it will condition new users to better understand what the heck is actually going on under the hood, and lead them to discover things about the fediverse that they wouldn’t otherwise have known was even stuff to know.
[1] Right now I can hover over a username and get a pop-up card telling me what instance they’re from - indicated as @<user>@<instance>. I feel it would be considerably more helpful (and habituate new users more easily) if the username above the comment gave that info explicitly without having to hover over. Maybe something like “<user> from <instance>”.
That’s one of the things the excellent Kbin enhancement script fixes. User names and communities all display as <item>@<instance> everywhere, unless they’re local to the instance you’re browsing.
I find that change alone makes things much more navigable, and it really should be implemented by the devs sooner than later.Your link is pointing to a playstation 2 youtube video
How the fuck? Anyway, it’s fixed now
That was my initial reaction as well, everything is VERY developer focused and so “normies” won’t like the site if it stays that way. Actually, the whole fediverse thing is a complicated mess that only devs truly understand how to navigate.
Now, we do have to understand that this is very very early and stuff like this is to be expected. No product was perfect at the beginning stages and specially the UI takes a backseat.
That said, I think the UX is instrumental for kbin or lemmy to truly take over and appeal to the masses.
Then again, I’m a UX/UI designer so I might be biased ;)
Keep in mind though that kbin is actually newer than lemmy, (only a month old?) so it truly is more barebones than reddit. The developers are working hard though :) 2 days ago, becuase of the server load, I couldn’t even stay logged in on kbin, it was that buggy, but a day later it was stable
As a note, the Kbin notification settings are almost all turned off by default! Turning them on is a game changer!
It is insane that they are off by default
wait, there’s notification settings?
Yep! On mobile if you click on your name there’s a drop-down with settings and you can alter them there. There’s also a different settings cog that handles UI settings like infinite scroll and a sticky header.
It’s there on desktop too I just can’t remember exactly what the UI looks like for that.
Check out https://kbin.social/m/kbinStyles for some ui enhancements with userscripts
This is great but it won’t really help the majority of users, who live underneath the tip of the iceberg. What would be nice is if there were a way, within kbin’s interface itself, to mod in styles like that without having to install a *monkey and download files.
I believe there are requests on the codeberg issues tracker for these to be added. I agree that these aren’t an easy thing for everyone, especially on mobile
That and a good default home page. Right now on “all” and “hot”, all I see is two day old posts. It’s ridiculous.
Which posts you see depends on the instance that you’re viewing from. If you’re on a really small instance and content from outside (e.g other Kbin or Lemmy instances) isn’t viewed much, your instance will not backfill the threads.
This essentially means that until at least one person follows a given magazine/community, posts from said community will be invisible. This is some jank regarding Federation that many people are currently working on improving, but efficiency is still a huge concern.
Everyone says it doesn’t matter which instance you use, that “all” should be all or something. Also still doesn’t make much sense to see 2 day old posts in “hot” if there’s any engagement at all.
I’ve got my settings to not include federated sites* and my first page or two of ‘all’ is fairly current with most things being 12 hours old or less. I also checked out new a few times yesterday and it took 4 or 5 pages to hit one hour-old posts.
*I’m kbin-only because of all the porn on other instances that doesn’t seem to tag itself NSFW (looking at you, lemmynsfw) and therefore isn’t hidden/removed by my settings here. I know there is a solution being planned to address this in a future update. I’m aware there are ways to address this if I were using a desktop browser but I’m not and don’t plan to.
Where is this setting?
I’m on mobile so not sure if it’s the same for desktop…
At the bottom of this thread just below the comment box are two icons. The one on the left is where the federation on/off setting is and the one on the right (gear) has the display settings.
OP is talking about Kbin, though 🤔
…good point, i’m dumb.
So am I downloading ZIPs and running their files? Why? And many other questions are novice user may have.
Are you hacking my mainframe to steal my cloud?
If you actually clicked the links, you would see you’re not the only one who is bringing up UI issues.
No, these are projects to improve the state of lemmy, they are in order
tafkars-lemmy, this will allow reddit apps to work with lemmy by simply replacing the URL, essentially. Meaning we’ll have all the 3rd party apps that reddit broke.
automatically staying on your instance when provided links to others, this will make it so that you don’t get kicked to another instance when somebody gives you a link to a community, they’re also adding instance-agnostic linking.
the final thing automatically compiles communities into lists, so that you can easily find all of the communities of a certain type and subscribe to them all automatically, and look at them all at once.
EDIT2: also NOTIFICATION?! like there is no indication when i go to kbin that this post has any interaction. I have to manually go to the post.
Hi, moderator of m/quickstart here.
Here’s how to get notified when someone replies to your thread or comment.
Reading these threads makes me wish I could do more than just donate. I’m a tradesman, not tech, and I’m utterly incompetent in this regards. But I am more behind this movement than I have been anything in a long time. I feel like I got the human spirit in me real strong. It’s quite nice. I’ll try to tend the flame while you guys work out the hard stuff.
But right now pictures are smooshed and theres still huge empty space
https://github.com/soundjester/lemmy_monkey
You’re welcome.
in what world do you think a github link is helpful to a normie tho?
Thats what I mean: it should be more accessible and more usable natively. If there are solutions out there open source, it would be nice to have a sort of “App Store” or similar experience, like a plug-ins or Extensions menu or something more user friendly.
if they (we?) can make things like that happen, it would be revolutionary IMO.
it should be more accessible and more usable natively
Basically I’m really on your side, with Mastodon I’m also one of those complainers who try to get the developers in a direction that stimulates newcomers and does not deter them.
But in this place? I’m at this place for 2 years now. It’s been an exile here until 2 weeks ago for a triple-digit number of marxists and shitposters no CEO want to see on their platforms. Developed by 2 enthusiastic, equally radicals in their spare time. And now thousands and thousands come in a week and make claims.
Let me tell you something: When suddenly the rush came on Mastodon, a lot of damn dedicated people got to work in a few weeks. I take my hat off to what they’ve done with Elk for beginners and hockey moms. Now, developers not only of Reddit apps have also already declared to be at work. This isn’t about a nice essay.
All this crap is now going on a week before the world public. How about keeping your feet still for once?
The smooshed pics are on kbin though.
