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!
My condolences
r/ProgrammerHumor… Oh oops, old habit.
kbin is written in PHP, but if you want to contribute, it’s opensource on codeberg.
Kbin is PHP/Symfony, but people are writing tools in various languages, not to mention clients. I haven’t looked at the client repositories, but I assume that some, if not all, of the codebases for them are Java.
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
And my axe!
Reddit really is here
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.
His own knowledge, skills, abilities, and time are almost certainly worth more than he is receiving in donations. Dudes a skilled programmer/developer and is putting serious work into this. If he was putting his time and effort into freelance work instead he’d be building a heck of a nest egg.
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.
@BestOf might be of interest. The community sifts through the junk to share the most insightful comments.
Rome wasn’t built in a day
That’s pretty lame friend
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.
Federation already solves this, mostly. If kbin.social disappeared, other places like kbin.cafe and kbin.lol would have copies of the magazines, so content wouldn’t be lost. And the community could regroup under a new magazine.
The only issue is magazine portability - right now there doesn’t seem to be a way to annoint an instance to be the new owner of a magazine that’s hosted by the kbin.social instance. But maybe that technical problem will be solved in within the next five years.
my first non-reddit hit is kbin.pub which is probably worse than join-lemmy
Maybe kbin.pub should have a banner at top like “Got here by mistake? Maybe you just want to join an instance? Try …” with … being picked at random on each page load. Or we could have a featured kbin instance of the month or something…