Most people aren’t even thinking of moving to reddit alternatives. Users have a lot of power in this situation. Just move your community to Lemmy or Kbin. It’s not that hard.
Well, after what happened with /r/MildlyInteresting and others, more of us have are starting to feel as if Reddit, the company, has metaphorically declared a wanna-be “war” on the mods. Toss in the statements by Spez the other day about users, who gave the company loads of data for free, somehow being wrong to expect a certain degree of reciprocity and, I might expect a certain increase in migration rates. After all, I am now here. (Hello!)
Just move your community to Lemmy or Kbin. It’s not that hard.
No, it is that hard.
- You have hundreds/thousands of community members accustomed to a certain user experience that have to start that learning all over again when they move platforms.
- You have teams of moderators that have to learn a new set of tools for a new platform.
- Less content and inferior experience for everyone until there’s headway made on 1 & 2.
Anyone whose worked on a team that had a management shakeup can appreciate this. Anyone who has a friend that refuses to migrate to windows 11 can appreciate this.
Never underestimate the power of comfort and convenience. “It’s just too HARD to move!,” people will say. “Everybody I know is here!,” they’ll say. I’ve heard people say this a lot since the social media collapse sparked by Elon Musk. It’s their choice, but I’m not comfortable staying. Maybe in time they’ll realize that it’s the right time to leave as well.
Kbin and Lemmy are still fairly new so I do not anticipate everyone would be willing to make the jump if it means putting up with relatively small member counts. We just have to put in the extra effort ourselves to keep these communities fresh and active.
The answer can be many things if you go into detail but the summary is change is hard.
Same problem as with any social network migration: the network effect.
Sometimes the largest equivalent Lemmy community for a subreddit is tiny, or worse, nonexistent. Sure, you can go create one, but unless you can also convince other people to join with you, it won’t be much fun.
The familiarity of Reddit is a huge boon. People think the fediverse is some mystical hard thing (it’s not lol) but they want simplicity.
We’re early adopters. Early adopters have a higher tolerance for (and ability to deal with) things like bugs, confusing UI, uncertainty, and probably continual change for the short term.
But hey, someone’s gotta do it. The end result of this will be an established community and a more polished product. Over time, more and more people will show up as this place gets better and better, and Reddit continues to worsen. (Everyone knows that old.reddit is going away, it’s just a matter of when.)
We’re early adopters. Early adopters have a higher tolerance for (and ability to deal with) things like bugs, confusing UI, uncertainty, and probably continual change for the short term.
Not to mention, a lack of content. While it’s populating nicely it’s still not like Reddit, especially for niche subjects. You definitely have to endure a lot of shouting in the wind situations while this builds up.
Yeah, I’ve certainly found myself subscribing to any and every magazine that looks even remotely like it could be interesting. Getting inundated isn’t a problem around these parts just yet. But the volume definitely has gone up recently.
I still am struggling with how to sub to a magazine. Poor guy running this needs a bit of help with ui so stupid people like myself can enjoy it
It’s genuinely hard and needs to be improved. Subscribing to a magazine that someone else on kbin has subscribed to already isn’t too bad. Go to the magazine (eg, click what looks like the subreddit name in the post) and scroll alllll the way down and there’ll be a subscribe button.
But if nobody has subscribed yet in the instance, it’s hilariously hard. You have to search in the general search (not the magazine search) for specifically “magazine@domain.com” and you should see a subscribe button then. You will not content in that magazine that existed before you subscribed. If that sounds terrible, it’s because it is. Thankfully, most of the time, you won’t be the first to subscribe to a magazine and thus can just use the magazine search or browse the front page to see posts.
PS: the subscribe option is also as the bottom of each thread. So you can alternatively just open a thread in the magazine instead of the magazine itself.
PPS: I’ve mentioned the subscribe button being at the bottom because that’s the placement on mobile and I think many of us are on mobile. On desktop, it’s in the sidebar.
That’s the one thing that bugs me, federation should be automated, why does it need for someone to try to pull a community first before that starts? It should be like Usenet or DNS and self-propagate.
It’s probably a resource management issue. No need to sync with servers that nobody is reading yet, it just wastes bandwidth and CPU time.
Yep, Reddit will be a dumpster-fire even more. Probably worse when old reddit goes away. right now old reddit its living on borrowed time!
Out of all the social platforms, Reddit is probably the easiest to copy. The moderation was all handled by users in the first place, and I don’t think Reddit employees are as needed as Twitter or Facebook.
Reddit is just shooting itself in the foot right now. I understand the need to make money, and I can understand the API becoming a revenue stream. They just handled it so poorly. There were tons of ways to open a dialogue with app devs about charging them. They could have made their users move to a subscription model. I just don’t get it.
This is my first comment on kbin!
Yeah, spez has really shot the golden goose (the free engaged moderation staff).
And welcome!
One thing I’ve seen get in the way is everyone wants their own instance rather than to setup just one community on an existing instance.
I don’t think you understand the benefits of the Fediverse. With multiple sites you have alternatives to go to if the site goes to shit. Lemmy and kbin sites also appeal to different tastes, rather than having to endure one size fits all mentality. Being federated means you can subscribe to and access and post on other federated sites from kbin. No more monopoly abuse.
