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Anything new is scary
Reddit is complicated, they just forgot.
The digg users said reddit was ugly and they would never use such an ugly site.
I tried explaining reddit to a diehard forum user, why are all the replies out of order? why are upvotes changing the posting order? this is so complicated!
Don't explain, tell them where to start and how to start. then it explains itself.
I can't help but think that people who describe the Fediverse as complicated joined reddit after the redesign...
Kbin is exactly like an old, stripped down version of old.reddit.
I think this is also the cause of the squabbles.io Vs kbin/Lemmy split. Squabbles is like new Reddit, kbin is like old Reddit. And people like what they know
This last sentence is the crux of the matter. People don't like change, but quickly forget that they spent time learning the site that they're so familiar with.
In kbins case you actually have a responsive admin and can actually find devs on here working on new features and tweaks (hey there!)
Super happy with how kbin has been going so far
As a forum user, it was absolutely crazy to me when I first signed up on Reddit a decade ago that the replies would be out of order and sorted by popularity. But I grew to understand that it was a crowdsourcing effort in most ways and that the cream rises to the top. It was really quite good to get the information you needed out of the thread.
Anything new is scary
Agreed. Most people just want to settle into something comfortable.
It isn't hard to sign up for. No one is saying that is the case. It gets confusing when people start talking about adding subscriptions from other instances and how you can copy and paste the link and subscribe. That right there is where 95% of the people on the internet stop caring.
If the developers of Lemmy and the wider Fediverse ever get that fleshed out in an intuitive way I think popularity will go pretty fast.
That and long term if there is a way for information to be collectively backed up so that if some owner shuts down an instance everything isn't gone.
The first step is completely different from anything else you've ever done
"Pick an instance to sign up for"
This does not compute. What is an instance? Why do I have to pick? Which one should I pick? Compared to
"Create an account at reddit.com" makes sense and is something everyone has done before.
It doesn't matter how simple the answers to those questions are, the fact that the very first step requires multiple explanations is huge, and will always be a barrier to entry.
The first step is completely different from anything else you've ever done
This isn't really true, you already had to do this for email. Never heard of that being a barrier of entry.
My parents prefer to opt for local privacy/security focused email providers, while I go with gmail for the feature set and design. But I used to try out a few different ones to figure out which one works best for me. Still use a hotmail email for my Windows account.
I fail to see how this is different to the situation with lemmy/kbin instances.
99.9% of people just use gmail, and before that 99.9% used hotmail, etc. There's always been 'the one' that effectively everyone is on.
What is this about having to copy and paste a link to find subscriptions from other instances? I literally just pull up the community browser and set it to "all" and then search.
Yes, that will show you all the communities/magazines that your instance has already discovered and have started federating with. But if it is a community that hasn't been discovered by your instance yet, you will need to search with the link for it to start federating. And once even a single user from an instance does that, the community will be visible to everyone else as well.
On Lemmy, if nobody is subscribed to a community on your instance, it doesn't appear in that view.
In order for it to appear, someone with an account has to go to the search bar at the top right of the page and type in the URL to the community manually. Then it'll appear after an initial search.
On large instances like Lemmy.world, you can almost guarantee someone has already done this for most popular communities - but newer/smaller communities may not appear because nobody on your instance has searched for them yet.
For smaller instances, there are likely multiple communities missing and you'd have no idea until you went to look for them.
Just be careful. That only works because your instance already knows about those other instances because someone already interacted with them. If you ever want to join a community on a non-popular instance, you might have to be the first person to search for it by copying and pasting.
Agreed. It still is a pain to follow subs on other instances, especially within Jeroba. I know you're supposed to copy the !sub@instance into the search field, but it never comes up.
For Lemmy, if nobody is subscribed to that community on your instance you have to copy the entire URL. E.g. you need to search for https://instance.social/c/sub in order to find [email protected].
Once one person on your instance searches for it, then you can find it by searching [email protected].
I don't know why Lemmy works like that. Kbin doesn't have the problem; you can find things by searching @[email protected] no matter what.
Kbin doesn't presently auto-hyperlink the !sub@instance text.
I expect that it will in the future.
The question everyone was really asking was if will they will be able to make these quality of life changes before the Reddit API changes come into effect. The answer seems to be "no" unfortunately. It's a huge missed opportunity that may never come again.
It makes no sense to me that there are separate forums for the same topic that have the same names other than "@instance". IMO there should be a single place that is /politics which has the same posts and comments regardless of which instance you're logged into. If these instances are "federated" with each other then they should act like a single shared space. Or at least that's how it seems like it should work to me.
Reddit was the same way.
You have /r/gaming. /r/games. /r/truegaming. /r/videogames. /r/videogame. Etc.
Each community was slightly different in subtle ways, but some people were subscribed to multiple (basically identical) communities. Others self-sorted into different communities based on moderation style and community vibes.
Not to mention that your idea of how federation should work kind of ignores moderation and community preferences. Communities hosted on Beehaw are tightly moderated. There may be other communities that want something less strict. How do these two reconcile with one another? What happens if a conversation is removed on one instance but kept around on another?
If local mods only have local power, they can get quickly overwhelmed as you effectively need a mod team on every single instance. Smaller instances wouldn't necessarily have the manpower to have their own dedicated mods for literally everything.
Kbin was trivial to figure out. Mastodon I still struggle with a bit.
What part of Mastodon do you struggle with, if you don't mind me asking?
Reddit has been around for quite a while. There are those of us who used to be tech-savvy "back in the day" that don't handle change either quickly or well. For a casual social-media only user, this can be similar to the experience of a cave-person discovering fire. There are bound to be questions, especially when dealing with multiple types of instances on the fediverse. If we want this to grow into its full potential, we NEED to be patient and welcoming to even the most technologically illiterate.
Average internet user doesn't understand internet
A greater percentage of reddit is younger than some of them realise. So many redditors are going to be used to new reddit, and plug-and-play services in general. Kbin and Lemmy look like old.reddit, and they require them to understand the concept of what a 'server' is to even get started. This is knowledge they've never needed before to use the services they want to use.
Imagine spending all your life eating McDonald's and then somebody told you homemade burgers are way better quality, taste better, cheaper, etc; then when you ask how to get a taste of those bad boys they start with informing you that you'd need to grill them. It's not hard, it's just new.
In addition to the learning curve and the minor bugginess of Lemmy and Kbin, I feel like there may be some cognitive dissonance going on for users that are on the fence on whether they want to switch. To resolve the dissonance, one could either change their behavior (switch to Lemmy or kbin) or change their cognition (rationalize why they do not want to switch; for example by thinking that Lemmy or Kbin is too hard to use). Changing behavior can be hard especially if it is a habit built over a long period of time, so coming up with excuses for why one doesn't want to switch would be the easier thing to do.
As someone who designs software you are vastly overestimating users, they wake up with their shoes tied together and spill hot coffee on their lap before they even get to the website.
A lot of people don't really understand computers. We mostly know how to manipulate the user interface (UI) to get the computer to do what we want, but if you switch up the icons or install a new desktop environment, I guarantee you that 99% of users will be completely lost.
This is because the UI abstracts the complex process of running a computer so that the user can just think about getting things done. The user doesn't need to know what it means to "go to the start menu and click the Notepad app." Practically, this is Windows-speak for "open the default text editor". However, if you take a Windows user and drop them into a Linux and ask them to open up the default text editor, they probably won't know how to do that unless a Windows-like desktop environment is chosen.
Basically, a lot of people don't "know how to use Reddit" so much as that they know how to get the Reddit website to do what they want it to. Lemmy is even slightly different than Reddit, cosmetically different. Although we usually use the phrase "cosmetically different" to imply that the difference is not important, because we rely on GUIs to understand computers, cosmetic differences are really important in UIs.
Go look for posts on Lemmy discussing Jerboa and the other apps. The apps mostly differ in how the user is able to interact with the site. They should all have the full functionality of Lemmy (or are working towards it), but the ways of presenting that functionality to the user are different.
One of the most important groups that moved to the Threadiverse were the blind community. It is because of the inaccessible user interface in the Reddit app that they decided to move over.
And let me be very clear that the fact that computers abstract away their complexity is very much a good thing. That's why we have computers: to do tedious, complex work automatically and simply. Not everyone needs to be a computer expert, but I do think that developers need to resist the urge to make cosmetic changes that don't improve functionality. I realize that this is an ill-defined tall order. Regardless, we need to be aware that most people don't know how computers work.
I think that, in order to get people joining our communities, we should try to be compassionate and helpful when it comes to users learning how to use site. Actually, this is a special case of my more general position that we should try to be compassionate and helpful in the face of people who are confused and trying to learn, whatever the subject. I know it can be hard; if I'm being honest, I have a bad habit of getting annoyed at people who don't look like their listening. But we need to unlearn that.
not gonna lie, the "magazine" thing did really confuse me at first. I thought it pulled magazine articles at first, lol
Been here a week. Still no idea what the words you just said mean. Lemmy wont become super popular unless it becomes super simplified so even a caveman could do it.
I don’t think that really justifies a lot of the comments I’m seeing in Reddit alternatives threads that it’s hard to figure out.
Haven't been back there and didn't read the comments...
But I think I can understand to a degree:
I think there are a lot of advantages they're probably missing too. I like that kbin/lemmy we can choose whatever fucking avatar we want instead of being limited to customizing our snoz or wtf Reddit calls their mascot thing. I saw one guy mentioning how there's no karma bullshit to deal with for new accounts and absolutely agree with that sentiment.
tealdeer; meh, I like the fediverse and it's not hard for me but I'm not shitting on people who don't get it. If they want help, would probably help but not going to push it on people either. It is what it is and that's good enough for me
Fear and an unwillingness to try new things.
For example, some of the complaints that people had about Mastodon early on were just odd to me. They made such a big deal out of "you have to pick a server, no one understands that" or nitpicking UI interfaces between Mastodon and twt. They didn't have logical arguments IMHO it was them just not being happy about change and not being honest about that.
Having "add new post" in the header on kbin it's definitely something that will trip up people coming from Reddit. You need to add a new "article" which isn't very intuitive
“Magazine” is the biggest offender here. That’s a very unintuitive term.
To be fair, Reddit's variant, "subreddit", isn't very intuitive either, especially if you don't come from a forum background.
This is my first post...if my dumb old ass can figure it out, anybody probably can.
KBin is actually the best reddit alternative I've seen in along time. The truth is though that reddit has a 15 year head start and giant conglomerate corperate backing. Even though federated sites like this are getting better and better all the time the user base is still small when you compare it to the internet monster that is reddit. This site still has along way to go in terms of users, content, and overall polish and ease of use. I look forward to the day when I site like this can scare the likes of reddit, but sadley I don't feel that today is that day. This is coming from a place of support for the fediverse btw.
They are saying it's hard to figure out as it's hard to figure out. It, as you say, has a learning curve that isn't really present in Reddit, Twitter, Facebook, Tiktok etc.
Choosing an instance seems important. Many of the large instances are overtly communist, quietly communist, piracy, porn, nsfw focused or a safe space for lgbtq+ people. Instances are changing hands and de federating each other. There doesn't seem to be much in the way of GDPR type agreements about user data. If a server vanishes with all your data, can you legally retrieve it? Are they obligated to delete data on request? who is they?
Choosing communities is complicated. There is massive duplication of communities across instances most of which have have very little content or members.
The apps are all alpha quality from what I know. curious about accessibility options too, r/blind was hit hard.
Whilst I was trying to get a grip on how Lemmy & kbin interact, Lemmy seems to have blocked kbin access.
I think I could sell Lemmy to the average linux user but it appears I don't have to as most of them are here anyway. It's the other 99% of the user base that's the issue.
Honestly I wouldn't even bother trying to convince my meat space techy friends at the moment never mind a non-techy community with a few hundred thousand iphone and windows users.
The only real issue I have is that searching for communities I know exist on other instances often fails, and opening them in their home instances doesn't offer a subscribe button to my host instance.
I do get ppl saying its complicated. A lot of people dont know much about servers just as a start? (Not that you really have to to use kbin or lemmy.) or know anything about federation or what it mean in this sense. If you ask them what is meant by instance, most people saying so probably wouldn't understand that in this sense even if English's their maternal language. Not even that those people arent smart, just like just because you dont understand a foreign language doesnt mean youre not smart: this is just an area they dont know about.
I think some people find it strange that people are confused, because maybe they dont often talk with people who arent as familiar with technology, or more used to being on 'tech' related parts of the internet where some people would understand these. It seems this way bc the community of kbin seems to be more into technology, like i seen programmer humor posts get popular a lot, and discussions about linux, and the technology magazine, and stuff like that.
If so i can see why someone being confused would be surprising. But know that: a lot of people probably wouldnt join other social media either if it was more user-driven (in terms of setup? If thats phrased right?) which is why stuff gets more simplified on official websites and app. Is important to remember that many people (even some my own age!) dont have any context for all of this stuff they would need to deal with and decide in order to use Kbin/Lemmy - dont know what is an instance. What is federation. Defederation. I would say its easy to understand once you try, but i know i speak for myself who already has some knowledge and interest about technology and learn fast. And not everyone even wants to use something that required them to figure it out as they go.