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.
I’m on kbin now because I have no idea what I’m doing.
based, me too
I figured out how to join lemmy by joining kbin, now I’m on both! The Jerboa app is better than anything I could find for kbin, so I joined lemmy.world and have a nicer interface.
Reddit is almost 20 years old now?
Do you expect Lemmy and Kbin to be an immediate replacement or an replacement at all?
Agreed. I am very confused by most of these types of comments. “Why isn’t this newer thing with a smaller user base as robust and efficient as a 20yr old platform?” Things take time. Not to mention it SHOULD also take time, since these instances would not be able to hold the amount of users Reddit has. I’m sure many people complained about Reddit when they jumped from Digg.
I dont, but i understand people expecting kbin or Lemmy to be replacements bc people have said that theyre replacements for Reddit and to move there. And tbh kbin is not bad (havent used Lemmy much)
Until search engines and LLM companies start crawling the fediverse, this will continue to be a niche of the internet, albeit perhaps large one at that.
The thing that worries me about kbin is that everything is located on one single instance. You guys are building a lot of centralization over there which might lead to a Reddit 2.0 scandal at some point
- posted from Lemmy
There are other active instances: https://kbin.fediverse.observer/list
But things are not as evenly spread as among lemmy instances (yet), and a lot of Reddit migration advice points to kbin.social as the main onboarding space.
User experience is an extremely important part of on going growth. I feel like even with the migration under the circumstances, the onboarding and learning curve for new users is very difficult on kbin or lemmy vs reddit or other mainstream socials.
This may seem trivial to motivated users to go through the setup and learning required but for further migration and adoption the UX definitely needs significant improvement. I haven’t seen or heard much being said on this subject regarding the fediverse in a serious way.
Products that are already simple to understand and use, spend time refining and reducing friction for growth and retention. I know these products are in their early stages but while the fediverse has its pros, I am concerned that the rate of improvement of UX for the fediverse will be very slow. But I am hopeful that people will keep pushing to make it better.
for YEARS I refused to use the site which should not be named because I hated the UI. RIF is literally the only reason I explored outside the group I joined for.
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…
Not sure what universe you are from but in my reality that’s just bullshit. What you said is there but right next to the “set up a server” button is a “join a server button”. And right above the scary code pictures is another “join a server button”.
I don’t care if it replaces reddit. I care that it remains free of corporate control.
I don’t want the fediverse to replace reddit. I just want a place to post and share stuff without corpo baggage.
It doesn’t need to replace Reddit.
And it won’t, for many reasons. The biggest being that people don’t like change.
But it can give, and has given, people a place to go who are ready to be done with Reddit. People who are ready for something new, not just “Reddit, but with a different name”.
Until Reddit’s website disappears, Reddit will march on. Those of us here are just those who can no longer tolerate feeding that beast.
Lemmy devs have also said they aren’t interested in replacing reddit
I am fine with that. Fediverse is good as it is without all the reddit simpletons.
Lemmy and kbin are still very much in their infancy while Reddit has been around for nearly 20 years. There’s definitely going to be growing pains since it’s still so new and for right now at least most people that are going to join are people that are leaving Reddit so it’s probably going to remain a fairly niche thing at least in the short term.
Secondly, I don’t think they have to necessarily replace Reddit and they both could go on and do their own things. Honestly, even during my time on Reddit I found the smaller communities were better than large or default communities IMO. I just find that smaller communities have better engagement where ones that are too big your post or comment will end up getting buried.
Even if Lemmy or kbin don’t overtake Reddit, I think there’s still a place for them.
I do like a lot of things about Kbin, and visually it’s much better than unmodified Lemmy in a browser, but it also has its own share of problems, not least with intuitiveness. I don’t understand why communities are called Magazines, and the terminology of “Favorite”, “Reduce” and “Boost” are very confusing to me. Trying to make a new thread might lead you down a microblogging path instead since “Post” sounds more like a new thread than “Article” to a newcomer.
There also seems to be much slower sync between Kbin and various Lemmy instances compared to intra-sync between lemmy instances themselves. Kbin also doesn’t have an API (yet?), but a more tech savvy individual than me will have to say how big of a deal that is.
Both Sync and Boost have large and loyal userbases and will probably attract plenty of users to Lemmy, and good Third Party Apps might help with first impressions and onboarding for new users.
Ultimately though, content is king. I liked Kbin better when I first made my accounts, but then we had a Race Week in Formula 1 and the community here was dead while discussions were happening on Lemmy, and since the sync was slow so I ended up over there.
You’re absolutely right that we have a bit of a terminology issue here, but one slightly advanced and techy thing to understand about the fediverse is that the fediverse itself is the “platform”:
Lemmy, Kbin, Mastodon, Calckey, etc., are software projects or processes that are running on some server somewhere, and ActivityPub is the protocol (kind of like a language) that all these processes use (to varying degrees) to speak with each other. As users, we interact with a specific server or service (like beehaw.org or kbin.social) that is running that software and sharing info with other servers through a protocol.
This is totally different to Reddit or Twitter, which are both the names of the service AND (probably, but we don’t now) the software that the service is running behind the scenes. Naturally that makes it a bit easier to talk about, because we don’t have any access to or knowledge about the software or protocols that they use, and we can just talk about the services.
This is all a long-winded way of saying that Kbin and Lemmy are replacements for Reddit (the software) while servers like kbin.social or beehaw.org are replacements for Reddit.com (the service), except they also talk to each other somewhat seamlessly. I’m logged into the server “kbin.social”, which runs a software called “Kbin”, which communicates over a protocol called “ActivityPub” to a bunch of users who are on other servers running other software.
In other words, Google searching for “Lemmy” isn’t exactly a good metric, not only because Reddit is one of the biggest websites around and Google knows this, but also because “Lemmy” isn’t the actual name of the service that we are using right now, just the software. If you tell someone to go over to a specific server (like beehaw.org, kbin.social, etc.) then they’ll have a much easier time finding something that they can actually use.
Most of us are guilty of kind of glossing over all this stuff to keep things simple and easy to understand, but there are some layers of nuance to the fediverse here that make this a little bit more complicated than you’re making it out to be imo.
Everything you’ve said is correct, however, there is an issue that the “this all just the fediverse” doesn’t address: when I’m looking for niche info about something, I usually add either “reddit” or “site:reddit.com” to the end of a web search, but with the fediverse, it’s kinda hard to replicate that. Adding “lemmy” or “kbin” to the web search wouldn’t exactly yield every possible result on the threadiverse since not every threadiverse instance uses those words in neither the URL nor the website itself. How would you handle that specific issue?
I don’t know, and I think that’s a fair point…
Of course, part of the reason that Reddit is so easy to find on Google is because it’s already a huge and established website with lots of traffic. It’s never easy for a new site to compete with established players in terms of search engine results, and I think the bulk of that problem lies with the search engine providers themselves.
The problem we have then is that search engines won’t change for the Fediverse. Maybe the SearXNG people could at least add the biggest instances as “preferred” targets in the search results or something. We probably won’t have a perfect solution for a while.
I choose kbin over Lemmy because most Lemmy instances don’t work for me. I made accounts on Lemmy.world, beehaw, and here. Kbin is the only one I can log in on all of my devices. The Lemmy instances only work on my Mac, when I try to log in on my iPhone or windows machine the login just spins.
So this is my home now
All the android apps don’t have support for kbin, I’m assuming its same for iOS. So kbin probably won’t go anywhere really until that changes…
