I’m a Reddit refugee who was on that platform for 10+ years. I saw not just a tremendous amount of controversies, but attempts at introducing alternatives to Reddit during all of them. The 2015 blackout saw a ton of alternatives suggested, and if you go back and look at them many have either not survived or never achieved their stated goal of serving as a viable alternative to Reddit. Places like Voat, Ruqqus, or Parler promptly turned themselves into extremist shitholes and imploded. The truth is most internet communities which found and advertise themselves as an alternative to Reddit die.
However, I think this newest wave of searching for an alternative has more legs than I think I’ve ever seen, and the key to that is the kind of users who are moving. The people who were pissed off by the recent changes are the old guard of the internet. These are the people who still remember searching for and finding RIF, Apollo, or AlienBlue (before it was bought), and have the technical know-how to care about the quality and usability of their platform. I think you all are people who engage with their online spaces with intention, and because of that I believe that we have more of a shot at making this work than I’ve witnessed since I joined Reddit all those many years ago.
In order to make this all work out though, I think it’s really important to cast our thoughts toward what made the websites that have come before us successful. Every single one of these spaces have distinct ways of interaction that indirectly communicate their ideologies. Memes, in-jokes, and lingo form the backbone of online communities and help to direct users back to the source, but they never gain real purchase without a unique viewpoint. I’m pretty sure I can confidently suss out whether a meme comes from 4Chan, Reddit, or Tumblr, just through the message conveyed and the template used. For an online platform to have relevance and draw, I believe it absolutely needs to have an individual and communicable perspective.
Now I am aware that much of this is organically generated, but I think we underestimate how much of it isn’t. The structure of a website clearly communicates to users its core values, and users almost certainly respond to that. The fact that users are by default anonymous on the Chans absolutely contributes to the unique “flavor” of those websites, and the subreddit structure of Reddit allows it to contain a greater variety of clashing values. We can already see some of this on the Fediverse, the tension engendered by the federated instances I think places greater emphasis on building consensus. The fact that an entire server can be excised at will from a group of other like-minded server owners means that one has to always have an eye towards the common consensus, and I think we will see many fights over this in the not-so-distant future.
So as we go forward, and while we are in the most nascent part of this website’s lifespan, I think we should be discussing and commenting on what we think is most important about this space. I’m already seeing that people think that Kbin is “nicer than Reddit” and you’re more convinced that you’re interacting with real people. I think this is all good, and I think that while we’re making content, we need to have an eye on putting that particular spin on all the things we brought over from where we came from. Eventually, we need to get to the place where we’re creating unique meme formats, and having our own slang, but for right now we need to be thinking hard about what we want out of our online lives and how this website can be built to serve those purposes. I think the risk of not doing that, and forever being only a federated Reddit clone is going to leave people forever jonesing for the experiences they had on Reddit, and this space is going to die just like every other attempted alternative has before.
TLDR: Now that we’ve all left Reddit, for this new place to live my opinion is that we need to have more discussions about what our principles are, and we need to make unique content that brings people to this website.
There is definitely a sense of community here based on me lurking for about a week and the number of apps being developed, but at the moment I don’t think any have done a great job at attracting ordinary people outside of reddit migrators. To be fair, this is a really difficult problem, and I’m not even sure if there is a good solution that wouldn’t involve changing common terms about the fediverse works. Where it gets really weird is when federation allows me to interact with Mastodon content on a completely separate platform, and I can’t imagine an average user just understanding that immediately.
Of course, this also involves a change in some UX patterns in existing apps. For instance, I have to hit the “Add comment” button on Kbin in order to see how this comment will look in reality. While this editor that I’m typing in has the ability to bold text, it just wraps what I’m typing in the actual bold markdown tag. This is fine for technical users, but to an ordinary person this doesn’t make any sense, especially when other apps already give you a WYSIWYG experience. Granted, this of course is not an easy thing to implement either, but I think it’s necessary for winning over non-technical users.
Right now, it feels like a lot of apps (at least on iOS) are creating an “Apollo for Lemmy/Kbin” type of experience, and that’s great in its own right as all of these apps feel very intuitive considering the platform’s age. However, especially with Kbin’s microblogging feature in mind, we should try to differ from Apollo while still using aspects of it like its swipe actions and the amount of customization it gives. Otherwise we inherit many of Apollo’s flaws (that may be even worse on fundamentally different platform), which is what led to others using apps like Narwhal or even the official Reddit app.
TLDR: In general the initial direction seems good (especially with the many good apps being developed), but the next biggest hurdle is becoming mainstream and that requires intuitive UIs to attract ordinary people. We don’t get good and diverse content otherwise.
I’m an older person, and I have a question, genuinely. As long as we have enough content generating, involved persons in the federation… do we truly need to worry about mass appeal? Or about attracting the “average” user?
I remember extremely pleasant, active IRC channels, and chat rooms on AOL with less than fifteen people that were engaging and enjoyable. As long as the people here are active, quality people, does it truly matter if we can appeal to the average? To put it another way, why try and attract the lowest common denominator if what we want is to avoid the pitfalls that come with them (the low quality comments, the mindless repetition of select in-jokes designed to make the reader engage mindlessly)?
I’m enjoying the vibe here. I mean, I read your entire comment. And then posted this one! Effort is happening! It feels almost like the lawless wild west that the internet once was! I’m not in a rush to lose this in the name of pumping up the number of users, when the only benefit of doing so seems to be a collective lowering of our quality.
To answer your question here, yes - some of us are looking for non-techy people to join.
Rigorous conversation aside, I have hobbies in knitting and crochet that are not populated by folks who want cumbersome UX. Kbin is fine for me because I joined reddit back in the day before its redesign, but I can imagine someone much younger than me who probably spent all their formative years on Facebook coming here, finding this all too stripped down and clunky, then bailing. Or they might be unable to see how much of a “one stop shop” an instance like kbin could be for them because the concepts and terminology for a federated internet are too lofty.
Am I making a case for idiots to come on board? No. But I am saying that some folks who could otherwise be active, quality users here won’t take to kbin like a duck to water.
I don’t want kbin to lose its old.reddit-like vibe. I don’t want the Fediverse to be completely inundated by ads, influencers, stealth marketing, and constant reposts. But I miss having my specific communities, and this is going to be a real challenge to bring in non-techy users. Even if to just provide more balance for let’s say feminist or queer issues. Why would newcomers here ever stay if the experience is too close to walking through numerous conversations at Tech Crunch? or a Warhammer 40K convention? or Comicon?