The branding for kbin is perfect for capturing the reddit migrators. The biggest friction point for the Fediverse is choosing an instance. If I want to join Lemmy, googling Lemmy takes me to a landing page with no join button, telling me to go to these other sites. Some of these sites even actively discourage signups, creating so many places for a new user to churn.
Also, see the cases where the admins of a few Lemmy instances act badly: now the brand of every other instance is tarnished.
If I want to join kbin, I go to kbin, and I signup. How easy is that? I personally think this is why kbin has been getting a lot of traffic compared to Lemmy instances, and this benefit is lost when other kbin instances begin popping up.
In my opinion, it makes way more sense to market the instances individually rather than as a whole. Federation can be discovered at the users own pace, instead of being the main draw which will always be the content hosted. This does add a bit of a prisoner’s dilemma, but I do think it would end up benefitting the ecosystem as a whole.
You laugh, but as a sorta-but-not-super-techie guy, that initially stopped me from joining Mastodon. It prompted me for an instance to sign up on, and that felt like a serious choice for which I was missing some info.
Same deal with Lemmy, really. At first glance, the implications of choosing an instance are not clear. And then you start reading and you realize that some instances ARE problematic even if you have access to the entire federated content from it.
It’s definitely a small but significant barrier to entry, and Kbin presents a front that feels easier to grasp when you’re not familiar with the concept of the Fediverse.
Personally I needed reassurance that an instance at least appears to be committed into fighting hate speech, especially as a gay guy
As a similarly sorta-but-not-super-techie guy, I agree. Kbin nailed the presentation of the Fediverse by introducing a UI and experience that is remarkably similar to Reddit. For that reason alone I hope Kbin comes out as the most successful (or at least viable) alternative.
The moment we approached the Fediverse, we heard about the creators of some of these places holding some extreme viewpoints, and we are hesitant about the type of people this may attract. Don’t know firsthand how true that may be, but we sure as hell don’t want to sign up to something that ends up becoming a sort of Voat.
The reassuring thing is that this exodus is completely different in nature than the one that ended up stampeding to and destroying Voat. The majority of damaged individuals who migrated back then… well… they already migrated back then, not now.
I don’t care if a site has stuff that caters to a crowd with viewpoints that I don’t share, as long as they aren’t hassling me.
agree. You start thinking what if the one you randomly chose is the problematic one, what if they don’t follow best/good privacy/security practices, what if they are not an active collective/person and they forget updating their instance etc. Then you start thinking again: ok I’ll go to the “main”, default one, it must be a safe choice, you go there and you see that the main one has closed the registrations and you are still in the same position.
This was exactly my situation with mastodon. And guess what? I ended up joining a smaller instance that… closed down. So all my mastodon stuff is gone now despite mastodon still being a thing. it’s dumb.
i think there is a way to move your account from one instance to another, but even if there is a way, it wouldn’t cover the case that an instance is already offline. Yes, generally speaking it is nice and correct approach to “choose a smaller instance”, but when you don’t know who runs it behind, it is actually other problems that come up, as you already know first hand.
To be fair they handled the closing as well as anyone could do. they left it in read only for quite a while for people to download their stuff. they gave everyone notice. etc. but the point remains.
There is also Calckey if you haven’t tried it yet. It has a lots of useful features compared to mastodon. You can migrate everything to another instance very easily.