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Reddit Migration @kbin.social
metic @lemmy.world

I don’t understand people who say they can’t figure out Lemmy or KBin

Does federation have a bit of a learning curve? No doubt.

Is Lemmy buggy as heck? Absolutely.

But 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. The front page feed and sort options are very similar to Reddit. Searching for same-instance communities is not too difficult. Posting, commenting, and voting are all quite intuitive. What’s the problem?

153 comments

  • 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.

      • Even a low barrier to entry tends to significantly improve the signal-to-noise ratio in discussions.

        So, I'm fine with people that can't get past making a simple, almost irrelevant, decision as step 1 of gaining access... not gaining access.

    • 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.

      • That's cause over time people have added communities to your instances repitoire over time. Network effect, essentially, making it easier for each new user. Tbh, if new users are on a bigger instance this should be a non issue.

    • 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.

      • Kbin doesn't presently auto-hyperlink the !sub@instance text.

        I expect that it will in the future.

      • 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 !sub@instance.social.

        Once one person on your instance searches for it, then you can find it by searching !sub@instance.social.

        I don't know why Lemmy works like that. Kbin doesn't have the problem; you can find things by searching @sub@instance.social no matter what.

      • You don't need to do that if that community is already federating with your instance. If its not, it might take a little while for the federation to actually start after you make the search (based on the server infrastructure of your instance and the remaining queue). Try searching again after a bit and it should be there. These quriks should be solved as instances become more stable, and Lemmy/kbin gets further developed.

    • @sota2077 When I first came over to Kbin that's the thing I got hung up on, everything else I got used to quickly. There's plenty of smart people in the Fediverse, I'm sure someone will come up with a solution.

      @metic

      • 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.

      • Oh I have all the faith in the world that someone will come up with a solution eventually. I just assume it was never a major priority because of the userbase. With an explosion of users I'm sure they have a 100 things they want to improve and it is just a matter of time.

    • This can be alleviated a bit. If one person searches for an other-instance community by URL, it will become available for all other users through a normal search. So over time this becomes less of an issue, particularly if someone takes out some time to seed a bunch of these for their instance.

  • 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.

  • 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.

    • that is so dismissive.

      people don't want to switch because they had a thing that they liked and this thing is nothing like that.

      • I agree, and that is part of the cognitive dissonance between enjoying reddit for what it provided and wanting to switch to an alternative. However, if one is searching for a reddit alternative and will not switch to anything exactly like it, why should one even be looking for an alternative?

  • 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.

    • @Manticore

      they require them to understand the concept of what a 'server' is to even get started.

      I've known 5 year olds start minecraft servers. And understand that each "world" is an "instance". But that's aside the point, as you're right that even Help-Desk IT people struggle to understand the difference between computer and server.

      It's not hard, it's just new.

      The "new" part is what gets people. All of this is new. Even the implementation of all of this "fediverse" is new. It will come with time! People probably didn't understand email vs snailmail, and probably had an even harder time with SMS/IM vs email when all of that came about just over 20-30 years ago. Most of these "complications" are from people that grew up knowing that the "internet" is basically 5 or 6 social media sites for very specific uses, and those 5 or 6 sites are older than most of the people using them, so that's all they know. Even for a dude in IT, the fediverse was a new concept to understand, and even difficult to understand how it could best be implemented for the masses.

      @metic

  • 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:

    • Too many choices: Picking an instance can be confusing for folks that are used to only having to remember 1 name. I personally think this is a bit like people trying Linux for the first time and getting confused by all the choices available. Basically, it's what some people call "analysis paralysis" but add to that the fact that you'll get 12 different recommendations from every 10 people you all (e.g. there's no clear consensus on the "best" one bc "best" means something different to each person). I think one list I saw on GitHub literally had over 200 instances... For non-techies, I could see that being a bit confusing
    • UI differences: some things like making a post on kbin are a bit different (IMO not bad but still different enough that I could see some folks getting confused). Doing searches on lemmy for specific topics (not finding communities but searching for something in a community) is done from a different area on lemmy than on Reddit and IMO is kind of a pain in the ass currently. And on kbin, frankly, I'm not even sure we have that feature at all.
    • Missing features: haven't tried mobile apps (which could again be another point of confusion) but for desktop at least, AFAIK we don't have anything comparable to RES yet. There's no analog to multireddits. And we don't have anything similar to reddit's Saved feature yet. All valid complaints in my opinion. And someone used to any or all of those, might spend a lot of time looking bc they just don't know if it's hidden or does not exist. So, yeah, I could see so confusion there too.

    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

  • 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

    • Took ne a few tries to figure that out. And what is a microblog even and why do we have it?

      • Microblogs are like tweets. I think posts from people you follow on Mastodon and similar federated microblogging platforms should appear there. I wish there was the option to merge the microblog and magazine feed. I don't think having them separated is necessary on a platform like this.

      • It's for Mastodon compatibility. Articles are like Reddit posts and microblogs are like tweets. You can post either from Kbin. Your articles will show up as community posts on Lemmy, and your microblogs will show up as toots on Mastodon.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • “Magazine” is the biggest offender here. That’s a very unintuitive term.

    Lmao what? For people born after 2010 maybe? Magazines have been a thing for decades and anyone over 20 is going to associate "magazine" with "series of articles about a topic"

    • I guess generally online the term magazine hasn't been used often. Then again subreddit wasn't either and that's a made up word.

      • I was just thinking that. Subreddit is a dumb made up word that a corportation invented. Community and magazine are descriptors. Sublemmy or subbin are just people trying to map experiences from on platform to another, and are understandable, but I'd personally prefer to see us call them communities and magazines in the long term.

        Bottom line. Subreddit. Dumb word. If you were able to learn that, you can learn "magazine"

      • A made-up word is easier to adjust to compared to the word that already has a different meaning in your mind, I think. Once your brain has filed something into memory it's not very enthusiastic about changing it.

    • “Magazine” implies little if any input from readers (letters to the editor being the exception). It doesn’t sound very interactive.

      • Not necessarily? I guess it depends on what magazines you read.

        A lot of the magazines I've read over the years are collections of things submitted by readers. Model Railroader magazine is a bunch of model railroads submitted by people across the US. They'll pick a few to feature, but they're all basically submitted by readership and it's fairly interactive.

        Lego Magazine was the same way when I was a kid. While a lot of it was about upcoming Lego products, there was a significant section that featured Lego builds made and submitted by the community.

        For newspapers, I'd absolutely agree that it implies an editorial staff and no input from readers. But magazines (to me) have always had a focus on community involvement.

        IMO, it translates quite well to the web, and the fact that there's a big ol' "+" button with "add new article" as an option makes it pretty obvious that this isn't just a static read-only place.

        My main hangup was "make new post" vs "make.new article". "Make new post" will make a Twitter-style short-form post in the "microblog" side; "make new article" goes as a Reddit-style self-post thread on the threads side. But once I understood that it was pretty straightforward, and I use both pretty regularly (articles for self-posts I'd normally post to Reddit, posts for little one-off thoughts or things I'd otherwise put on Twitter).

        Kbin is planned to work with more fediverse stuff at some point as well. It already supports Pixelfed (Instagram) and PeerTube (YouTube). Mobilizon (fediverse event planner) support is on the roadmap, which would let event planning appear natively as well.

        So if you ran a magazine based around a TV show, you'd be able to add a Mobilizon event that corresponds to when a new episode comes out. Then that event would serve as a "megathread" for episode discussion once the episode airs. It's a pretty neat idea, since it intuitively reminds people when things are and gives the community a place to discuss.

    • I think the implication is from the perspective of a long-time reddit user. I've already gotten used to posting "articles" in "magazines" and the nomenclature has clicked a little, but I certainly was pretty confused about it for a day coming hot off of reddit. For example, something like "community" and "post" could have been more fool-proof, albeit less interesting and unique.

    • I think that "magazine" is fine. As is "sublemmy". But I kind of am not enthusiastic about having two different words for them, unless there are future plans for them to act very differently.

      From a user standpoint, unless he's talking about the internals of the server involved, there isn't really a difference. Saying "sublemmy/magazine" is just verbose and annoying. I'm on Kevin, but I want to be able to refer to magazines/sublemmies in a way approachable to all the people reading the content.

  • “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.

  • 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.

    • Whilst I was trying to get a grip on how Lemmy & kbin interact, Lemmy seems to have blocked kbin access.

      That was lemmy.ml, not all of Lemmy. Lemmy.ml is an important instance -- one of the larger Lemmy instances, and it is run by the Lemmy devs -- but it's still but one instance among many.

  • In terms of people who didn't fully understand the fediverse, there are two kinds of people:

    • those who want to fully get their head around it first so they can make optimal decisions
    • those who are happy to just jump in and learn by doing

    • the people who are like "but what linux distro will be perfect for all my needs???"

      • I mean, there's a reason that Linux is used by less than 3% of the market, and the same will likely be true here. The fediverse is not the answer for over 97% of people, and that's a problem.

  • It took me a couple days of reading and browsing around and creating accounts to figure out the fediverse and Lemmy and kbin. Until it actually clicked in my head that I was in one instance, seeing content posted in a community of another instance, commented on by users of even other instances, and how it worked between all that. I wanted to actually understand the mechanism, to better navigate it. Now, it all seems simple to me, but it was all very new for about a week. Also, the connection and federation errors that were happening a lot added to the confusion to a lot of people, I feel.

    I am now very excited about the potential of all this. Decentralized networks rock.

    Now, I think a random user could just show up and make an account and start enjoying it quickly, just would take some time to find the communities they want content from.

  • 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.

  • 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.

    • With you on that one. Some small youtuber I have followed for years setup over on lemmy.world. I know it exists, but searching on kbin, no matter what I try, doesn't yield it to me. Unless it hits the frontpage or I am accidentally looking at the new feed the same moment the guy posts there, I won't really have a way to subscribe. Also don't really want to wrangle multiple accounts.

    • For Lemmy, if nobody has subscribed to a community locally, you need to search https://instance.social/c/whatever to get !whatever@instance.social. Once someone subscribes locally, searching !whatever@instance.social works.

      It's pretty unintuitive, especially when Kbin lets you search @whatever@instance.social even if that community isn't on your instance yet.

  • I asked someone who wrote a huge reddit post about it, and they responded with "idk, I just looked at it and didn't get it."

    I think people are just resistant to change, and only want a system that they think is 100% a clone. Honestly, IDK how you look at lemmy and don't think it looks like reddit, but I guess it is just that browse local is the default option. I guess browse all should be the the default for now, but I actually like browsing by local first to see what is going on in my local instance before looking at the rest of the fediverse.

    • I asked someone who wrote a huge reddit post about it, and they responded with "idk, I just looked at it and didn't get it."

      UI labs record a person trying to use something for the first time so they can see what they get stuck on. Like, mouse movements, clicks, even eye-tracking.

      Not saying that the Lemmy or kbin devs should be doing that right now, as they've got full plates. Or that Reddit did this. But understanding where and why people get stuck is a big part of working on UIs.

      • It’s the UI that trips me up on KBin. It’s probably a lot easier for people using a desktop to navigate. But from mobile, it’s frustrating when I tap what I believe should be a button and it isn’t actually a button. The navigation of KBin.social is less intuitive to me than the navigation of Lemmy.world. Also, yeah, “magazine” is not an intuitive term.

  • There's a bit of learning curve for sure, but people shouldn't overthink the federation aspect too much. At least here on Kbin there is plenty of content already.

  • Any website that doesn't have a simple sign up in two steps (username/email, password) and everything clearly explained to them like a 5 year old will receive tons of complaints about being confusing. It's just the internet

153 comments