I think this is really spot on. I wasn't looking for a "reddit alternative" that "kinda sucks" because it's not reddit. I was looking for an actual "reddit alternative," not a reddit clone. And yes, I've just been lurking up until now, but so far this seems so much more sane and reasonable. For the time being, at least. Until someone finds a way to turn it into a reddit alternative.
Lemmy isn’t currently usable by “normies” but we, the weird ones are already here, building great communities, fixing bugs, developing features. Give it 6 months, and Lemmy and kbin will be ready for prime time. The world will watch it rise like a giant middle finger shown to /u/spez.
I consider myself only moderately tech-savvy and definitely not an IT person. I managed to make my way on here, and decided to create an account on a lesser-used instance after the second evening of looking around. Granted, it took some figuring out (didn't see any guides), but after about an hour I had most things set up to how I wanted it, and had Jerboa installed on my phone. If I can do it, 90% of the general population can. They just need the motivation.
Kbin is much more polished already. While lemmy is more or less a clone of old reddit, kbin is more like modern reddit just without the suck. Also, both are compatible.
i think it is really nice that you can use a time filter of 3h, 6h,12h 1d in kbin.
This makes finding new content so much easier without having the raw state of new
My scroll wheel hated me until I figured out I could just hold the space bar for a sec to jump to the bottom lol. I would imagine it needs to be changed sooner than later before the number of comments in the threats increases.
The thing to remember is that the user experience on Reddit, Twitter etc. is only going to get worse from here on in. But on the fediverse it's only going to get better.
Personally I don't need it to be "polished", and too much polish would smack of corporate excess to me. I want lively but friendly discussions on a variety of topics that interest me. And it's fun to watch something grow from early(ish) stages into a more complete package. I hope this will be a good social media home for me.
ETA I upvoted you for good topic and discussion, rather than downvoting in disagreement.
But unless something changes dramatically, it’ll suffer the same fate as Mastodon or Bluesky.
I have no idea what's going on with Bluesky, but mastodon is... fine? It's not twitter and never will be.
This doesn't mean Lemmy doesn't need a bit of work, though, I don't think anyone would deny that. I don't think they've had quite the pressure to triage issues like they do now, so a decent list of priorities is probably emerging.
I'm tempted to try to help, but I'm (generously) a rust novice. I worry I'll waste their time with bad PRs.
Bluesky is in beta, it isn't even out yet. But somehow it has already suffered a fate?
New things like Mastodon, Bluesky, and Kbin don't have to kill the current things in order to be successful. We don't have to rule the world, we don't have to be perfect on day 1.
I think the biggest thing probably tempering Bluesky at the moment is a queue that is 3+ months at a time to actually get in. It's creeping close to ~6 on my end and still nothing.
I still intend on swapping, but most people are going to lose interest in that period of time and just stay on Twitter.
It's going to take time to spin back up the reddit communities. Also, some behavior adjustments will need to be made (though I do miss having notifications I can instantly click to get to the replies. I suspect that's in the works.)
Majority of the people here are super helpful, much friendlier, and supportive even with all the flaws that we are experiencing. Building a community takes effort. Everyone’s effort is focused here so that we can have the place that we want it to be - a place better than reddit.
It's the people that make a platform a success. For all its popularity and polish, reddit often felt toxic and abrasive. I haven't seen too much of that here.
I created an account about 24 hours ago and this is actually better than I expected. Of course, I wasn't expecting a complete and polished interface from something so new, but I had read plenty of horror stories about how lemmy/kbin signups were impossibly complex.
I like it. It's already pretty intuitive and I like that it's not a 1:1 Reddit clone. I can easily imagine this expanding and growing into something really interesting
Thing is, people looking for a Reddit replacement are going to be in some way disappointed, since part of the idea of developing a new system is to avoid the things that made Reddit turn terrible. The sad truth it Reddit is probably too big for its users to just leave, but maybe they will financially just crash since their efforts to become profitable aren't looking all that effective.
wanted to try mastodon, but what really annoyed me was the the blinding bright post box in dark mode. Everything was nice and dark, but the post box had to be white. tried to find a user script to fix it, but there were none
His issues are that he misses the cultivated nature of Reddit. Reddit didn't start out cultivated, and took time and effort by volunteers to figure out it's identity. The same thing will happen with the fediverse. It will get cleaned up and streamlined as people put in effort. People look at a lump of carbon and say it's worthless, but with time it becomes a diamond.
Some people only see the value of something in it's present form and miss out on potential. The fediverse has a lot of potential so long as it is active. It's open nature will bring in freelance development help and it could very well become BETTER than what reddit was. Keep the faith
The same thing will happen on the fediverse if there are enough people using it. It's a circular problem.
The technical and usability aspects of Lemmy/Kbin will get ironed out, and probably sooner rather than later. I just want there to be enough critical mass of people that I have communities for most of what I want. E.g. gaming is well covered, but I don't have a replacement for /r/nfl which was my primary NFL news source.
Also, I imagine that the NFL mag will pick up when the season actually starts. The NBA mag was fairly active for the finals, so long as people are still active here they're gonna wanna talk pigskin
Just gotta give it some time. The Reddit apps have years of development behind them; the Lemmy apps weren't really seeing wide use until the last few weeks. There's now a lot of pressure for better alternatives, and a few other options are already in development (for iOS, at least - I assume for Android, too). Rome wasn't built in a day.
These burgeoning communities are rough around the edges. But as @dan96kid said, there's space for us to speak up, rather than simply lurk. I'm getting a kick out of this disruption.
I ended up switching to Kbin and like it a lot more in regards to how the main page provides threads. It still has it's issues, but they're for the most part outside of the main loop.
I'm somewhat surprised at how much the dynamic page load really messed with my ability to navigate Lemmy. Basically if I went away for any given time it would go from top threads for the day to random junk that had no activity. It really needs a way to turn that off.
Unlike Reddit, Lemmy instances are individual servers that come together like an interweb of subreddits.
That is not how it works, like at all. This same thing happens with Mastodon when journalists come on with a negative attitude and don't really want it to work so they don't really try.
You know what I love about kbin/lemmy - no goddamn Nazis. I'll take the growing pains of a burgeoning platform over Nazis on my timeline any day of the week.
Reddit wasn't all that amazing either when they first started - it took a while for things to get ironed out. Then they had to go and ruin a good thing
I think it's important to note that when the Mastodon migrations really picked up, the software was already 4-5 years old with organized development. Lemmy is only around 3-4 years old and kbin is only a couple years old (with very limited public use). That makes a big difference in what you can expect from them. With the influx of interest in these platforms, you're going to see far more help and contribution to the underlying code alongside better third party app support in the months ahead. These are both very young platforms and have a lot of room to grow in the next while.
I actually like kbin more than I did reddit. Reddit has a huge advantage though, over a decade of content. What I like about kbin though is it feels smaller, I see familiar names and interaction feels like I'm talking to a person not a thing.
“Currently” is the key word here. I’m using the TestFlight beta of Mlem and it’s coming along quite quickly. I haven’t been back to Reddit since the day before the blackout. Admittedly I’m spending a ton of time just searching for the subs that migrated over to communities here.
I‘m actually relieved if it doesn‘t become too big, I‘m afraid if it does, the corporations and other bad actors might come to destroy it again. I‘ve gone through this often enough.
With the popularity of Reddit and how simple (in theory) of a concept it is, it blows my mind that there is not an alternative. Kbin and Lemmy are okay, but they are pretty big compromise so far.
I can forgive the issues with Kbin and Lemmy because Reddit has had more time and resources to build the platform. My hope is that with the new attention and the open source nature that Lemmy will show consistent improvement to where I don't feel like I'm compromising.
There's been little demand. Give it some time. Enjoy being in in the ground floor, or wait until it's a little more mature. The more use and demand the more we're going to see improvements and alternative mobile apps and such.
For being an early beta, kbin is usable and remarkably polished. I think the downsides for most people are deciding what server to join and content discovery.
Because there isn't enough resources to develop it without any real interest. Most of fediverse projects start as personal projects and evolve as they gain traction.
This version is the worst it will ever be. It can only improve from here as corporate greed is not a factor with open source project.