Can I just rant a little to you all?
I’ve tried numerous times to help people from reddit set up an account and get started on Kbin (and lemmy), but 4 out of 5 times people can’t seem to grasp the concept of registering an account and starting to use this platform. Even breaking it down into 2 steps, with direct links… They get angry, and then ragequit their attempt in a huff saying how it’s too fucking complicated and it will never take off because it’s so hard.
Ok, I get that the fediverse is complicated if you think deeply about all the interconnectivity and federation etc, but there is no reason you even have to think about any of it to create an account and get started. Like, at all.
It reminds me so much of my 70/y old mother-in-law not immediately knowing how to work a tv remote and shoving it at me after 1.5 seconds saying “here, I can’t figure this out”. When in reality all she had to do was press the fucking big red button…
I’m just so frustrated with people’s complete lack of ability to help themselves.
It is confusing. Simple as. I have an account on lemmy dot ca, but I don’t understand how to view or participate in kbin content so I just don’t
You are literally participating in kbin content right now, commenting on a thread on a kbin magazine posted by a user registered to kbin.
Tbf, I think that underlines what he was saying. He has no idea where he is, or that he is already participating kbin.
Compare that to reddit, and it’s more complicated.
Why do they need to know?
See a post, upvote it, comment on it. It’s functionally exactly the same as where they came from. The nuances are dramatically unimportant unless or until someone decides they want to use the platform in a more advanced, detailed way, which is going to be like 5% of us.
There’s literally no reason to explain the concept of federation at all unless someone specifically asks “Hey, how can I do this more advanced thing?” The cat pictures are all right here, on my screen, and I can comment on them the exact same way I did on reddit. The only difference is that the interface is a little rougher around the edges at the moment.
First of all, why shouldn’t they know? I’m pretty sure you’ve seen the posts saying reddit is undeleting posts or that lemmy/kbin is “bad for privacy” because they don’t delete comments? Many of them never even realized or remember how pushshift worked. Because they didn’t know. I won’t advocate jumping in blindly to a site/app because, “trust me bro.” It’s even a good thing people want to know what they’re signing up for.
There are literally reasons to explain how it all works. Just scroll on /all and you’ll find a lot of posts asking stuff about the Fediverse and/or how to navigate it. Or to troubleshoot some issues. Or to ask “how do I search this and that?” Etc. I bet I just need less than a minute on my browser to find a post like that.
Let’s say a newcomer arrives, signs up for beehaw (or lemmy.world since it seems to be a popular lemmy instance), and proceeds to get Jerboa. Do you think the app shows all communities you search for out of the box? No. I’ve been there. I have a lot of communities I’m subbed in that I had to use the direct link and search via browser for me to even find it. You can say, “just use the browser,” but you’d be ignoring the fact that many people are unhappy precisely because they can’t use their app anymore so they obviously navigate via an app.
If someone wants to know, they’ll ask. But just using the platform requires exactly none of that knowledge, and trying to infodump all the technical jargony bullshit onto people right from the beginning is absolutely going to make them go “wow, this is complicated” and not come here. Because you’ll convince them that it matters somehow.
Or maybe kbin is just fucking amazing and I’ve been spoiled by not having to know shit about the backend of this. Maybe Lemmy really is more complicated, or something.
Kbin really is pretty cool. Lol. The only reason I’m not on it is because there’s no app. I’m on mobile 95% of the time so browsers don’t really work for me.
I get what you’re saying, and I agree. I’m just saying for some folks it might not be as simple as you and I think it is. And it wouldn’t hurt if the fediverse became a bit more easier for the non-techie people. Some people (like me lol) just makes things needlessly complicated. I’m still trying to convince people to join us here despite the obstacles.
For what it’s worth, I’m only using kbin on mobile and a lack of app hasn’t been an issue for me. I say this having come from Reddit using Relay for a good 8+ years.
Kbin lets you install a Progressive Web App (PWA) which gives you a button that puts it in it’s own separate window from the rest of the stuff running in your browser and to my understanding lets it run in the background to give you notifications if you want (I keep notifications off for most things, so I haven’t tested this aspect).
It might be worth a try. My only caveat is that it isn’t working right in Firefox because they seem to have stopped PWA support, but it works fine in Vivaldi which is chrome-based so other chrome based browsers are probably fine for this use.
Apps are a bit of a relic from the days before responsive web design / mobile-focused web development took off. If you think about it, we really shouldn’t need to download a separate app for every website we visit on a mobile device.
It also underlines what the OP is saying. The average user doesn’t need to do anything or think about anything special to use the platform. Simply making an account and interacting with whatever is on front of you will work.
It’s only complicated if you’re constantly comparing it to reddit in your head and trying to recreate the exact experience here.
Not always. There are the defederated instances, for example. Sometimes things break like lemmy.ml and people are having issues subscribing to communities (it’s apparently just a visual bug, but still). There have been tons of questions about the Fediverse from people who just got here. Kbin, for example, was not federating properly for a while before and we on lemmy could not see any posts on it. That can matter if a specific community is on an instance not accessible to a user for one reason or another.
Edit: I’m not criticizing the Fediverse, but it still has issues to be addressed. It’s pretty young relative to big social media sites like FB, reddit, etc so growing pains are to be expected. But we do need to acknowledge the issues if we hope to fix them later on.
Yes but that’s only relevant if you’re aware of a specific community on a specific instance and expect to be interacting with it on purpose.
It’s completely irrelevant if someone just gives you the name of an instance, tells you to make an account on it and start using. You’ll be perfectly fine reading and commenting whatever’s in your feed.
The only way this breaks is if you’re in an instance that is too small to have local traffic while having technical difficulties with federation. If the instance is active enough or it’s federating normally, someone completely unaware of the concept of federation will be perfectly fine as long as they understand the interface.
True. I agree with you. Hopefully soon most technical issues will be resolved enough to not matter to the average user. I’d love for us to grow more, and I think we should address the barriers that are preventing some “normies” (for lack of a better term) from heading here. I know some are just making up excuses, but hell my mom just learned how to post in facebook middle of last year. Lmao. Some are just easily confused.
They’ll be fine until someone recommends a community on another instance complete with link and suddenly the user is logged out, can’t subscribe to that community, and when they try to log back in by clicking the login link on the page, it says account not found.
For this reason, there is a need for at least a little bit of understanding about how federation works.
This understanding is much more easily achieved after one’s familiar with the basics of their own instance though, isn’t it? Rather than expecting them to imagine the exact user experience of the fediverse before they even made their account, would we not be better off introducing them to a cold open and be helpful later when they have questions?
All of these problems are caused by the same underlying system and trying to explain the system to non-users is the exact wrong way to go about alleviating them. Better interface and UX design is the only thing which can solve this issue.
Yup, it’s like email but take away recipients. Yea, there’s sorta recipients, but you don’t really know who it’s federated with/etc. We (foss devs) need better optics here. UX is difficult, though i welcome ideas.
The important part is that it isn’t actually that important. You aren’t having much of a clue about how Reddit’s algorithms work either, you just partake in what’s presented to you, and same goes for the fediverse. Eventually you get a better grasp about things, but overall it’s not a requirement to actually use any of the platforms. People just make things more complicated for them than they actually are.
You gotta admit, this right here is a pretty classic fediverse moment.
Is there an active “BestOf” community? Lmao
I also did not know what a kbin is as of a few minutes ago, but the great thing is, that I really didn’t need to know. I guess it feels “complicated” because there is much that can be learned but you don’t necessary have to.
People also did not know how the Reddit backends work and just used it but apparently they feel that they HAVE to learn how the fediverse works on day 1.
you’re participating in kbin content right now…
The funny part is, you’re viewing and participating in kbin content right here. This is a thread posted to kbin. My reply will look to you as if it was made in lemmy, but it’s not. I have a kbin account, and that’s the magic at work.
The best analogy I heard so far is email; everyone gets that you can send an email from gmail to outlook. We are just not used to that websites can interconnect with each other but give it some time and it will be second nature to people
Please stop with the email analogy. It really doesn’t help with anything. You send emails to an email address, people don’t think of the back end of that process at all and can’t make an analogy to social media where posts just… go out into the ether.
The only reason this is confusing is that tech-heads in these services can’t shut up about federation despite federation being largely irrelevant to the experience. The fact that the poster above didn’t even notice that the interaction is happening cross-service but still was confused about how to interact cross-service tells you that the way to help people get over how “hard” understanding federation is would be to shut up about it.
I mean, that won’t help with people not being willing to just make an account on a place at all, but yeah, everybody is so pleased about the interoperability thing that they make the day-to-day use of federated services seem a lot more convoluted than it is in practice.
I actually agree. Nobody explains DNS to people trying to understand how mail works. They don’t need to understand MX records, SPF records, DMARC, DKIM, or anything. All they need to know is sign up and how to use the To: field to start sending emails. Hell - you don’t even need to and probably don’t want to explain the purpose of the CC or BCC fields at this point either.
If a user is trying to actually understand the underlying technology then the email analogy can be a first introduction. But if someone is technical enough to be trying to learn it’s better to just teach them about ActivityPub.
Yeah, the email thing keeps getting repeated but doesn’t actually make sense when you think about how people use the fediverse.
I think it as more of as being like what kind of device you use to watch subscriptions. Are you picking a tablet or a smart TV to watch Netflix or Hulu? The device is kbin or lemmy. What communities/magazines you interact with is is like the service. All of them can access the service if you’ve subscribed. You don’t need a Hulu device or a Netflix device, just a device.
As the others have pointed out, this is a kbin thread. Since your account is on an instance that’s federated, all the content comes to you, you don’t have to do anything special.
…this whole thread is on kbin
Looks like you figured it out by accident, this is a kbin thread lol. It’s functionally identical to taking part in Lemmy threads, the complicated stuff is happening in the background as our instances communicate. Threads from all instances show up in the “All” tab and you can participate in them just the same as if they were from your own, for the most part. Since you’re on a relatively large instance as well, you should be able to search for just about any community you want using Lemmy’s own search bar and be able to find one without having to worry about if it’s in another instance or not. Chances are, whatever instance its on has been visited by someone else before, so the link between the two already exists. I hope this helps!
I don’t know if you’re aware but …
That happened to me too in the beginning with lemmy coming from kbin, until I discovered the very bottom of the page where it showed me which community I‘m in (odd place to put that).
I made some strange posts like linking to a community I was in. Gets better with time.
What community you’re in is right in the URL and can be found at minimum twice in the sidebar. Just look for @[sub]@[instance], or the previous with @[username] in front of it.
Thank you, all that is so good to know!
I didn‘t see any of that, cause the back of the URL is a bit painful to look for on my phone’s browser and the sidebar part is collapsed by default. Now that I know what to look for I‘ll hopefully not get lost again.
The mobile site definitely needs some work, or better some proper apps.
Since nobody said it yet, you should know that this whole thread is k.bin
You are rn interacting with kbin people xd
Also, there’s kbin, lemmy, squabbles.io (speed- and layout-wise my favorite) - each with several „federated“ instances. Which to chose? For many, the appeal of a social media platform is that you have ONE place where you can be sure to see/read and reach all others.
And instances are sometimes „unfederating“ or the federation is incomplete, you‘ll never know. Just look at this (on reddit, sorry) : https://www.reddit.com/r/RedditAlternatives/comments/149sm0n/beehaw_defederating_from_lemmyworld_and/
If the admin of one instance decides to de-federate, you’re suddenly cut off.I’m enjoying my time on kbin.social and I genuinely support the idea of federation, but… This is honestly the only major issue I have with the Fediverse. Most of my Reddit/social media posts are related to three or so niche interests. My first Mastodon account was on the central hub for one interest that later defederated with the central hub for another interest. Not being able to interact with 1/3rd of the people I want to interact with just defeats the whole point of joining these kinds of platforms. Moderators just carving out a chunk of the Fediverse for their users is just unacceptable.
Is squabbles federated? I don’t feel like it is. But I do love it.
No. Squabbles is neither part of the fediverse nor is it open source. It’s its own independent & proprietary platform. It’s kbin, Lemmy, and to an extend Mastodon.
I think I can understand how confusing this is for people. It took me a while to get used to Reddit originally, and now it is another different environment.
I am kind of running to here because I tried going to Discord and found myself getting rather confused with the many channels/servers (?). I am a tech-idiot. I just like to be in a place where I could see interesting threads to join and chat. I used to go to forums, but those forums slowly died after social media platforms came into prominence. I miss those friendly forum environment, and I struggle to keep afloat in a world that seemed to be moving a lot faster than my brain can follow. :(
Listen here youngster. You are doing just fine. You are here, you are finding threads. You will get the hang of it. It’s the internet it grows and changes. Hopefully for the better.
I would say you are doing a lot better than struggling! I hope you find more interesting threads!
I get that, and I’m sort of understanding - just frustrated and wanted to vent earlier…
There is a lot of tech jargon people are throwing around that is wholly unnecessary in the grand scheme of ‘just sign up and participate’. People don’t need to understand all the backend workings to just participate and I don’t know why everyone is focusing so much on it.
The equivalent would be every user trying to understand the inner workings of reddit’s website; the servers, the dns records, the load balancing, the network between each server. None of it is necessary to actually use the site.
They are coming here because they are angry at Reddit. They are still angry when they get here. Being angry is not conducive to having a good experience of something new, especially if they didn’t want to leave Reddit in the first place. Kbin/Lemmy is being sold as a forced upgrade. It’s like if your word processor has all its icons moved around and put into a side bar that’s hidden until you know where to click. Why the fuck did they do that? We all hate that sort of shit, and that’s what it feels like being forced to come here.
If you are going to promote Kbin/Lemmy, you need to change their mindset before they get here or they will just see a forced downgrade onto a broken Reddit clone.
That’s a fair assessment, and I hadn’t considered the anger from being a forced change. I have good reasons for seeking an alternative and thus invested in making the change. That may not be the case for most.
Let me put it…indelicately. We are filtering out idiots with nothing to share and who aren’t willing to put in effort.
That’s fine. Keep chugging along
Not a bad take. It is insanely simple. All the talk I read before trying made it seem like I would be jumping though hoops… Just set .world as the instance and made a login like I would anywhere else…
Is that ONE extra curve ball too much for people?
I think it’s mostly choice paralysis, people are used to have centralised social media and when they enter the fe diverse they are like “where should I go? Which instance is the best one?”. Maybe an automatic instance picker that assigns your closest, moderately populated instance with the option to manually choose would help solve this.
I agree. Picking an instance was really difficult with all the options available. Also, to conciously pick an instance, you would first have to understand what they are and how Fediverse works, which is quite a lot to ask from a person who comes from a centralised social media platform. There are some hurdles that have to jumped, albeit they are quite low. Even low hurdles are still hurdles though and add to the effort which deters many people from joining.
Any Lemmy thread I click on, I have good time engaging with the content. The natural filter is doing good work
Heck yes!
I can only assume that the people having trouble understanding kbin/lemmy are either relatively young, or relatively inexperienced with technology. Basically those people whose online experience really only started in the era of Reddit/Facebook/Twitter/etc. Those of us who were online in the early 2000s are familiar with web forums. Kbin Magazines/Lemmy Communities are basically just web forums that can be interacted with from any kbin or Lemmy instance that’s federated. Those of us who are even older and were online in the 90s (or earlier) are familiar with Usenet. Kbin Magazines/Lemmy Communities are basically Usenet newsgroups, with the particular instance you’re on essentially the same as your Usenet provider. Or for the really old folks like me, instances are like BBSes that are connected to each other with FidoNet.
It reminds me of people who get confused getting on Discord for the first time, when it’s really just a modern incarnation of chat-rooms or IRC. None of these ideas are new, and people were able to figure out these core concepts decades ago.
I don’t properly understand how all of this works.
But signing up to kbin on the weekend was just like signing up for anything else online.
And once I did, replying to posts - like this one - was more or less the same as replying on any other discussion forum.
So…I don’t get it, what’s so hard? Do you really need to understand the technical details underneath to start using this place?
That said, I would like to grasp this whole thing a little better. But I figured the best way to do that is to jump straight in and go from there! :)
I don’t get it, what’s so hard?
One of the biggest obstacles are links to other instances. Imagine a post from lemmy.world appears on your kbin.social frontpage where someone says “Hey, go check out this cool community I found: lemmy.world/c/CoolCommunity”. You click the link and suddenly you’re on another instance where your kbin account doesn’t work. It appears like you would need to create an account on lemmy.world in order to participate. What’s actually true is that you need to change to URL to kbin.social/m/CoolCommunity@lemmy.world, then you can subscribe to the community and participate using your kbin account. This is something you need to understand in order to enjoy your time here. A solution for this needs to be implemented, like an option to automatically turn URLs from foreign instances into home instance URLs.
An even bigger issue for me was finding communities in the first place. I have to use !x@y syntax, but maybe also sometimes @x@y? But what is x and what is y when kbin has different syntax and names for things compared to lemmy? Also, it works for some communities but for others it just throws a 404 error?
I’m kinda familiar with it now and I know the little tricks to get it to work, or which steps to take to avoid stepping onto a mine, but it’s still confusing at times. I’m recently seeing cases of comments just not syncing and showing up on kbin but they are visible from my beehaw account. Clicking on posts doesn’t properly navigate you to them and sometimes it’s next to impossible to find them in larger threads.
It’s impressive and very promising tech but it’s very early for massive adoption, it cannot replace reddit as it is.
100% agree. I’m currently trying to find a way how a browser addin could take care of the URL translation (like automatically turning kbin.social/m/memes into feddit.de/c/memes@kbin.social when feddit.de is defined as your home instance in the addin). Then I noticed that feddit.de/c/BuyItForLife@kbin.social gives me a “404: couldnt_find_community” error and I have no idea why. I also can’t find the BuyItForLife magazine with the community search on feddit.de. I can find other kbin magazines though, like memes. No idea why ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I just hope some of this stuff will be fixed with the 0.8 update, otherwise I don’t see how a browser addin could look like. I also wouldn’t know how to translate post and comment URLs automatically.
It seems like nobody on feddit ever subscribed to BuyItForLife@kbin.social so it never got synced to that instance. My understanding is that it should be found like this the first time, but it never worked for me on lemmy: https://i.imgur.com/pQHfq1N.png .
After this is done, it should start showing up with your link, it definitely seems correctly formatted. It will be missing posts made before it started sync, it doesn’t work retroactively though. On kbin I just use the magnifying glass (not the “all magazines”!) and then it usually finds any community I want.
In short, yeah… it’s a mess
That’s an interesting point, I hadn’t tried doing that yet. Seems fairly fixable though. I guess all this stuff will start to get better soon.
It reminds me so much of my 70/y old mother-in-law not immediately knowing how to work a tv remote and shoving it at me after 1.5 seconds saying “here, I can’t figure this out”. When in reality all she had to do was press the fucking big red button…
It’s not just you, the one who is helping us, feeling like this. It’s us feeling like this too… or atleast I feel like this.
Suddenly, I’m no longer the technologically sound person that I used to be. I’m overwhelmed. My hectic schedule and paucity of free time is not helping the case, either. There’s just too much to read about; figure out… Took me a good hour or so just to create an account. Then another good few minutes to login, when it asked “instances” or something that I wanted to login into.
It’s quite different from what I’m used to. I’m feeling as though there’s so much that I’m being forced to learn. And I’m annoyed, extremely annoyed, that I’ve been forced to leave the one place I used to enjoy. I miss the content that I used to enjoy on reddit.
People like yourself, ones taking time out of their day to help us, are really a boon right now. For days (really, a couple hours spread across days), I searched for alternatives to reddit. Tried to read and grasp a couple of guides before I made-up my mind to take that plunge.
I see where you’re coming from. And all I can say is, maybe once people get into the head-space to finally migrate, they may be more open to learning. They may still rage a bit about it - I know I am. But they may be open to learn.
Just want you to know that these guides and helps are most welcome right now. Thank you for helping us.
Two examples:
when you’re browsing your follows on mastodon, and click on their follows, the list is not true to their follows (because your server hasn’t fetched them).
and, when you first subscribe to someone’s posts, you can’t see older posts (say they’ve got 100, but you see zero).
I’m aware that there are technical reasons (you weren’t subscribed), and open source reasons (nobody has the time to volunteer to fix it), but these are insufficient to help an anxious new user who’s undecided about the platform.
That’s only Mastodon, which has 7 years of refinement. Don’t get me started on the litany of federation-related edge cases of Lemmy’s UX failings.
Yeah I won’t lie I’m… very confused but I’m kinda just rolling with it and hoping I figure it out along the way. I can’t speak for others but I find myself generally comfortable with computers and willing to try things out and see what I can do. Some people are afraid to do that and idk how to change it
I just made an account and started browsing the threads. Easy. I still have absolutely no idea how any of this works. The info diagram that was posted around a week or two ago was not very helpful.
I was unsure of which instance to go with, but I got on Kbin as soon as I saw that it had Oauth. (just don’t want to deal with it)
Honestly, I agree. I am not tech savvy, I am actually a pretty basic user of the internet. I just followed the link provided in a post, registered on Kbin, and started enjoying it.
Now, Lemmy did give me more trouble, and it’s the reason I am on Kbin, but even then it was more a matter of having to wait for confirmation. By the time it came I found I preferred Kbin “graphics” (don’t know how to explain it better).
Really can’t understand what people find so difficult. Even the fediverse isn’t a difficult concept: you sign up in one site, you can see posts from other sites too. Simple as that. There’s nothing complicated if you’re just an user and not someone who has to make it work
When one user is having problems, the problem is the user. When it’s multiple users, it’s a pattern and problem with the design.
The problem is that people don’t want to dedicate time to learn new, foreign things, they just want them to work. Because that’s how it is with the stuff they’re used to. Those things just work.
Also, fediverse isn’t ready. Servers aren’t always responding, design isn’t finished etc. So it’s no wonder people find it hard to use – because it’s an unfinished house or maybe more aptly a village.
I gotta be honest, I’m a tech person myself and I was also slightly confused when I checked out Lemmy for the first time. There were three major things I had to grasp before I felt like I understood the whole concept:
- Browsing “All” shows content from all federated instances
- Most big instances are already federated, so chosing the right instance is not really that important
- You can participate in other instances with the account of your “home” instance by turning foreigninstance.com/c/Community into homeinstance.com/c/Community@foreigninstance.com, which is a kinda cumbersome process right now, but I’m sure some wily developer will come up with an elegant solution for that in the future (like having the option to automatically turn URLs from foreign instances into home instance URLs).
It kind of makes me want to learn coding, so I can participate and make Lemmy better and better, lol.
For #3 the easiest way is probably just to search for the community. The search shows other instance’s communities too.
Which is still cumbersome and too convoluted for most people.
Yeah it’s definitely a problem. But I think most casual users would just see posts in their feed, and they can visit the community from the post with no issue.
That’s true, the problem only starts when someone includes a direct link to a community, post or comment of an instance that’s not your home instance.
Most people are really dumb when it comes to technology.
