People are really impatient. The platform is still full of bugs and problems, moderation tools are lacklustre, and the list goes on. A number of users are already shooting from the hip, asking for defederations etc, instead of giving the system time to settle down right after an influx spike, with more to come (when 3rd party Reddit mobile apps stop working; when old.reddit and RES go poof, and so on). Just sit back, customize the experience to the degree you can control it yourself, and watch it grow and get into shape.
this post was submitted on 17 Jun 2023
22 points (100.0% liked)
/kbin meta
639 readers
1 users here now
Magazine dedicated to discussions about the kbin itself. Provide feedback, ask questions, suggest improvements, and engage in conversations related to the platform organization, policies, features, and community dynamics. ---- * Roadmap 2023 * m/kbinDevlog * m/kbinDesign
founded 1 year ago
I was going to say the same thing, what we are experiencing right now isn't organic growth, it is an exodus, I think it is inevitable that instances will disagree at one point or another and decide to defederate but making these decisions now feels like jumping the gun.
Yeah, I can see why people would want to defederate from some places, but if the platform gives us, the users, tools to deal with it ourselves (ie. blocking complete instances, right now it's only users and communities), this problem will solve itself. The same goes for the double and triple communities, split over the instances. Some very popular topics from Beehaw disappeared overnight for my lemmy.world and sh.itjust.works accounts. If we get aggregator tools to help us group communities like the multi-sub tool in Reddit, for example, the whole social construct will gain a lot of stability. But this is taking time. The people coding all this stuff probably have day jobs.
Especially since most of the platform is still fresh out of the box. It doesn't even have a mobile app yet (Lemmy does, but it is a heavy work in progress, like Lemmy itself), but that it works well enough, and didn't all implode immediately under all the Reddit traffic is a minor miracle.
I def see the splintering as a positive. Personally, I dont feel I motivated to engage with a community once it starts to feel "too" big. There's a certain size where I feel unmotivated to engage. I know whatever I say there will get lost in the noise and there will be less meaningful communication. If any of my interests on a single server start to get too big where I feel like I'm just adding to the noise, I can always easily hop over to another instance where I can engage in a more meaningful way. I would bet there's a lot of other folks on here who will feel the same. While I'm sure it's likely that one instance for each topic might become the biggest "main" one, I dont think the smaller ones will be any worse off for it.
It's not just about "having nice conversations". It's about staying informed. If I want to get international [email protected], [email protected], [email protected], [email protected], etc. The same principle goes for topical stuff, like the Ukraine war, specific video games, and so on… Of course you could subscribe to all of them, but then you'd end up with a lot of repeated / duplicate threads in your subscriber feed. It also causes activity to be spread out, which causes activity to be lower overall because people feel like their community is not active anyway, so why bother?
The demise of reddit marks my third foray into the fediverse - first after Google+ shut down and Mastodon was a squalling infant. I made accounts in numerous fediverse instances to try them out, and most withered from disuse. Then Musk began the death of Twitter and I moved solidly into fediverse and our distant cousin, Diaspora. I did not think of reddit as social, but as a news source - my bad. But now that it is effectively gone, I am all in with the fediverse. I again have multiple accounts, and they work remarkably differently for being so connected. Like if someone comments on Lemmy in direct reply, and I commented from Mastodon, I get the notification on Lemmy AND Mastodon (because the first @ is the same on both accounts I suppose). Anyway, hard to say how the platforms will evolve, but I love having a front row seat for these things and participating.
I created magazines, not to stake out space, but to make a "bus stop" for fellow explorers. I have no long-term desire to own a piece of the fediverse. When a more robust space arises for a group's topical interests, we'll subscribe there too, and let the weeds take the old bus stop where we first gathered.
I still think it's needed but it doesn't need to be forced. The /m/technology can have a "local" and "federated" tag so the users can pick and choose whether to see Kbin or the rest of the lemmyverse magazines/communities.
One other problem is that people won't be bothered to know the name of the site just the community. Like on reddit, it's just /r/technology and /r/askreddit. On Lemmy, it's beehaw/c/technology and then some other one which I don't remember which is a problem.
/m/asklemmy should just go to all of them and then I can pick and choose which ones to see.