Think about things from the point of view of someone who has never used Reddit or the fediverse, but you’ve heard about them both from recent news articles and want to see what they are about.

Reddit:- You Google Reddit and your first result is Reddit.com. You click the link and are presented with the front page. You from scroll from a few hours and end up signing up and staying.

Lemmy:- You Google Lemmy and your first result is a wiki article for Lemmy Kilmister… Your second result might be join-lemmy.org, which you’re smart enough to realise it’s probably more likely what the news is about.

You click join-lemmy.org and are presented with a page of information about the fediverse, links to set up a server and pictures of code…

There is very little chance you’re going to investigate further.

If we want the fediverse to replace Reddit then either
A) Lemmy needs to improve its initial impression and Search engine optimization
B) We should be promoting a different platform with a better initial first impression.

I’d recommend kbin personally as it gives the same sort of experience as Reddit from the initial interaction.

  • abff08f4813c
    00·
    1 year ago

    kbin is newer and less polished. But yeah I personally recommend kbin over lemmy for exactly the reasons you posted.

    • Crankpork
      00·
      1 year ago

      Less polished, but the browsing experience is better and more customizable than any Lemmy instance I’ve been on so far.

    • tbird83ii
      00·
      1 year ago

      Also, the Kbin dev expressly stated he isn’t ready for a massive migration, and the current influx has caused him no end of stress. We want to keep him around and not drive him insane.

      • BedSharkPal
        00·
        1 year ago

        I would argue we also don’t want to be in a place where we rely on any one individual. Thankfully @ernest seems to understand that as well.

        • ernest
          00·
          1 year ago

          I appreciate the concern, and it seems to me that kbin is no longer just one person ;) Currently, kbin is a team of wonderful people who handle development work, devops, project management, and more. Additionally, Piotr helps me with administering kbin.social. There will be significant changes here soon, things are happening quickly. But to be honest, I wasn’t fully prepared for such substantial growth, and it will probably take some time before everything stabilizes. But… this is just the beginning ;) What’s important is that the snowball starts rolling, regardless of whether kbin, Lemmy, or Mastodon gains the most users. We all win in this situation.

            • BEEKAYRANDEE
              00·
              1 year ago

              The thing that helps Kbin the most is that it is, by far, the easiest to understand. Googling “Lemmy fediverse” gives a bunch of various links to other Lemmy instances, which are presented in a way as if they are separated from one another. Kbin appears as one site, one location for content aggregation. Although that “goes against the idea” of decentralization, most users are currently looking for their “one home to replace their old one home”. The more users flock to one area and learn how it works, the more things will begin to take their proper shape, so to speak.

              • rideranton
                00·
                1 year ago

                A feature we’ll definitely want to have with kbin in the future is the ability to migrate accounts to other instances. That would mean that even though we’re centralizing on kbin.social right now, people could move to other instances and spread the load across the fediverse without losing their history

                • BEEKAYRANDEE
                  00·
                  1 year ago

                  I’m still learning the ins and outs of this place and the others, but part of me thought that was the feature of being federated. User accounts could seamlessly transfer from one instance to another.

                  Looking further into it, it looks like that feature exists for content, but not so much for accounts.

                  • tal
                    00·
                    1 year ago

                    You can access content from an account anywhere, but not migrate the account.

    • Nahaelem
      00·
      1 year ago

      Assuming we coalesce around Kbin, 5-6 years down the road when Kbin is a lot more polished and has a significant user-base,h ow do we prevent a repeat of Reddit?

      It’s inherent in human nature to coalesce, to form a community, which ultimately creates a centralized hub that is ripe for control by a few people.