Reddit Migration

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

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. :(

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.

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

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.

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.

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! :)

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

Most people are really dumb when it comes to technology.

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

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:

1. Browsing "All" shows content from all federated instances
2. Most big instances are already federated, so chosing the right instance is not really that important
3. 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.

If the super-easy signup process is a barrier to entry for someone, is that person really worth having here? This may sound crazy, but I want barriers to entry.

Anyone recall how much better the internet was when it cost a few thousand bucks, and a bit of technical know-how, to even get online? It was no utopia, but it also wasn't everyone's Aunt Betty, who can't operate a toaster, on her iPhone screaming "5G gives you covid DO YOUR RESEARCH!!!1"

After finding the voting system better than Slashdot's, I was on Reddit for 14 years; I fell in love with it at the start, and slowly fell out of love each time they dumbed the site down, in order to lower the barrier to entry. It went from a forum for a community of nerds, to a Facebook meme image board, and each step was a painful reminder of Eternal September in action.

The Fediverse still has that old feeling of community, and I don't want Eternal September to happen here (and it is happening, but not to a terrible extent, yet). I wish signing up really was confusing. Nothing good will come from adding training wheels for Aunt Betty.

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)

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.

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.

I hear you. People have very little pain/change tolerance. Humans want things easy the first time. Those who stick around the fediverse have higher pain tolerance. They are more cognitively flexible. They are principled. There's a short time of adjustment that one has to tolerate.

I'm thankful for all those who have the strength to say "NO" to the likes of /spez. It's a small thing but it shows some determination and character.

For a lot of people, anything new means stress. So their willingness to put up with that new thing and the amount of perceived stress will almost always hinge on the potential (personal) benefits. And the benefits will initially be perceived as not very high. So the willingness to overcome the hurdle/endure stress will be pretty low.

So don't be too harsh on those people. They'll join once they perceive it as beneficial enough. ;-)

>sign up for reddit just fine
>claims signing up for kbin.social is too hard
???? it's the same process???