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Lemmy and Kbin: The Best Reddit Alternatives?
(www.pcmag.com)
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this post was submitted on 26 Jul 2023
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Technology
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I think these long explainations of instances and federation are really not necessary. It should just say "pick a server and start browsing. You'll be able to see everything*."
"*If you really want to get into the weeds, blah blah blah."
For real. Wanna try Mastodon? Make an account on mastodon.social. Wanna try Lemmy? Make an account on Lemmy.world. Once people buy into the platforms they can migrate to smaller/niche instances if they’d like. Simply things at first, active users will then slowly figure out the rest.
It sucks migrating between instances right now. I've found no way to port my subscriptions from one instance to another. All of your subscriptions are saved on your current instance as websites, but to subscribe on you new instance they need to be formatted ![name]@instance Lots of work needs to be done
And on Mastodon, you can't migrate posts, which also really sucks
Yes. Anytime someone starts trying to explain the Fediverse to someone signing up I want to put my hand on their face and tell the newbie right this way.
It’s like how there aren’t articles comparing email options. We all just kinda picked an email site and stuck with it until something goes wrong and then pick the next one. No one’s really investing time in debating ones over the others or trying to convert others to Team Hotmail or somethin.
I always smile when I see Hotmail addresses come up 😄
I used to have my first name (which is very common) at excite.com 🎉😂 Good times!
Mine was from highschool because they told us to use that. Now it's for junk
Secretly? I’m pretty blatant about laughing at yahoo accounts.
an AOL email
I saw someone recently with a Prodigy email. That was my first ISP in like 1999.
Unless you're crazy like me and host your own email server :)
I like the direction Lemmy and Kbin has provided in terms of providing a messaging environment on the internet where it is more decentralized much like the internet of old.
Email on the other hand has taken a serious step in the other direction with email monopolies from the big names such as Google and Microsoft etc that have made self-operated email servers quite a bit more difficult to operate then it really should be, at-least from the perspective of actually sending email to other people using their servers and getting it in their inbox.
I find it ironic that Google/Microsoft etc use the excuse of spam/malware as the excuse to block self-hosted email servers with little to no email history/reputation yet most of the worlds spam comes from their servers.
But a negative consequence of that was the centralisation of email providers.
Agree completely. It just makes it all sound much more complicated than it is in practice. I’m used to the fediverse now and my eyes glazed over reading all that.
Another issue I have with the article is that he doesn’t even touch on third-party apps, which are abundant and pretty damn robust considering how new they are. The fact that much of Reddit’s self immolation was directly due to their treatment of third-party apps. At least worth a paragraph in my opinion.
Otherwise, nice write up.
I am not sure I agree. It does not need paragraphs of explanations but something that says the server you sign up for decides what you can see, should still be mentioned.
I have signed up for multiple servers in the beginning and found quite big differences in what I could see because of what was already blocked. Or servers that have not federated with each other yet. Then I stuck with lemmy.fmhy.ml and well, I guess you know the story.
So I think it definitely should mention server choice may influence content and one should try out several in the beginning to see whats best for yourself.
I saw this claim and signed up for a different instance just to see if it's different. Nope, it's the same. Unless you really go off and find an instance that curates, it's really the same.
They can have an explaination below, but for 99% of people it really doesn't matter.
Unless you say what two instances you signed up for we can agree to disagree.
I signed up on feddit.de, startrek.website and lemmy.fmhy.ml. I saw many communities only via fmhy, which we obviously now cannot test anymore. After that I signed up for ttrpg.network and was missing quite a few communities, and yes, of course I can search/connect to them to get them to federate, but the point is a new user does not know that and will not attempt it.
This might be different now, a month in after the big move from reddit where there is more extensive federation, so your experience is potentially more valid than mine now, I admit to that.
So long as the federation of servers is based on the whim of the few people who own the instances, the server you choose is most currently relevant. The people running these communities need to realize that cutting of groups just because you don't agree with them or have personal issues with them is going to cause an extremely fragmented experience, alienating new users who don't understand the landscape this ensuring nothing but monolithic servers and communities exist and no small communities will ever be populated.
There are also some quirks in how Kbin handles things that differs from Lemmy. Linking to Lemmy instances works fine when viewed from Kbin, but it doesn't seem to work when linking Kbin communities. All fairly minor though!
Agree