CynAq

I've been using mastodon for a few months even though not very actively, so when reddit shenanigans took a turn for the worse, I looked for an alternative and found out about kbin.

For me it was pretty straight forward. Following feeds from other instances is simple enough to do but the exact user experience varies depending on which service you're using.

Right now from kbin, I'm following my own mastodon account and a few communities from mastodon, a couple from lemmy and several from beehaw.

Personally, I'm hopeful. I think as more people figure things out and the culture of the system starts to spread more mainstream, it (the fediverse as a whole) will make a good platform for all sorts of social media needs from twitter-like microblogging to forum discussions.

The bane of my existence in any pvp game is crowd control mechanics.

In general, I hate every player skill in pvp games which take away the opponent's ability to play.

This place will need serious server upgrades soon by the looks of things.

I can see how that might result from the general style of the answers people are getting when they ask how to start using this system. Things like "it's like email" or "it doesn't matter which one you sign up on as every instance can see the other instances they are federated with" can very well lead to the impression that a single user account works on all instances sharing the protocol.

I still think the reason for this is people are actually asking about the user experience rather than the way the protocol works. When they are answered with the above, instead of "go to the largest instance you can sign up at and start asking questions" and "if you go to a small instance it'll be very quiet and you'll get the feeling that all of this is really hopeless".

First and foremost, and I know this freaks out the decentralization first users who value that above the lively environment, people should be directed to where everyone else is if we want any sort of widespread adoption. Even if people flock to one instance, the decentralized nature of the protocol will still act as a safeguard against monopolization because once people learn the ropes, it's trivial to migrate to another instance which doesn't have whatever that is you don't like about your first instance.

**Edit: I visited beehaw.org, which seems to be a relatively large fediverse site (I'm new, don't judge), and their communities tab lists communities they host locally and others they are federated with. You can subscribe to any one of them through kbin by pasting the full address of the community (which looks like communityname@hosturl, usually listed on the right hand side column in the community) into kbin's search bar.

Also the notifications for comment replies are turned off by default on kbin. Actually, all notifications seem to be off. It detracts from the new user experience as people don't realize their comments have been replied to. Turn on your notifications in your settings!**

I'm wondering this too. And if there's a good way to see what instances there are in the first place.

I'm quite sure I understand how the overall "fediverse" system works on a technical level, and I think most people are quite capable of understanding the architecture of the system.

What people are confused about when they ask how this works (and are answered with useless email analogies and metaphors as to how the architecture is set up) is the user experience of finding curated content similar to a way they are used to getting on centralized systems.

I don't think most people are confused about what federation is or how the underlying protocol works, nor do they need the details unless they are interested in creating and hosting their own instances. What people are wondering is how they can recreate a reddit-like (or twitter like, in the case of mastodon) experience, while the decentralized nature of the system seemingly makes it impossible.

It's really shitty they are doing this. When desktops are providing way better price to performance ratio, they are trying to create the illusion that you can still get comparable performance with a slight increase in price, when in reality you are sacrificing a substantial amount of performance for mobility.

If they made this part clear, I don't think there would be any appreciable decrease in laptop sales too.

Do you think anyone opts to buy a laptop when they have no absolute need for mobility?

Yesterday I tried to use the Power Delete Suite to edit all my comments and self posts to F U u/spez on my 12 year old account. It failed and also resulted in me getting banned from a couple subreddits due to spam. Then I gave up and just deleted my entire comment and post history using the same script.

A lot of people might be doing something similar, which would spike the requests on their servers quite a bit.

Absolutely right. What makes or breaks any social media platform is the ease of forming large communities (which goes hand in hand with the number of total active users) first and the user experience second.

"Fediverse" seems to suffer greatly from a UX point of view, mostly due to decentralization, which creates this isolation effect for newcomers.

Take mastodon vs twitter for example. For someone used to signing up for twitter and instantly gaining access to virtually everything the platform has to offer, mastodon has a big threshold to jump over before you can have a twitter-like experience. At least it feels like it until you get used to the experience. That's still the biggest barrier in front of large scale adoption of decentralized social media platforms.

I had the same idea. Tags are already there to gather posts related to a topic in a single page. The difference in experience would be the curation reddit's subreddit system allows. Curation and moderation. Otherwise, an agreed upon tagging scheme should do the trick if the only concern is subscribing to topics.

It would be good to have a list of subs going private. It might incentivize other subs to join in protest.