Don't tell people "it's easy", and six more things KBin, Lemmy, and the fediverse can learn from Mastodon
https://privacy.thenexus.today/kbin-lemmy-fediverse-learnings-from-mastodon/
Reddit's strategy of antagonizing app writters, moderators, and millions of redditors is good news for reddit alternatives like KBin and Lemmy. And not just them! The fediverse has always grown in waves and we're at the start of one.
Previous waves have led to innovation but also major challenges and limited growth. It's worth looking at what tactics worked well in the past, to use them again or adapt them and build on them. It's also valuable to look at what went wrong or didn't work out as well in the past, to see if there are ways to do better.
Here's the current table of contents:
* I'm flashing!!!!!
* But first, some background
- Don't tell people "it's easy"
- Improve the "getting-started experience"
- Keep scalability and sustainability in mind
- Prioritize accessibility
- Get ready for trolls, hate speech, harassment, spam, porn, and disinformation
- Invest in moderation tools
- Values matter
* This is a great opportunity – and it won't be the last great opportunity
https://privacy.thenexus.today/kbin-lemmy-fediverse-learnings-from-mastodon/
Thanks to everybody for the great feedback on the draft version of the post!
#kbin #lemmy #fediverse @fediversenews @[email protected] @[email protected]
@thenexusofprivacy @[email protected] @[email protected]
I'm a first-wave Reddit refugee and I agree, don't say the fediverse is easy. I've been online since the early 90s and it's not an easy transition. I wish there was a map. I wish it were easier to set up new communities for chatting.
But having been through these cycles (online and IRL) before, I must say that maybe you *don't* want it to be too easy. You *don't* want to get too popular.
I hope the Reddit revolt works. I want my niche communities back.
I stated a similar sentiment elsewhere. The reason the discussions on reddit became less rigorous and interesting over time is a case of Eternal September. As you make a site more user-friendly and accessible, you actually are inviting a lot of users who are would have been unwilling to learn a slight learning curve, whether technical or social. Maybe it's remiss of me to say, but I think it speaks to their unwillingness to change their minds or being willing to view a new perspective about much.
As an older person here who was on Slashdot and left for Digg and then left to reddit, I genuinely think having a slight learning curve prevents people who would otherwise be shitposters and nothing else from joining the fray. I really would like to see high quality discussions online thrive again like they often did in the early days reddit (and where they often still do on its predecessor, hackernews), and as elitist as it is to say, I think having it be a little more technical and confusing isn't a bad thing.
Also, as an older person here, if people are willing to figure out the initially quite confusing way (to me anyway) that Discord works, they can figure this out, too.
@[email protected] I strongly disagree. Most people have better things to do with their time than fight their way through buggy and confusing software. And as I say in the essay, if it were harder to sign up for Gab, would that make the quality higher? Of course not.
@Grumpycat8
I don't think its nearly that bad. It takes time to get setup the way you like it, but so does reddit. So does other social media platforms.
Having an easier search and community index system would be great though. I feel like that's one of the biggest barriers to entry currently.
Yes and no. In the article I say
| Still, despite the quirks, once you figure a few things out, both Kbin and Lemmy can give you a surprisingly good reddit-like experience, and some of the larger communities have over a thousand active users which isn't chopped liver.
That said ....
on lemmy.ml this post says it has 10 comments but only 8 are visible. Looking at it on blahaj.lemmy.zone it says 15 comments, also only 8 are visible.
Your comment showed up on Lemmy and (unlike other comments) didn't show up on @[email protected]'s original post.
Even if you have a Mastodon account, if you click on that link it'll most likely take you to a tab where you're not logged in and can't interact with it unless you know the magic way of cut-and-pasting it to the search window in a tab where you're already logged in -- and your account's not on a site that's defederated from infosec.exchange
Most people (including me!) find stuff like that very confusing!
Yeah, so far it has been neither buggy nor confusing for me. It's taken a small amount of research and being willing to ask fellow Lemmings how things work. It's actually a much more fully fleshed out in many ways than a lot of other social media sites. I just learned how to do footnotes[^1], for example.
[^1]: Ooooh, fancy!
The more popular a community becomes, the shittier it gets. The easier you make it to join and interact with, the more popular it will become.
In the case of places like Gab, Truth Social, Parlor, and other right wing nut job havens, while the quality of users might not get higher if you raised the barrier to entry, those places certainly wouldn’t have become as popular as they have.
But the barrier to entry isn’t the only reason they’ve congregated there, they have other cultural reasons driving them, primarily the owners or moderators being friendly to that kind of mindset. I don’t think the same crowd would be able to gather here as they’d just get defederated.
@SemioticStandard There are good subreddits with over a million users. At least up to some threshold, it's just not true that the more popular a community becomes the shittier it gets.
I really do not understand this expectation people have that an online forum of 1,000,000,000 people would be full of deep nuanced conversations. Even if you got the smartest 1,000,000,000 people who ever lived and put them in some group, how could they consistently have interactions anything other than superficial? Communications will be flying around at blazing speed all the time.
Any group that size is going to have only tenuous connections and contexts with one another. So it will suit certain kinds of topics and vibes and goals and not others. The lingua franca of funny cat videos will work. But some things require a more intimate approach where participants can create and become acculturated to group norms. Luckily all modern forum software and platforms have the ability to form sub groups and to choose what groups you attend to. Nobody was forced to spend time in /r/all. All this talk about how put upon the smarty pants geniuses are because easy to use technology compelled them to pay attention to dumb people does not impress me. Really just seems to be a lack of agency when it comes to deciding how to spend one's own time.
I think large communities can be perfectly fine as long as you have your expectations calibrated properly.
I disagree with that. The larger subreddits have significant moderation problems. Only through extraordinary efforts by the mod teams, such as at /r/askhistorians, are things kept in line. It's simple math: the more users you have, the more likely you are to have people posting in bad faith. If a subreddit of 1 million users has only 0.05% of its users posting low quality content, that's still 50,000 people that need to be moderated for.
@SemioticStandard I agree that the larger a community gets the harder it is to moderate well (and the tools here are still much less advanced than Reddit, which is a big problem). But trying to deter bad actors by making it hard to sigh up doesn't work. Spammers and other bad actors are typically more likely to make the effort than people who might well add a lot of value.
Why do you think this?
because spammers and bad actors are motivated exclusively to get something by joining the community. they are willing to put in the work in anticipation of attention, traffic, sales, whatever. it is their job. they will also try over and over to figure out what they need to do and then exploit their method of entry when discovered.
on the other hand, a person who might have a more collaborative relationship with a community is considering both the benefits and the costs of joining. they are wondering if anyone will be interested in their contribution, and if they will get relationships, feedback, learning, good feelings, whatever.
If you need to solve several puzzles to gain entry, and you aren't a puzzle solver kind of person, it is a very loud message: "we are not interested". A person who is receptive to social cues will pick up on that and draw the inference that their time is better spent elsewhere. and being receptive to social cues is one of the qualities that makes a person a good participant.
Sounds like in your case, a person would be correct in that conclusion. All I can say is I think that is erroneous at the platform level. I think it's good to have focused places to go that meet different needs and have various expectations set. and as a user you should spend your time where it suits. But there isn't like a magic puzzle to determine how interesting a person is. Personally I find the nerd parts of reddit to be the most easily replaceable. Here we are, and on many other forums as well. But there are all kinds of little interest communities populated by people who can't just spin up a server, who will not be so able to re-find each other and those were very cool and now they are gone. If reconstituted it will be on some walled garden proprietary service.
It wasn't really Eternal September that killed Usenet, though; it was spam, and the lack of effective means to control it — or the will to completely isolate the servers that tolerated it.
The AOLers weren't the ones with the Perl scripts emitting
buy herbal teen viagra. Rather, the new popularity of the medium made it appealing to every unscrupulous idiot with a get-rich-quick scheme. The first commercial spammers went on to publish a book about how to spam Usenet, which instructed similarly unscrupulous businessfolks to "hire a nerd" to code up a spam bot.