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founded 1 year ago

Why is kbin so full of empty stuff? (kbin.social)

submitted 11 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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I'm not asking to be snarky or anything... I'm subbed to plenty of magazines that I enjoy reading.

It's just that the front page has the "random magazines" section, and the top bar is full of a seemingly random list of unrelated magazines... and 99% of what shows up in these two places is just empty. They seem like magazines that were made as placeholders and have been sitting empty for 6 months.

These two spots seem like prime real estate that should be filled with useful subs; or at least that magazines under a certain threshold ought to be filtered out of these locations to keep them relevant.

Or am I missing something?

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[–] [email protected] 5 points 11 months ago (1 children)

i wanted to add my personal experience, as someone who tried kbin and then ended up on lemmy

when learning about fediverse, i was first introduced to kbin. i assumed that kbin was a close match to reddit, and this was why i was being introduced to it. turns out, nope! it also has some microblogging thing? active people? boost vs favourites? i was bamboozled to say the least.

i'm sure the dual-purpose threads + microblogging is good for some, but i'm really, really not into twitter. and i also found it to be confusing when i was tagged in something as to whether i was reading a thread, or a microblog. i.e, kbin wasn't a good fit. then i discovered most of the actual content i was reading on kbin was being posted from some "lemmy" service? i clicked to find out more and... yeah, i made the switch pretty quickly.

basically, not all of us went back to reddit. i can't speak for all former reddit users, but one of the detracting points for kbin was the mixed purpose. like, for example, if i was to list places like facebook, twitter, instagram, even mastodon - these are all "people" focused places. you post about people, and the focus is more skewed towards following individual people and trends. if i was to list places like reddit, hackernews, something awful, even... 4chan... - these are "things" focused places. you post about things, and the focus is on following things. lemmy is firmly in the "things" camp, whereas kbin is trying to be both "people" and "things" at once, and so it just wasn't for me. 🙂

[–] [email protected] 3 points 11 months ago (1 children)

I'm going to present the opposite opinion to yours here. Kbin represents the best way forward for social media, to me. If we can get a working PeerTube integration after Threads federates, I'm all set. It's what Google Plus was supposed to be, it's why I first (as a user) used TweetDeck back in the day. It puts everything in one place again. I was a LiveJournal user back in the day, which was another place like this - communication & community, but individual places for your thoughts. I tried Tumblr for a while and it was close to an LJ replacement.

Everything since then has fractured and fragmented so we have very aggressive echo chambers, but no private places. This might be able to give that back to the users.

I accept that it can feel like drinking from the firehose at the start. It was to me at first too, but I was aware of Lemmy early on, and I was on two Mastodon instances that didn't cofederate. I knew what I was going in for. I stepped back from Kbin when a known tech issue degraded my experience, and it's been fixed. I think the thing is that Kbin allows you to curate your own experience, rather than be tied into doing one thing or another all the time.

I think when Kbin is ready for prime time and when the major issues are fixed, there might be a need to look at the first-timer experience, maybe even a tutorial. Because it's not a beginner focused interface. It's meant for us who want it all back in one place, and accepted the burden of experience that means.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 11 months ago

I'm with you on this.

I started out at lemmy and moved over to kbin because I liked its versatility. Lemmy just seemed like a left-leaning version of reddit. kbin seemed like a new and interesting to interact over the web.