this post was submitted on 13 Jun 2023
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Reddit Migration
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### About Community Tracking and helping #redditmigration to Kbin and the Fediverse. Say hello to the decentralized and open future. To see latest reeddit blackout info, see here: https://reddark.untone.uk/
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Just need more instances.
But then, apparently the fact that people don't know that other kbin instances exist is what makes kbin interesting to people. Sigh.
I imagine Christian could just make his own instance kbin.apollo and maybe use app subscriptions or donations to give it a beefy server, but I wonder about over-centralization. (Or if that's even how this all works...)
But that would require him to administer a server. That's a lot of work.
Look at the strain its putting on ernest. We have a growing pile of threads talking about what features need to be added, but he's spending his time trying to keep the website from spontaneously combusting.
The separation of community administration and website administration was a key element of Reddit. It's what made it work at all. The separation of website administration and development takes this one step further.
If we'll ever stop demanding that software developers be social media website managers, at least.
Yeah - Christian has also publicly stated that he's not interested in building or operating a service.
It's a shame in a sense though, because there is this one-time opportunity of invested users migrating from Reddit to something else and it will likely end up in a very fragmented universe. (Though maybe that is for the best).
I firmly believe that Reddit is too big to actually be useful as anything other than a passive ingestion experience for the overwhelming majority of people there, even the ones who want to be engaged. Major subreddits are too big to actually discuss issues, and the entire comment system is gamified to promote finding new posts in popular subs with a low number of comments with the potential to reach the top of the sub and then posting something biting.
That's not actually a healthy model of interaction, and it actively twists the way we think about topics, both as posters and lurking readers.
A multitude of accessible communities of a few hundred to a couple thousand users on the same topic where those users can actually be seen and heard and engage in a discourse is just better for us all. For each of us individually, for the online communities, and for society as a whole.
The fragmentation is a feature, not a bug.
Yes, there's the very real possibility that some post that you would have been interested in will show up on another website. Maybe that website will federate with the one you're using, so that you can go and fetch it and engage in it directly, temporarily engaging with another community. Maybe it'll happen on a website that doesn't federate, and you'll have to open another browser tab to read it. There will be friction there, sure.
But that friction is a good thing. It makes you make active choices in how you engage, rather than passive ones.
And yes, there's also the possibility that the post never crosses your field of vision, and you never know it exists. That you miss out on it entirely.
But that already happens on Reddit. It happens more times than you can count, as new posts that might be interesting to you get ignored by the subreddit at large and never get upvoted into relevance.
The FOMO is real. I get that. I experience is quite strongly myself. I go down way, way, way too many rabbit holes during my day, because websites like Reddit are designed specifically to make people burn hours scrolling past ads while having interactions of negligible meaning to anyone.
We have the opportunity to do something different now. Something more considered. Something without CEOs and investors who are looking to exploit our psychology and our passions to line their pockets. Instead, we can take ownership of the space at the infrastructure level and decide what's actually good for us, not just what's easy or what extends session times and clickthrough rates.
And that's a big, huge, massive deal.
High quality take. There's just one practical issue, most users of the internet are creatures of convenience, and they're not super big on the philosophical aspects of online culture. Fragmentation, friction, healthy interactions, these aren't considerations of the average social media user. They like integration, centralization, and (at the risk of sounding derogatory) being part of a hivemind.
As an example of that behavior, despite the scores and scores of videos and articles telling people not to pre-order games, to be wise with their purchases, gamers on the whole still pre-order games on a large scale.
We don't have to cater to everyone. If the average social media user won't climb over small barriers -- assuming those barriers aren't actual accessibility barriers, and are just an unwillingness to try -- then maybe... They can stay where they are?
We can have a healthier space. They can join us if they care enough to.