Reddit Migration

So, back 15 years ago or so, most people who wanted to discuss topics on the internet, and who didn't want that discussion to be ephemeral, found forums dedicated to those topics.

There were thousands of forums. Millions of them. Some had dozens of users, while others had 10s of thousands. Many of them discussed similar topics.

Browning Lemmy or kbin is like browsing thousands and thousands of subforums across dozens of websites. Some of those websites have similar subforums, but they might be populated by very different people having very different customs and discussions.

Reddit kind of pushed everyone into a single room, and in a single room only the loudest people get heard. Hundreds of thousands or millions of subscribers just leaves most people shouting into the void, having no meaningful conversations, and rewarding performative antagonism and biting sarcasm.

You know, toxic shit.

The best thing to do with multiple communities here is find one that you like best, and engage with it. If there's something actually interesting going on in one of the other ones, trust someone to cross-post it. Some of these communities may not take root and grow, but some will, and they'll each take on their own flavour, and serve their members, not the machine.

It's not necessarily a bad thing to have multiple communities for the same topic. Cross-posting content is much cleaner on Lemmy / kbin than on Reddit; if you're subscribed to multiple communities and something is cross-posted between them, it will only show up in your feed once, so you can safely cross-post to your heart's delight without worrying about spamming people.

Having multiple communities gives people options. Maybe one of them will eventually establish itself as the authority on that topic, where people congregate - and that's fine, but even if not, having alternatives means that if something happens to one of them - the instance shuts down, for example, or even just has an outage, or the mods decide to go crazy and start changing the rules or banning people, or an instance defederates, everyone can just adjust their attention to one of the other alternatives. Compare this to Reddit where when users of a given sub disagree with moderator decisions, they have no real recourse but to try and rally under a new sub with no real reach.

Edit: To add to this, if you cross-post something, it shows (on every community you post to) which other communities it was cross-posted to, so this can be a useful way to inform people reading from one community that the other communities exist, so they can subscribe to them, too, if they want to.

It’s worth the effort to get over the learning curve. I’m in the same boat as you, but I’m starting to wrap my brain around how it works.

I'm hoping for some kind of "multi-reddit" style system that lets us combine the communities from different instances.

The migration caused a large jump in the amount of users, and with that you will have disorder and confusion.

But in time, the communities/magazines where people actually congregate in will rise to the top of the lists. That's where you can find the most active discussions. Even now I found myself unsubbing from some of the quiet kbin magazines I found on my first day and subbing to the bigger communities on beehaw and lemmy instead, which works for me because I want that feel.

The beauty of duplicates is if you find that you're being drowned out, you can go to a place where you can have more of a voice, and discussions will be slower paced, or you can start your own. Most people crave simplicity though so realize that not every alternative will be alive; some of them are veritable ghost towns.

With regards to kbin.social itself, I like that it's relatively open and neutral, instead giving users the access to block users/magazines/communities/whole instances as they see fit. As far as I know it hasn't been deferedated by other instances yet, and that's great because you can reach most anything in the Fediverse.

I'm sure my fellow commentors have made good work of answering this question, but I wanted to offer my perspective as well.

The big thing to understand is, perception of a thing is about focus and direction. If you consider the communities to be consumers of content delivered according to a protocol, That protocol affords subscription services, and means of posting. Much of the rest of it is just security (where do you log in and post from?) and consumption format - all these services have enough in common that the content can be moved around among them without too much hassle about the storage and communications format, and the display format is 90% of the difference between e.g., kbin and mastodon.

As it turns out, the walled garden people had to work hard to make those gardens walled, and to keep them that way. The evolution of communications systems favors this kind of unrestricted exchange of information and bespoke methods of presentation for consumption.

Unfortunately, or fortunately, depending on your perspective, these new communications methodologies do not readily lend themselves to converting private persons and their self expression into corporate mass market products.

The good thing about redundancies is, they make the system more resilient.

If everybody flocks to one singular community/magazine for a topic, and the instance hosting that c/m decides to defederate your home instance (or vice versa), you're cut off.

When that's just one of many c/ms, it's less of a loss.

Yeah, I ran into this the other day. I started m/Skeptic because it didn't exist. Later I found m/Skeptics. And then there was another one, I forget now what that was.

Maybe some of us can merge as we proceed and find our people? But maybe having a couple isn't the worst thing, if they have some differences.

It's sort of like the old school forums of yesteryear. On the ones you are interested in I'd suggest browsing them to see if you like them or if you just wanna jump in subscribe to several and see if you like one or more of them. Any you don't feel like you are meshing with you can unsubscribe and they wont show up unless you go for viewing everything federated/local (if more than one on that instance).

Drugs, man, drugs.

I found it easiest to not think about it.

I found it easiest to not think about it.

You can try searching here.