Hello all! I’m one of the original reddit users, and before that a long time Digg user. I want to enjoy and participate in the fediverse.
Can someone please explain federation, and to what degree the content from other platforms / instances will appear for a user who only visits kbin.social? I understand that federation is currently broken. What happens when it gets fixed?
I tried searching, but no luck. If there’s a fan or link, all the better :D
All of this seems unnecessarily confusing, and massively confusing at that. Why would anyone want to join a different instance? If I comment on one instance, then can I log into a different instance with the same credentials and edit my comment? Why would I want to do that? If I moderate a sub on one instance, then am I still a moderator of that same sub on every other instance? Why don’t we all just use one instance? The entire design of this system seems intended to confuse people.
There’s a certain syndrome — I bet it has a name, but I’ve never heard it named — where extremely smart people find it easy to grasp complicated ideas, yet fail to understand that those ideas which they grasp are far too complicated for normal people.
Personally, I know how distributed systems work, and if that’s how you want to design your backend for resilience, cool. But such complexity should never be exposed to users. And as a user, I’m here just to finally escape reddit’s governance. I want a dead-simple UX, because that’s what will attract people to use this platform. Move to a .com, as no other TLD sounds valid. Combine “threads” with “microblogs” and combine “upvotes” with “boosts”. Dramatically simplify the UI. There should not be two different “Settings”.
It seems clear that kbin is currently the defacto reddit replacement, but I don’t think it’ll succeed well until it drops this federation complexity, and focuses on building a simple, scalable website.
You’re missing the fact that each community is only tied to its instance, i.e. there can be a different community of the same name in every instance.
The idea of federation is not difficult or over the average users head, it is literally the exact same idea used in email. Gmail and Yahoo are two different “instances” that can talk to one another. There can be a nick@gmail.com and a nick@yahoo.com because those accounts are only tied to their respective “instance”. This same logic applies to both users and communities on Lemmy.
Also I completely disagree that Kbin is the defacto reddit replacement, Lemmy seems much more popular in my experience. The two federate, so it doesn’t really matter which you use, but Kbin can also pull mastodon microblogs, which I find useless for how I use Lemmy.
