Reddit Migration

a small difference, but important to how people use the site

Think about things from the point of view of someone who has never used Reddit or the fediverse, but you've heard about them both from recent news articles and want to see what they are about.

Reddit:- You Google Reddit and your first result is Reddit.com. You click the link and are presented with the front page. You from scroll from a few hours and end up signing up and staying.

Lemmy:- You Google Lemmy and your first result is a wiki article for Lemmy Kilmister... Your second result might be join-lemmy.org, which you're smart enough to realise it's probably more likely what the news is about.

You click join-lemmy.org and are presented with a page of information about the fediverse, links to set up a server and pictures of code...

There is very little chance you're going to investigate further.

If we want the fediverse to replace Reddit then either
A) Lemmy needs to improve its initial impression and Search engine optimization
B) We should be promoting a different platform with a better initial first impression.

I'd recommend kbin personally as it gives the same sort of experience as Reddit from the initial interaction.

For the last few weeks we enjoyed a much better content on kbin than we had on reddit for a long time.

But it is coming to an end as more and more people will be leaving reddit for kbin. With them the trolls, the spammers and the ultrapoliticized americans. They want to push their ideology and there are legions of them.

Even though kbin is not american anymore, the sheer numbers and obsession of american people with their politics will quickly outnumber any other content here. The voting system will make your post about pertinent news sink to the bottom of the frontpage. Lost under the "Trump he said/she said" routine. The same thing that happened on reddit will happen on kbin: people will come for the politics and then spread in others magazines for a quick, uninteresting meme reply.

The articles on the web are still designed to infuriate the readers, so they react and create free ragecontent, and they will do it here. They will get infuriated here, just the same as they did on reddit. This mechanics hasn't changed by changing platform.

The NSFW content is coming, the political memecontent is coming, making the idea of federating this instance with any respectable other pole of interest impossible. If we are to name the federations, this one will become the greentext type of federation. Not a dangerous anarchist federation but certainly a pariah one.

That's why if you really are interested into discussing with people, you would be very well inspired to do it on another instance than kbin.social. Do it on a local instance, where the news are directed by people of your geographical region. Your default instance can only be a regional one, I can't see a global instance like "kbin.social" being not raided by americans with a political agenda. But they won't step a foot in madrid.social or berlin.social. In a sense it's even better if kbin.social can polarize and hold the kind of population which is hypnotized by number and popularity. The right usage of the fediverse should be to pick a local instance near you and only subscribe to niche magazines in different instances based on your specific needs.

The fediverse project will be tested with very high numbers of users now, and I don't think that the implicit federation model which is to accept everything by default and block some will survive the waves of political trolls. The federations will split and specialize, and will defederate en masse. The most sought after federations will become the technology ones, which will probably become picky on the creation of random magazines, like news and politics, since it attracts the worst in content creators. The kbin.social experiment will lead to a more strict moderation model in other instances and probably different way to count votes. I don't think that kbin.social will ever come back from being a perpetual testbench of a social platform.

So don't fall in love with your account on kbin, instead you should get ready to jump to another instance which will inevitably open on a server near you.

There's a heap of devs working on bug fixes and improvements to the kbin.social website. If you run into a bug or find something strange, it would be great if you can report it on codeberg.

With third party apps going away, I'm expecting an influx of new people who will join kbin.social over the next few weeks. The project has taken shape rapidly and it's exciting to see the progress that's been made.

I've been working through a range of UI/UX issues focusing on mobile but any reports, along with images or use cases are super handy to people looking at the issues list.

r/pics is wide open to all kinds of anti reddit posts, calls for spez to resign, whatever you want with the current rules right now.

all it takes is John Oliver be featured in the image and title and you're free to post anything (but no porn or gore). go nuts!

the sub is in open rebellion and the mods don't delete critical posts. they even allowed a post calling out spez' history with child porn, to hit the frontpage of r/all! until an admin spotted it and had it removed. let that sink in.

it's because the mods don't act anymore, unless an admin tells them to, and by the time the admin sees a post on the frontpage, the damage is already done. it's malicious compliance from the users and mods! if your title doesn't trigger any bad words, the admins have no idea what's in your post until it's too late.

pics has 30 million subscribers and 8k are online. it's massive, and they upvote stuff to the frontpage, easily. some examples:

https://kbin.social/m/RedditMigration/t/85183/r-pics-calls-out-spez-history-as-jailbait-moderator-a-former

https://old.reddit.com/r/pics/comments/14k8ul7/thank_you_john_oliver_for_protecting_my_post_from/

but the mods can't post the critical content themselves! they need others to do it, so they can turn a blind eye. that's how this works, it's a coop game 😤🤝😤

As we start to see more users join, it's inevitable to see trolls (especially low-effort trolls) making more of an appearance and trying to be controversial and noticed.

Best just to scroll past them. They want to spark unwinnable arguments and rack up negative rep. If something seems absurdly ridiculous or inciteful, just move on. It's not even worth down voting.

Right now it's going to be for Lemmy, but the fediverse is still getting a fantastic app.

I was sort of holding on to hope, that something would change. Unfortunately, nothing did and so, here I am.

I'm really liking kbin so far, so I'm looking forward to spending more time with you all over here. ❤️

e: spelling

The protests worked, and so did moving/editing/deleting our old content. As one person complains,

I'm not here for Reddit, but for the aggregation of niche communities. I follow a lot of obscure manga that have relatively small followings and recently I got into an IT job which opened a lot of technological exploration for me. The worst part about this change isn't even that we are losing 3rd party apps, but that only members of the communities I frequent are the ones who care enough to protest. Can't tell you how many times now I've looked something up on Reddit and find an answer to the issue I have, only to realize that the community is closed or the post is deleted in protest. Now we are stuck in this limbo where protests seem to have lost their steam, niche communities are being overthrown and killed because of that greedy little pigboy. Seriously, fuck spez.

The apps have all gone offline, welcome aboard to all the other refugees, fuck /u/spez!

I wrote a short goodbye post on Reddit as we enter the last hours of Apollo. Just wanted to say thanks to everyone for the support over the years, it’s truly been the journey and dream of a lifetime building this app and meeting so many people. 🥰💙 https://reddit.com/r/apolloapp/comments/14nb5qs/today_is_apollo_for_reddits_last_day_and_i_just/

That's it folks. RIF has stopped working.
Reddit is no longer fun.

I might get "cancelled" for this, but hear me out:
If you remove your account bad actors won't be able to identify you unless they put in the effort. Reddit staff will revert popular comments and posts to the way they were before the Blackout. Mass-scrambling your posts and comments with a "f*ck Spez", followed by a long chain of "A"s or whatever, annoys people who are just trying to find an answer to something on Reddit, and it doesn't help anybody except the user's feelings.
The preservation of information comes above some moral feeling.
Your opinion?

Everyone is welcome to join.

I have setup some scaling for the website(In k8s), so it should be able to handle a decent amount of people.
Can always add more resources, if there comes a need for it.

If you signup, please let me know of any issues you find(Via my email or matrix).

Note: Captcha is enabled for combatting bots.

Moderators who refuse to reopen their subreddits were given an ultimatum

And make sure not to click on any links. If enough people use chatgpt or other LLM's to generate comments that are wordy but clearly just filler, it'll give advertisers pause and tank the value of the site as training data. Reddit's response will probably be to start banning users it thinks are doing this but normal users will absolutely be caught in the crossfire.

And throw in normal comments every so often too so it's not that obvious.

It’s one thing to have differing views, but I’ve seen enough attempted reddit migrations to be relieved that the popular communities in the fediverse so far haven’t been about crazy racist stuff or other extreme right bullshit.

I am also glad that I’m getting away from reddit’s general political shitposting, which was more left leaning. You couldn’t have any proper discourse on there, and even I with my generally more left leaning views recognized that.

Historically, porn has organically decided which platform or formats become dominant. It's incredibly anti-censorship, but walks many fine lines.

As Reddit now and tomorrow reveals more weaknesses, where will the OnlyFans creators, porn posters, and all those grassroots porn communities go? The creators need to make money by showing to a large and interested user base. The users need lots of content to choose from and be fed constantly, with very few hindrances between them and their...goals. Many of the niches actually have respectful and healthy communities, too. Those people deserve an easy to use platform, just as much as people that want to look at cats, some of those groups, arguably more.

The thought of how to pose this to the Fediverse, now, has been on my mind for weeks:

Can the fediverse rise to the task? Does it even want to? Should it?

Personally, I think it should absolutely try, but I'm not sure it can do so without several deep strides in tech and development. I'm aware this is a hot af take, but it's undeniable that the internet IS for porn, and denying that would be a huge opportunity loss for inevitably winning this popularity context.

It's fine to talk about Reddit here and there but let's not talk about Reddit 24/7 on here. For the health of the platform, it's better to talk about a variety of things and build out communities here, rather than complaining about Reddit incessantly.

I've noticed the same thing happen in waves on the Mastodon end of the Fediverse, where people will complain about one thing Twitter does for two week. It makes sense to be upset but at the end of the day you're not on Reddit anymore, and you're probably never going back.

It's the same energy as when a newly single dude can't stop talking about his ex.

I'm having an issue where comments aren't edited at all (not the same as other issues I don't think where it gets cached and changed, as far as I can tell). Recent ones, old ones, random one in between, regardless of sub. I don't have skip gilded actions on, saved actions, or mod distinguished. Anyone know what's going on? I've ran it twice and it didn't catch them, and I've targeted specific subs and it still wouldn't grab em.

Is there another service that will do it? I'm not trying to delete the account, I just want everything edited to what I want to say.

The real #redditmigration starts the 30th or the 1st, I hope lemmy and kbin are ready for the traffic!