A lot subreddits end their blackout tomorrow. Will you go back to Reddit, or continue with kbin and the Fediverse?
A lot subreddits end their blackout tomorrow. Will you go back to Reddit, or continue with kbin and the Fediverse?
I haven't used Reddit at all since the blackout began. Even if they change course, the Fediverse is growing on me, and I think I'll stay here.
But I think I'll peek in tomorrow to see what happens.
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I am not enjoying kbin.social right now. The latency is beyond atrocious, at 10+ seconds to load each page. The UI reminds me of 2004 forums that don’t know how users work. The mobile UI is just the worst.
Some pain points:
- I’m a software engineer so I can figure this shit out, but how the hell do I subscribe to a magazine? If I go to it, there should be a “subscribe” or context menu at the top to subscribe/favorite/mute
- Why is the comment box all the way at the bottom? Where’s the “add comment” button on a post?
- Why are comments paginated like a forum? Why not just a “load more” like Reddit? What’s the point?
- Selecting the comment box should NOT zoom slightly into the page. The mobile web UI needs a lot of work from people who know how to do mobile UIs.
- Is there no “homepage” button? Clicking the Kbin logo at the top just brings up a menu, which requires another click on the homepage button to get back.
- Edit: And you can't collapse comment threads? What even...
I really want a Reddit replacement, but this is not it with this terrible UI. It’s unusable, literally–if I can’t subscribe to a magazine then it’s not working.
•Subscribe is literally on the sidebar?
•They want to encourage people reading before posting first, but there are style sheets you can apply to move the comment box. Really, kbin just needs a service like RES so people can adjust things to their tastes
•Because it's not Reddit?
•Yeah, some fixing needs to be done
The great thing about it being federated though is that you can find a community that better fits your needs, and still get the content from here
On mobile, the sidebar is actually under comments...
Yeah, that's one of the few things that I agree may need to be reworked. It's REALLY easy to miss because who would expect it to be near the bottom?
Same with Home. It's a little picture of a house on mobile, but it's so small and unassuming and I'm so used to a website's logo automatically taking me there that I missed noticing it for hours
All basic things, though. It's not like they don't work, they're just placed an inconvenient scroll down the screen atm. They feel like minor annoyances to me even not comparing them with elsewhere.
You can also click the hamburger button on the mobile webpage and it'll show the sidebar contents, so top of the screen and bottom, essentially.
That’s where I found it, I never even checked the bottom
Res isn't the solution for mass adoption. The product needs to be good as is. Unfortunately afai can tell kbin is the best alternative.
You’re not wrong about many of your complaints but nothing is going to replace Reddit right now. Its going to take time to create something that will fully replace Reddit. I think Kbin is a good start. I see promise in Lemmy as well.
For me, I’m going to enjoy my time away from Reddit. I have been very productive the last few days because these sites don’t consume as much of my time. To me that’s not such a bad thing considering a large portion of Reddit posts were crap anyway. I am very excited to see where this community is in a year from now.
One last note. If the creator of the Apollo app decides to build something around one of these platforms like Kbin or Lemmy then that is where I will end up. That app was a joy to use.
Why are comments paginated like a forum? Why not just a “load more” like Reddit? What’s the point?
I like this design choice and I hope they keep it. Doomscrolling is a plague.
If infinite scrolling is forced on for posts or comments I'll be so distressed. It really is a plague even if you're not doomscrolling. It makes sinking infinite time into the app too easy.
Off topic but:
I’m a software engineer so I can figure this shit out
I'm also a software engineer, and I love it when other software engineers act like being a software engineer means that they are smart and if they can't figure it out, then it must be someone else's fault.
I've met other software engineers like this, and sometimes they actually are worse than others at figuring things out.
I can definitely see how that’s all frustrating, and I’m sure we all have our experiences with lag or with that goddamn Cloudflare verification or whatever, but I hope you and everyone else will stick around so we can help shape this space the way we want it. You’re already doing that with your comment above. Imagine the almost impossible chances of making suggestions to Reddit and having changes made. At least here that’s a possibility. I hope to see you around.
The site is still in its infancy too, so people just need to be a little more patient for a little while.