Something nostalgic and familiar about beta testing new apps, seeing the community grow, and getting 500 Internal Server Error screens in the process... I like it in a quirky kinda way
That's the same sensation I found with leaving Twitter and joining Mastodon. I found that I was more inclined to engage rather than simply read information, and it was more straightforward to curate the information and people I wanted to follow.
Completely the same! I now even run my own calckey instance and have lots of interactions. Also at almost 200 followers in just few months. Twitter felt like posting into the void instead.
Right?, it feels rewarding to add the discussion, to help solve issues in the code (if you can), helping people navigate where they want to go.
At least for me, reddit failed in something, making me feel part of its community, kbin is succeeding at this so far.
Edit: Obligatory plug of other kbin instances for new users to join: fedia.io, readit.buzz, fediverse.boo,
By joining them you are spreading the load so we can keep all instances stable.
I agree, right after getting used to swapping from reddit to kbin, it felt more like I was part of a community! I like to think reddit was a large city and kbin is a small village that is gradually growing.
I'm really glad I took the opportunity to swap from reddit to kbin, I already feel happier on the site and I haven't even been here for a week. I definitely feel like more people should swap which thankfully most likely will happen as reddit dies down.
It seems to me that there are several factors. Firstly, the instance was created recently, about 1-2 months ago. There wasn't even an official instance opening, you know, with cake and confetti ;) During this time, I've been observing people on the Fediverse. It's unlikely that any follows were given by chance. Later on, wonderful people who discovered kbin did the rest. That's how it is in the Fediverse. In the beginning, not everything is easy and obvious, but if you put enough heart and effort into it, it pays off in the future.
I saw kbin recommended by someone on Reddit (my apologies for not being able to give them credit - I didn't clock the username) and out of all the alternatives shared that I checked out, this one just felt right. If that makes sense. Thank you for creating such a wonderful space!
30k is small compared to Reddit, or Twitter, or Facebook, but it's very large compared to what's necessary to keep a space lively and engaging.
And on that front, there is such a thing as too big. Subreddits with hundreds of thousands of active users all engaging with a single topic stop being, well, engaging, and start becoming white noise generators: See a post, comment on the post, never have anyone read your comment because 20,000 other people have also done the same. That kind of environment just turns us into consumers of media, rather than social beings, and is just fundamentally kind of bad for us.
We have enough passive, unidirectional media we consume. Spaces like this are better when they're not one of them.
I always had a decent mix of subs. Large ones for content consumption; smaller ones for discussion. Even then, the large ones I interacted with were further fragmented (big example being sports game threads, it was usually only fans of the two teams). Hoping to find that here; that is a beloved part of watching sports for me now.
30k is small compared to Reddit, or Twitter, or Facebook
Yeah for sure. The entire fediverse, with all sites and services included is somewhere around 9M users, which is still minuscule compared to Reddit's 450M users - not to talk about billions at Facebook.
We have enough passive, unidirectional media we consume.
Exactly. Not everything is about big numbers, in fact, I tend to believe we (humans) perform best when we are in smaller groups. Dunbar's number puts that at around 150 people - so if your favorite community group reaches that number of active members, you're golden. You don't need millions. That's detrimental to good communication and community building.
Of course we often have several interests (for example, I'm looking for good discussions around tech, linux, cybersecurity, science, sustainability, specialy coffee, NHL and music!). All of those are communities haven't really established themselves here yet (some of them never protested on Reddit), so I'm still waiting to discover new discussions and corners in the fediverse.
As someone who landed on the lemmy side, I'm glad that choosing a side here didn't l doesn't have to fracture the community. You can pick the experience you enjoy best but still have scess to a broader universe of content.
I’ve registered on and experimented with a handful of fediverse instances, apps, etc this week and really keep coming back to Kbin.social as my main point of entry. With the progressive web app on my phone and iPad I’m having a similar experience to Apollo, and really liking watching this community (and Lemmy) grow. Glad to be here with you all, let’s keep this excitement going!
Right? This whole federation thing is great. Now I just gotta figure out how Lemmy federation with Mastodon works because right now it feels like the answer is "not very well".
It's strange, because Reddit changes so slowly that I've forgotten how much discussion used to take place. This platform actually has people engaging in conversation and it's awesome.
Yeah I actually feel seen on this site. People like to hype the fact that reddit has so many users but most of the time my comments and thoughts were just lost to the void.
So how do we new users help keep kbin alive? What are the hosting costs and what do we need to do to stay adfree or at least prevent long-term enshittification now?
Right now, your main goal should be enjoying the site. Ernest has been getting quite a few coffee purchases lately, so I imagine he's financially ok for the moment. But what Ernest can't do is populate the site with content and community. That's where the kbeaners come in. So the main goal you should have right now is to enjoy yourself.
I'm so happy to have learned so much about the Fediverse and its communities in the past week. A big thanks to the admins and developers who have put in all the hard work.
There was an old bit of snark about Internet Explorer being the best browser for downloading another browser then closing it permanently. I think that’s about where Reddit is: useful for telling the subs/communities you were part of that there are better places to be.
I remember back in the day when reddit was like this, fun, high effort discussions, even with people complaining about how confusing reddit was to use.
Too much focus on Reddit drama threads and not enough on actual content (I am guilty of this too). I think as the drama passes it will liven up in the popular topics/magazines. Reddit needs to stop pulling the trigger on their foot gun first.
It remains to be seen how many of the nearly 200K across kbin+lemmy stay active. A huge number of people will have created an account during the blackout with no intention of ever returning. They're still counted as active now (because they just created an account a few days ago), but they won't be considered active a month from now.
Unfortunately, unless we get more "normal" content over here, people will continue to go inactive. The only threads that really get any traction are the posts complaining about Reddit and the meta posts asking how everything works over here.
The real test will be July 1. For now, RIF/Apollo/etc. still work as they did for the past decade+, so people are still going to Reddit out of habit. Hopefully, the community here can grow enough in the next couple of weeks to appear viable to new users looking to transfer when their app of choice stops working.
I'm going to post on some of the niche subreddits about lemmy and the fediverse up until the end of the month and then thats it. I'm hopeful if people stick with it it'll grow organically.
Decentralisation is the only way to go.
Well post something then lol. The individual communities on each instance may seem small but the posts should still be visible on all the federated sites in the verse.
While this is great, I hope it's not too much. The system is really really promising, but still apparently needs a lot of work. Hope the refugees like me came to stay!
Does anyone know how Kbin calculates active users? Lemmy only counts users which posted or commented at least once during that time. But in case of Kbin, the number of active users is almost three times the total number of posts.