this post was submitted on 21 Jun 2023
127 points (100.0% liked)
Reddit Migration
83 readers
2 users here now
### About Community Tracking and helping #redditmigration to Kbin and the Fediverse. Say hello to the decentralized and open future. To see latest reeddit blackout info, see here: https://reddark.untone.uk/
founded 1 year ago
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
It‘s an essential reason of why I‘m here, if I thought this was just going to turn into Reddit 2.0 corporate enshittification boogalo, I wouldn‘t have bothered with it.
I concede though that it’s probably not a necessary information to get most people to sign up.
Just tell them this: "It's like reddit, but multiple devs own different parts of the content. But don't worry, you still use the same software to access it & get it all from one location"
Yeah honestly I've seen so many posts with multiple paragraphs explaining federation, while I've just been telling my friends two sentences like "it's just like reddit but instead of one website there's multiple independent ones (called instances) that all see each other's content. All content on all those instances can and should only be accessed through the website you signed up on, and when you do that it works basically completely like reddit"
This leaves out a bunch of information of course, but if they want more, they can always be confused and ask or look it up themselves.
Yeah I mean even like.......at this point you can show them a screenshot of the front page of kbin/lemmy and say "hey, it looks like this. Sign up for this instance & you'll be fine. Here's a link to 10 magazines you should subscribe to, and here's a link to your preferences."
Thing is, people do, which is why...
The easiest thing to do is, obviously, send new people to large sites that already have all of the remote communities people want access to subscribed to. Those work super well for people who need federation to be mostly hidden from them. But there's are practical caps on how big any one instance can get, which necessitates horizontal expansion of the network. Newer or smaller instances aren't going to have as complete federation, and that makes them less than ideal as a place for new users to go.
We need admins who are spinning up new instances to be conscious of this. People making niche instances need to have alts on mainstream instances to initiate federation. People making general purpose sites need to make sure they're seeding their server with all of the communities people want to join. Expansion needs to be done consciously and contentiously to make the distributed nature of things not matter.
“Fediverse: an open source Reddit-like cluster. An instance is a node.” … heh, as I read that, it probably makes things more confusing.