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What is the best way to make sense of the alternative federated communities? (kbin.social)

submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by kavides@kbin.social to c/RedditMigration@kbin.social

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It's a little daunting to me that in some cases there are 2 or more communities between the federated alternatives; what's the best way to corral these? I had thought I could perhaps subscribe to Lemmy instances on kbin; is that correct? If so, how? Thank you in advance.

Edit: Well, this is sort of embarrassing but when I was searching for the other communities, I was accidentally searching threads instead of magazines and of course not finding anything so that's the answer as to HOW to subscribe [when it comes to kbin]. My point stands, though, that having so many communities is a bit cumbersome. I guess I will let it percolate a bit and see how it feels.

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[–] Kichae@kbin.social 53 points 1 year ago (10 children)

So, back 15 years ago or so, most people who wanted to discuss topics on the internet, and who didn't want that discussion to be ephemeral, found forums dedicated to those topics.

There were thousands of forums. Millions of them. Some had dozens of users, while others had 10s of thousands. Many of them discussed similar topics.

Browning Lemmy or kbin is like browsing thousands and thousands of subforums across dozens of websites. Some of those websites have similar subforums, but they might be populated by very different people having very different customs and discussions.

Reddit kind of pushed everyone into a single room, and in a single room only the loudest people get heard. Hundreds of thousands or millions of subscribers just leaves most people shouting into the void, having no meaningful conversations, and rewarding performative antagonism and biting sarcasm.

You know, toxic shit.

The best thing to do with multiple communities here is find one that you like best, and engage with it. If there's something actually interesting going on in one of the other ones, trust someone to cross-post it. Some of these communities may not take root and grow, but some will, and they'll each take on their own flavour, and serve their members, not the machine.

[–] grizzly_dw@kbin.social 6 points 1 year ago

Reddit kind of pushed everyone into a single room, and in a single room only the loudest people get heard. Hundreds of thousands or millions of subscribers just leaves most people shouting into the void, having no meaningful conversations, and rewarding performative antagonism and biting sarcasm.

This is so true. Not only the promotion of toxic behavior but also just the shouting into the void part.

I used to play EverQuest back in the day, and I frequented probably dozens of forums at the time. My guild had one, there was one that somebody set up for the server I played on, there were forums for all the different classes, unofficial pre-wiki forums (anyone remember AllahKhazam?), and of course the official forums on the EQ website.

Your comment just brought back a bunch of memories from those days. After using Reddit for so long, I had kind of forgotten what it was like back then. The biggest difference between then and now, I think, was how much more personal it was.

Of course, everyone on my guild forum knew each other because we all played together. But even on the server-wide forum that had a few thousand people, you saw a lot of the same names over and over again in different threads each day. It made it a lot easier to remember the person on the other side of the screen, rather than just a username. You'd actually get to know people, to an extent.

We celebrated birthdays and new jobs. We knew when someone had a death in the family. There were friendships, and even long-distance romances that happened in the game/forums. And drama, of course. There were always the loudmouths who liked to argue with everyone, but everyone else already knew that, so when the loudmouth tried to start something people would just say, "Oh shut up, So-and-so. No one wants to fight with you." Sometimes people would leave our guild to join one of the bigger guilds on the server, and it was legitimately heartbreaking.

It really felt like an honest-to-God community, rather than a bunch of anonymous commenters who happened to be talking about the same thing. Even in the smaller, more niche subreddits, I never got that feeling. Maybe that's on me for just habit-scrolling most of the time and not engaging. But I really do think that the sheer volume of people on a platform makes it difficult to form real communities.

I don't know if the federated structure will help to bring that back or not. But I agree that the "fractured" nature that some reddit refugees seem to worry about is likely more of a blessing in disguise.

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