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[rant] Why is this so hard for people? (kbin.social)

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

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Can I just rant a little to you all?

I've tried numerous times to help people from reddit set up an account and get started on Kbin (and lemmy), but 4 out of 5 times people can't seem to grasp the concept of registering an account and starting to use this platform. Even breaking it down into 2 steps, with direct links... They get angry, and then ragequit their attempt in a huff saying how it's too fucking complicated and it will never take off because it's so hard.

Ok, I get that the fediverse is complicated if you think deeply about all the interconnectivity and federation etc, but there is no reason you even have to think about any of it to create an account and get started. Like, at all.

It reminds me so much of my 70/y old mother-in-law not immediately knowing how to work a tv remote and shoving it at me after 1.5 seconds saying "here, I can't figure this out". When in reality all she had to do was press the fucking big red button...

I'm just so frustrated with people's complete lack of ability to help themselves.

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[–] MuskX@kbin.social 8 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I don't properly understand how all of this works.

But signing up to kbin on the weekend was just like signing up for anything else online.

And once I did, replying to posts - like this one - was more or less the same as replying on any other discussion forum.

So....I don't get it, what's so hard? Do you really need to understand the technical details underneath to start using this place?

That said, I would like to grasp this whole thing a little better. But I figured the best way to do that is to jump straight in and go from there! :)

[–] hardypart@feddit.de 3 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

I don't get it, what's so hard?

One of the biggest obstacles are links to other instances. Imagine a post from lemmy.world appears on your kbin.social frontpage where someone says "Hey, go check out this cool community I found: lemmy.world/c/CoolCommunity". You click the link and suddenly you're on another instance where your kbin account doesn't work. It appears like you would need to create an account on lemmy.world in order to participate. What's actually true is that you need to change to URL to kbin.social/m/CoolCommunity@lemmy.world, then you can subscribe to the community and participate using your kbin account. This is something you need to understand in order to enjoy your time here. A solution for this needs to be implemented, like an option to automatically turn URLs from foreign instances into home instance URLs.

[–] Kaldo@kbin.social 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

An even bigger issue for me was finding communities in the first place. I have to use !x@y syntax, but maybe also sometimes @x@y? But what is x and what is y when kbin has different syntax and names for things compared to lemmy? Also, it works for some communities but for others it just throws a 404 error?

I'm kinda familiar with it now and I know the little tricks to get it to work, or which steps to take to avoid stepping onto a mine, but it's still confusing at times. I'm recently seeing cases of comments just not syncing and showing up on kbin but they are visible from my beehaw account. Clicking on posts doesn't properly navigate you to them and sometimes it's next to impossible to find them in larger threads.

It's impressive and very promising tech but it's very early for massive adoption, it cannot replace reddit as it is.

[–] hardypart@feddit.de 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

100% agree. I'm currently trying to find a way how a browser addin could take care of the URL translation (like automatically turning kbin.social/m/memes into feddit.de/c/memes@kbin.social when feddit.de is defined as your home instance in the addin). Then I noticed that feddit.de/c/BuyItForLife@kbin.social gives me a "404: couldnt_find_community" error and I have no idea why. I also can't find the BuyItForLife magazine with the community search on feddit.de. I can find other kbin magazines though, like memes. No idea why ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

I just hope some of this stuff will be fixed with the 0.8 update, otherwise I don't see how a browser addin could look like. I also wouldn't know how to translate post and comment URLs automatically.

[–] Kaldo@kbin.social 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

It seems like nobody on feddit ever subscribed to BuyItForLife@kbin.social so it never got synced to that instance. My understanding is that it should be found like this the first time, but it never worked for me on lemmy: https://i.imgur.com/pQHfq1N.png .

After this is done, it should start showing up with your link, it definitely seems correctly formatted. It will be missing posts made before it started sync, it doesn't work retroactively though. On kbin I just use the magnifying glass (not the "all magazines"!) and then it usually finds any community I want.

In short, yeah... it's a mess

[–] MuskX@kbin.social 1 points 1 year ago

That's an interesting point, I hadn't tried doing that yet. Seems fairly fixable though. I guess all this stuff will start to get better soon.