I am new here (kbin, but I guess this might post to other websites as well??) and am trying to understand how this place is similar and different from reddit. Is there a good overview somewhere? I already accidentally spammed this question three times as a microblog, whatever that is, and am trying to figure out how to actually do things.

How do I subscribe/join/whatever a community? Can I private message people?
What terminology do I need to know?
What’s up with the following people thing?
How do the points work (agree/disagree, relevant/not relevant, something else…)?
What else do I not know that I don’t know?

Thank you!

  • Scalpel@kbin.social
    0·
    1 year ago

    Another Reddit refugee chiming in. I’ve been on Reddit and ONLY Reddit for ages… everything in the fediverse seems so alien. Kbin seems the most familiar so far.

    Thanks for asking the questions, and huge thanks to the folks answering!!

    What do y’all recommend for actually navigating the fediverse? Like, looking at the URL, the social part of kbin.social tells me this is kind of a hangout spot focused on conversation and less on content; but then I see magazines like this one and other topics like medicine and news, so… .social has everything? I see I can navigate magazines and such within .social, which seems like exactly what I’m looking for in an escape from Reddit, but I’m wondering if I skipped a step in landing on .social, and should first weigh it against the kbin.OtherOptions?

    There’s also the whole seeing content on other platforms thing - how do I actually do that? Like from here on kbin, can I add something on Lemmy (which I aslo don’t know squat about) as a… magazine? follow? something else?

    • SoupOfTheDay@kbin.social
      1·
      1 year ago

      I’m going to chime in, but fair warning, it’s just what I think, so I could be wrong.

      The .social doesn’t actually mean it’s only for social things. It’s similar to a .com or .org. We can put anything we want up on it, similar to Reddit. We can have threads about non-sense similar to r/askreddit, or very detailed discussions similar to r/askhistorians or r/science.

      I believe at the moment kbin and lemmy aren’t talking to each other, or if they are, it’s more complicated than it should/will be in the future. The whole point of these sites is “federation”, each is its own little mini-group/site/“Reddit”. Like the US is made of states. At the moment I’ve heard kbin federation is either turned off or not working, so believe the borders are closed. But eventually it’ll be turned back on and we will be able to visit other federated sites/places like lemmy and mastodon.

      At the moment I think the big difference is the UI and how things look on your originating site. But as things grow moderation and content will also be a difference. In theory maybe you don’t like the way the gaming part of kbin is moderated but you like lemmy’s, you’ll be able to see posts and visit that site through kbin one day.

      Also, a magazine on kbin is basically a subreddit. You subscribe to it, like you would a magazine. Then you can see the posts. Boosts are apparently like following a hashtag on Twitter, but I never did Twitter, so I don’t know exactly.