jon

There really does need to be a limit of how many magazines you’re allowed to moderate. There’s no way you can effectively moderate 59 different communities.

I think that people need to get this idea of “winning” out of their head. We need to try and cultivate the userbase we want rather than focus on “beating” Threads/Reddit/Twitter/etc.

Don’t focus of numbers, focus on good content.

Most social networks have this “growth at all costs” mentality that is usually the root cause of enshittification. When I say ‘smaller’, I mean it more in terms of fostering a healthy community of dedicated contributors rather than trying to make the fediverse grow as much as possible as fast as possible. This is why I mostly support the notion of preemptively defederating from Threads. While it would help the fediverse ‘grow’, that’s not necessarily what I want out of it. I don’t want us to win, I want us to be good.

I think this has done damage to Reddit, but it’ll be death by a thousand cuts rather than a big instantaneous failure.

To be honest, I really don’t care what happens to Reddit at this point. I’d rather have Kbin be a smaller, more dedicated community than have it “kill Reddit”.

Hey, as an American I…well…yeah, pretty much.

Obviously Facebook took off once it dropped the ‘college student’ requirement and opened up to the general population. But once that first generation aged up, the younger generation didn’t follow and Facebook became the place your grandma posts Biden conspiracy theories. Widening your target audience can get you an initial boost of users, but you end up competing with every other platform doing the same thing. Then some new platform opens up, all the cool kids go there, and the old platforms gradually get dumber, withers away, and dies.

Or Reddifugies.

No, we’re all about pooping right now, not farts.

Honestly, mods should just force the issue and make Reddit replace them. It’s going to be a big problem if Reddit needs to find new moderators for hundreds if not thousands of subreddits. And that’s assuming all the new moderators will play along and not immediately join the protest, go on a tyrannical power trip, or just go dark after a few weeks.

Why would anyone even want to be a mod right now? It’s like your boss threatening to fire you from a job you’re not paid for while the building is actively on fire.

Yeah!

You all need some longer usernames, sheesh.

The issue is that for your average Joe Schmoe, decentralization isn’t really a selling point. For a lot of people, a computer is a magic box they use to visit websites, and how anything works under the hood is irrelevant. Whether it’s one server or a federation of servers doesn’t matter.

I saw a lot of people bail on Mastodon before even signing up because this concept of “instances” confused them. What server do I join? Can I talk to X of I’m not on X’s server? Do I need an account on each server I want to follow? This concept of multiple instances of a platform doesn’t exist outside of the fediverse. Kbin just pointing you to the default instance is probably the best thing it could do for widespread adoption.

I don’t think it’s fair to expect someone looking to join a new knitting community to learn about client/server relationships and federated social platforms. Point them to the main instance and give them a high level overview about the fediverse if they ask. The resources are here if they want to learn more.