I see a lot of posts on fediverse trashing reddit, Twitter, spez, musk and so on, and rightfully so. But like it or not, the mass majority of users on the internet still use these sites, and some of us still want to interact with the friends and communities we are a part of on those sites. And there’s nothing wrong with that either.
Personally, I want fediverse to grow, and I post on kbin and mastodon constantly, and try to grow the communities on them. But I still pop over to reddit for r/splatoon, r/casualconveration, and my hometown sub, because either the communities haven’t grown enough here yet for constant fresh content, or the content is different enough between both to justify me checking in.
I get many are here as a protest against reddit, Twitter, or where ever else you came from, and that’s valid. But there are many of us who are simply casual users who want to include fediverse into their drives of other social media, and that’s totally fine too.
Yeah, I had to go back to Reddit.
To be honest, I never had issues with the official app as I barely used it since 95% of my Reddit time was via Safari on my iPad Pro. Slide for Reddit was the only iPadOS app anywhere close to Sync for Android, which I adored, so after trying multiple times basically every single app, I never could stick with any but the official.
I deleted my 30K karma account in solidarity with the people who used third party apps and because I was incredibly angered at the stance that moronic rat-face of a CEO took, but so far the demographic of the Fediverse is huge on topics I couldn’t care less about. My Kbin frontpage was filled with LGBTQ+, US Politics, Ukraine, shitty meme communities, people mourning about their deleted Reddit accounts, and massive circle jerks regarding Reddit, while the communities I used to follow are non-existent here or are depressingly abandoned.
The biggest Solo RPG community on the Fediverse has been running for over a year, and it has ~40 posts, mostly made by a single dude. Others have said “Be the change!” but I’d end up repeating the Solo RPG case of posting literally for my own eyes. I’d definitely do it once Ernest can figure out how to make Kbin show embedded images on posts, instead of just creating hyperlinks to them, but in the meantime, all my communities are still on Reddit and I doubt that will change for a long time.
I mean ideally, you should be able to customize the communities you see, and on kbin at least, there is a setting where you see your subscribed posts as your default front page, which is what I use. You can also block communities that you don’t wish to see much like filtering from RES.
I’ve actually appreciated the LGBTQ stuff and memes, but I know that isn’t what everyone wants to see all of the time. The reality is there isn’t as much variety on the fed yet because most of the people who have stuck around are like minded nerds who enjoy the same stuff and align with the same views.
Having kbin.social direct straight to your subscribed magazines just started working since this last update, and yeah, I spent my first day curating my subscribed/blocked mags, but even after weeks, it’s like playing wack-a-mole. You block one community and the next day you go to “All”, and it is there, except now it’s from another instance. Right now, I have six “196” magazines blocked, but what the hell… that’s the current way of the Fediverse, and I’ll accept it.
It’s cool to witness how Kbin takes shape, and hopefully it becomes an easy and attractive platform for the regular Joe, so we have all kinds of neat and diverse communities over here. 😁