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Working Together to Improve /Kbin's Ease of Use for New Users (kbin.social)

submitted 1 year ago by lunar2m7@kbin.social to c/kbinMeta@kbin.social

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Dear not-so-techy KBeans ;)

While @ernest and the other instance admins are working on infrastructure, let's work together to improve the getting-started experience of users new to Kbin.

Share any graphics, FAQs, guides, or other valuable resources you've discovered (don't forget to give credit!) or created by posting them in this thread. Remember, not everyone's perfect, so if something in a resource isn't exactly correct, just point that out in your comment! A little clarification goes a long way.

These can later be congregated into a dedicated magazine for new users to reference (was thinking /m/GettingStarted? Lmk).

I'll start it off:

EDIT: @gettingstarted (mobile link) is up! Continue to use this thread for questions and content. Our goal is creating structured guides for users to follow over at @gettingstarted, but we need content to do that.

E: First, very sloppy intro guide is up here.

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[–] Eggyhead@kbin.social 0 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Perhaps an easy way to describe the federation to someone is that, rather than just one reddit with lots of subreddits, it's a bunch of reddits with lots of their own subreddits. You only have to join one of the reddits because from there you can subscribe to any subreddit you want across the whole spectrum the reddits. If you were subscribed to r/gaming before, now you can subscribe to r/gaming@reddit1, r/gaming@reddit2, r/gaming@reddit4, etc (you might want to skip r/gaming@reddit3 cause they're just a bit too authoritarian for you or something). And if your chosen Reddit's moderator ends up being a u/spez about everything and you don't want to support that site anymore, you have the freedom to just skip out to a different reddit without losing access to subs.

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

Unfortunately, this decentralisation of basically what used to be 1 thematic sub into multiple clones "because it's technically possible" is just not what most users are looking for. That is why Reddit was ONE website with such a large amount of knowledge. The human brain likes to centralise stuff in one place. That is why when we put away stuff and clean our own homes, we tend to put all the forks together, all the knives together, all the glasses together... Centralisation is a way to break down complexity of what would otherwise be chaos, by factorizing it.
If you've got 50 different "gaming" instances instead of one, basically the very "gaming" word becomes irrelevant, and users will have to memorise the names of the 50 different hosting instances instead.

Also, on a pure tecnical standpoint, the "federation" aspect is currently simply not true: I get "The magazine from the federated server may be incomplete. Browse more on the original instance." warning message when I try to access most magazines that are not hosted on kbin.social.

[–] Czorio@kbin.social 0 points 1 year ago (2 children)

One thing that’s not quite clear to me is whether these individual gaming “subreddits” would effectively work as one to the subscribers or not.

I.e.: YeeAyy, the large game publisher, announces a new hotly anticipated instalment in a popular series, each /r/gaming@redditx.com would probably have a post about it. Would I, as a subscriber to each, see X amount of duplicate posts?

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

Is there any way like-minded communities could voluntarily have all their discussions automatically merged for identical links submitted within a 12-hour range or something?

That way the community isn’t fragmented with lots of very similar discussions occurring in repeated posts in the feed.

[–] kurgal@kbin.social 0 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Isn’t this the same if you do it on Reddit? I’m already seeing multiple duplicated posts on Reddit

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

Now it seems the problem is compounded because we're gonna have reposts across different related communities which will then be duplicated onto every instance/server. I'm also wondering how this will affect SEO and long term documenting of the internet. When I do a Google search for something, what will it return?

I'll give it to Reddit, nearly anytime I needed to search on how to do or fix something, those first 2 or 3 Reddit links almost always solved my problem or told me what I needed to know. Not sure how relevant or diverse the returned searches will be with kbin's system.