this post was submitted on 20 Jun 2023
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Reddit Migration
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### About Community Tracking and helping #redditmigration to Kbin and the Fediverse. Say hello to the decentralized and open future. To see latest reeddit blackout info, see here: https://reddark.untone.uk/
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Some are doing just this. But most mods, like most users, don't know much about the fediverse, other than that it exists.
@nonexcludable @masires
On top of this - a lot of mods (like a lot of users) dislike the fediverse. The Twitter -> Mastodon exodus left a bad taste in a lot of peoples' mouths, and that holds true for mods as well as users.
I'm in a Discord with a bunch of other Reddit mods. We originally were using it to organize the protest, but it's become a place to discuss next steps. A lot of them pony up the "the fediverse is too confusing" angle. Even when it's explained, they say "No, it's too confusing" and refuse to even try to ask questions about where they're getting lost. Instead, they push alternatives like Squabbles (which seems to be the most common among the anti-fediverse folks).
On top of that, both Lemmy and Kbin don't have much in the way of moderation tools. There doesn't appear to be a spam filter and certainly no AutoModerator. Kbin's API is (currently) read-only, so a bot can't even be written to work like AutoMod. This makes large communities much harder to moderate and should basically be the next step for devs once they stabilize from the Reddit exodus, as anything with more than 1000 users will quickly start to become basically impossible for human mods to keep up.
The fact that those tools don't exist turns a lot of mods off from joining as well, and fuels the anti-fediverse sentiment.
Some of the holdouts understand the limitations and just don't think it's a good platform for them. They have legitimate criticisms and point out ways that their communities wouldn't work properly on Kbin/Lemmy. Other holdouts are stubbornly pig-headed and refuse to understand. They derisively dismiss anyone who tries to explain as a "tech bro", dig in their heels and draw a hard line in the sand for reasons they can't even explain other than "I don't like anything fediverse."
But there is a list of subs that are advertising their fediverse equivalents; my sub (500k+ members) has an ad for our community in the "we're reopening, sadly" sticky and the sidebar. You can also see a list of places which have equivalents over at https://sub.rehab/; anything with the "official" label is advertised somewhere by the mods that run that sub on Reddit.
I am joining on the hope that a lot of these features will be developed and integrated eventually but acknowledge the suddenness of the change. Is there anything in the works?
Various things being talked about, nothing concrete. Looks like every community will be going somewhere on their own that meets their own needs rather than any single destination.
I think this may be a disconnect in what you're talking about and what they're talking about.
As someone who mods some communities on Reddit that have talked about rehoming, the complexity of kbin/lemmy is a very significant and valid concern.
That concern is not something simple or trite that I or another mod would just need to ask about but "refuse to even try" - it's that no matter how comfy it would be for me learn it, that same thing remains a barrier for each and every one of my membership that I'd like to have move over to here. Even if some of them will ask, not all of them will and many will instead see that issue as a 'quit point' in learning a new platform. The various Fediverse platforms have multiple of those stumbling blocks and quitting points baked into their overall complexity, as much as the complexity is a selling point in some regards - it also makes the space quite daunting to the relatively simple folks that make up the bulk of our community.
While considering lemmy/kbin for my community a sizable chunk of my energy has been trying to figure out what I'm going to need to teach community members as far as engaging with the platform and a new community here, and whether or not it's realistic to put that amount of tutorial into something that's still small enough they'll engage with it.
This is a secondary but still super valid concern. It's something that I hope gets resolved in the long term as Fed spaces grow, but I also know that I'm effectively relying on open-source or similar to adopt the Fed spaces, have them take off, and then make tools for them - because I'm not software enough to do that myself. We are smaller, but see a shitton of astroturf and spam compared to communities at 20K say - at the moment, Fediverse is really well suited to communities in the 10K population range, but it lacks some of the foundations to maintain order once it grows beyond a scope where manual moderation remains practical.
Some measure of platform automation makes so much of managing that space vastly easier, and at the moment there isn't somewhere I've encountered that has the same level of development and depth regarding the community management side of moderation.