I wanted to get a pulse check on how new members are finding the general experience/website. Is it more confusing than Reddit or are you finding the instance system a better way of doing things as it can give you more freedom of where you choose to create an account?
I’m a new user myself but have found the experience to remind me of Reddit back in the day, lol. It’s definitely giving me old-school yet modern vibes and it’s great to see something that isn’t Reddit growing in popularity!
I guess I’m too dumb to still understand how the communities work. I am using kbin, and it seems like magazines are the equivalent of a sub-reddit? I subscribed to a couple, but I guess there are multiple of the same magazines which are about the same thing?
There are many instances (“servers”) of the service running, and each one can have its own, local equivalent of a subreddit. We can see and interact with all of them. I just went through 15 pages of “magazines” and subscribed to communities with the same name on 2+ instances at least a dozen times.
Suppose I am interested in photography, so I subscribe to the photography community on instance “foo.” Another user has the same interest, but they find the community on instance “bar” and subscribe to that. If I post on photography@foo, they won’t see it. The community is effectively split — often into more than two parts.
This makes it really difficult to build an engaging community at a scale similar to Reddit’s. Ideally, users will eventually congregate around just a few, but this is going to make early growth quite painful. And it isn’t intuitive to newcomers.