Does federation have a bit of a learning curve? No doubt.
Is Lemmy buggy as heck? Absolutely.
But I don’t think that really justifies a lot of the comments I’m seeing in Reddit alternatives threads that it’s hard to figure out. The front page feed and sort options are very similar to Reddit. Searching for same-instance communities is not too difficult. Posting, commenting, and voting are all quite intuitive. What’s the problem?
Edit: I do think terminology is a bit of an issue. I can tell a lot of people don’t understand “instance” vs. “community” at first. “Magazine” is the biggest offender here. That’s a very unintuitive term.
“Magazine” implies little if any input from readers (letters to the editor being the exception). It doesn’t sound very interactive.
Not necessarily? I guess it depends on what magazines you read.
A lot of the magazines I’ve read over the years are collections of things submitted by readers. Model Railroader magazine is a bunch of model railroads submitted by people across the US. They’ll pick a few to feature, but they’re all basically submitted by readership and it’s fairly interactive.
Lego Magazine was the same way when I was a kid. While a lot of it was about upcoming Lego products, there was a significant section that featured Lego builds made and submitted by the community.
For newspapers, I’d absolutely agree that it implies an editorial staff and no input from readers. But magazines (to me) have always had a focus on community involvement.
IMO, it translates quite well to the web, and the fact that there’s a big ol’ “+” button with “add new article” as an option makes it pretty obvious that this isn’t just a static read-only place.
My main hangup was “make new post” vs “make.new article”. “Make new post” will make a Twitter-style short-form post in the “microblog” side; “make new article” goes as a Reddit-style self-post thread on the threads side. But once I understood that it was pretty straightforward, and I use both pretty regularly (articles for self-posts I’d normally post to Reddit, posts for little one-off thoughts or things I’d otherwise put on Twitter).
Kbin is planned to work with more fediverse stuff at some point as well. It already supports Pixelfed (Instagram) and PeerTube (YouTube). Mobilizon (fediverse event planner) support is on the roadmap, which would let event planning appear natively as well.
So if you ran a magazine based around a TV show, you’d be able to add a Mobilizon event that corresponds to when a new episode comes out. Then that event would serve as a “megathread” for episode discussion once the episode airs. It’s a pretty neat idea, since it intuitively reminds people when things are and gives the community a place to discuss.