Why is kbin so full of empty stuff?

This place is very new still. It will probably take reddit doing some other anti-user policy before you get the numbers. The best thing you can do is share OC and let it build organically.

None of the communities I actually need ever migrated here; most people just did not care. I still go to reddit for things relating to Japanese residency topics, finances, etc. as it is the only place I know of. I only visit those subs, though.

There are also people like me who post like one thing a year (though I comment much more).

I'd say it's three different things:

1. Many of the people who came from the initial Reddit migration left pretty quickly. This was always going to happen. Reddit alternatives are relatively undeveloped and lack the sheer amount of activity that Reddit has, so people were inevitably going to lose interest and leave after the initial rush of wanting to stick it to Spez.

2. Kbin development stopped for about a month. This was due to the developer, Ernest, having real-life stuff to deal with and thus very little time to work on Kbin. Development has since started back up since then, and you can take a look at the progress over on @kbinDevlog, but that long period of silence led a lot more people to lealve.

3. The people who are here aren't posting a ton. There are a lot of magazines where threads will get tens or hundreds of votes and comments… when someone decides to actually make a thread. Any social media site is going to have more lurking and commenting than posting, but if all the people who want to see content were to post a bit of their own, many of these magazines would be a lot more alive.

A lot of people came here, then went back to Reddit immediately.

Honestly if you see kbin magazines that are just empty and unused (as you said, lots of people have made placeholder magazines during the Redditpocalypse and then it took time to see if people would stick around, or settle on a specific magazine)), check if the owner is awol for more than a month and if so, claim the magazine and set it to delete. Ernest goes in and will clear them out (tho he's a bit behind I assume due to all the work he's doing right now on the software) but it will help with getting the unused ones cleared out. I got well over a dozen of em scheduled to be deleted myself, as well as 10 or so others already deleted.

At the time of the Reddit protest, Lemmy was only beta version software, not fully ready for the migration. Whereas Kbin on the other hand was only alpha version. It has come a long way since then, but keep in mind that it started out far behind (Lemmy, and even farther behind Reddit), hence has focused more on foundational aspects than small UI matters such as this. i.e. it's not fully functional even now - for instance, doesn't it still lack moderation tools, and an API that can be used by a third party app? A better way to look at it is perhaps how it is this tremendous project given how it is still so experimental, rather than looking at it from the lens of a finished, fully viable product like Reddit is.

Which in turn does not entice non-technical minded people to join, when they come here from Reddit to evaluate it, and not liking what they see, return. We who are here prefer things this way, but it is not everyone's cup of tea.

And you may enjoy community creation or expansion too, or perhaps you can even write some code to implement this feature that would benefit us all.

I don’t think you are missing anything. I’m not quite sure what the purpose of the top bar is -it doesn’t really perform a useful function at the moment.

Having it filtered by an activity threshold certainly seems like it could be a good idea

As I said in a comment elsewhere: In the movie Field of Dreams, the ghost voice says "If you build it, they will come.", but fails to say "Oh yeah, you have to look after it once you've done that. You're gonna need a ride-on mower."

During various exoduses[1] from other social media platforms, people excitedly created accounts and also attempted to re-create the places, magazines as they're called here, that they were familiar with. And then they didn't want to post content in those communities, nor did they want to have to manage them, because they hadn't done that elsewhere.

They expected the content to magically appear as it had done in those other places.

When it did not, they went elsewhere or perhaps back whence they came.

While I am very much guilty of expecting the magical appearance of posts, I can live with what's available here, and Federated from other places. I was self-aware enough to not create any magazines, though. I do not want to buy that mower.

[1]: Exodi would be the Latinate plural. Exodoi would be the Greek. You may now relax.

The main problem is actually with users like you and I mean no offense here, people subscribe which is a great start but they fail to post or contribute in ways that can help content and start a discussion.

This post drew attention and people have commented below, but if you didn't post this, the community's last post would have been 2 days ago.

My point is be the change you want to see, if we want Kbin to succeed, yall gotta start posting, not just looking around.

As is the case normally with these "exodus" things, most people went back to Reddit after the first month here.

My experience: I initially came here from Reddit and mostly access Kbin via Lemmy instances. I quickly had to make the decision to unsubscribe from most Kbin communities/magazines because unmoderated Kbin magazines were the source of 90% of the spam in my feed. It harms the reputation and makes me hesitant to subscribe to anything on Kbin. I really wish Kbin success but I think it would be greatly beneficial if Kbin went and deleted its inactive communities.

Easy there Skeeter, they ain't hurtin no one.