I see a lot of comments here saying that the vision of being “Mainstream” is not something Lemmy or other Fediverses try to achieve so they discard the feedback about UX or user comfort and discoverability because “we’re not trying to appeal to everyone or grow infinitely”.
And while I agree somewhat that “growth” is not the goal, I do feel like a lot of people here miss the point that “Being available to Mainstream users” is also greatly about diversity.
If the user experience and hurdles a user has to pass are great enough to filter only tech savvy or people who the issues with Reddit/Twitter are big enough to take action on, you self select to a very specific population.
You should try to help introduce diversity of people, and any user experience pitfalls and extra requirements reduce that diversity.
If the “fediverse” want artists, zookeepers, woodworkers, small business owners, hobbyists, lawyers and many other people with views and interesting content to contribute this is a really bad hurdle.
Part of the reason why so many places of community that downplay user experience trend towards the same population of open source evangelists with the same form of discussion and “hivemind” that already exists in many iterations of this same experiment in the past.
I feel like that’s what the author is talking about more than “It needs to beat Twitter” when he’s talking about mainstream appeal, and anyone ignoring that is potentially dooming this or any other “let’s give people an open alternative to big platforms” to only serve their own specific subset of people and build another same-y echo chamber that could have been achieved using any self hosted forum system.
I know I’m a bit late to the party here with this comment, but I hope it someone helps change someone’s mind about downplaying the concerns raised in this post.
You’re making good points, however I want to throw this in:
to only serve their own specific subset of people and build another same-y echo chamber that could have been achieved using any self hosted forum system.
I’ll rewrite the “echo chamber” into “appeals to users you care about”. For companies like Reddit, mass appeal is important (and thus UX) because it’s what draws in advertisers and thus money. As such you could argue that they’re doing the exact same, with the motivation of making money instead of prestige or having a good time.
However, I do think that UX is highly important. My biggest gripes with Lemmy are currently:
It’s too hard to join/browse a community on another instance. “Just put it into the search input” is fiddly, I mean, you click on that icon and now I have to parse some complex form just to find the most important bit, the search query itself, at the end. Why is advanced search the default? It should be there, but meh. I resort to building the URL myself which also sucks and doesn’t work in Apps
That I have to do that at all is annoying. This isn’t “federation bad”, but more that it’s just not there yet.
I’m wondering if Lemmy could copy the idea of Home Assistant. An example, go here: https://www.home-assistant.io/integrations/octoprint/ and then look for the “My ADD INTEGRATION” button. Clicking it brings you to a simple site that asks where your Home Assistant is hosted and then redirects over to there to make that feature work. The most important bit: That redirection site remembers the setting.
As this little site stores the data as a cookie it’s still not perfect from a UX perspective. However, it works everywhere you’re using a Browser (And apps can just rewrite the pages) and, most importantly, it works without any server logic. Thus the Lemmy project could host it cheaply (for free) on e.g. Cloudflare Pages.
I see a lot of comments here saying that the vision of being “Mainstream” is not something Lemmy or other Fediverses try to achieve so they discard the feedback about UX or user comfort and discoverability because “we’re not trying to appeal to everyone or grow infinitely”.
And while I agree somewhat that “growth” is not the goal, I do feel like a lot of people here miss the point that “Being available to Mainstream users” is also greatly about diversity.
If the user experience and hurdles a user has to pass are great enough to filter only tech savvy or people who the issues with Reddit/Twitter are big enough to take action on, you self select to a very specific population.
You should try to help introduce diversity of people, and any user experience pitfalls and extra requirements reduce that diversity. If the “fediverse” want artists, zookeepers, woodworkers, small business owners, hobbyists, lawyers and many other people with views and interesting content to contribute this is a really bad hurdle.
Part of the reason why so many places of community that downplay user experience trend towards the same population of open source evangelists with the same form of discussion and “hivemind” that already exists in many iterations of this same experiment in the past.
I feel like that’s what the author is talking about more than “It needs to beat Twitter” when he’s talking about mainstream appeal, and anyone ignoring that is potentially dooming this or any other “let’s give people an open alternative to big platforms” to only serve their own specific subset of people and build another same-y echo chamber that could have been achieved using any self hosted forum system.
I know I’m a bit late to the party here with this comment, but I hope it someone helps change someone’s mind about downplaying the concerns raised in this post.
You’re making good points, however I want to throw this in:
I’ll rewrite the “echo chamber” into “appeals to users you care about”. For companies like Reddit, mass appeal is important (and thus UX) because it’s what draws in advertisers and thus money. As such you could argue that they’re doing the exact same, with the motivation of making money instead of prestige or having a good time.
However, I do think that UX is highly important. My biggest gripes with Lemmy are currently:
I’m wondering if Lemmy could copy the idea of Home Assistant. An example, go here: https://www.home-assistant.io/integrations/octoprint/ and then look for the “My ADD INTEGRATION” button. Clicking it brings you to a simple site that asks where your Home Assistant is hosted and then redirects over to there to make that feature work. The most important bit: That redirection site remembers the setting.
As this little site stores the data as a cookie it’s still not perfect from a UX perspective. However, it works everywhere you’re using a Browser (And apps can just rewrite the pages) and, most importantly, it works without any server logic. Thus the Lemmy project could host it cheaply (for free) on e.g. Cloudflare Pages.