- cross-posted to:
- fediverse@lemmy.world
- cross-posted to:
- fediverse@lemmy.world
This is a follow-up to Tim Chambers’ “The Seven Deadly UX Sins”, in which we collaboratively review where and how the network has improved over the past six months, with a lot of different initiatives to show for it!
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I came to this post late, but though I’d add my 2 cents since it’s an interesting topic.
Sin 1: Instance Selection Paralysis - is a legit issue but is mitigated somewhat now we have meta websites like https://join-lemmy.org/instances, though it would be good to have it hosted by a fully independent group that cannot be claimed to be partisan.
Sin 2: Timeline Turmoil - the suggested fix of “Cut the interface down to one feed” seems ridiculous to me. Having a quick and easy way to switch between different feed types like local/new vs subscribed/active was fantastic from day 1. Maybe mastadon users simply prefer a more basic experience? The article does seem very mastadon centric.
Sin 3: Remote Interaction Purgatory - seems like a valid complaint. I mainly stick to lemmy and piefed for this reason.
Sin 4: DM Disasters Waiting to Happen - also seems valid.
Sin 5: Ghost Conversations and Phantom Followers - seems to be mostly technically resolved by now.
Sin 6 (Part 1): Search Without Surveillance - this is basically impossible to implement, because LLMs and search engines do not care about your personal preferences, and will scrape everything that is public. Unless we achieve a 100% block rate on scrapers (not likely) then one should assume everything you type is subject to surveillance. And even then, any 3-letter agency could spin up a server and ingest all the federated content with nobody being any the wiser. An illusion of security is worse than no security imo.
Sin 6 (Part 2): Content Discovery Mirage - fairly interesting and I like the way you can create and publish feeds of communities on a specific topic, for example, on Piefed. Would be great if that feature came to Lemmy.
Sin 7: User Discovery Hell - I really don’t understand the difference between this one and the previous one. Both seem to be talking about sharing curated / aggregated feeds.
the “sins” read like that have expectations that the fediverse will be just like the centralized platforms; it’s not and will fail if they try to become like them.
I disagree. Decentralization has its own quirks when it comes to usability. This is not a call to exactly emulate centralized platforms, but a recognition of where many of the pain points are, and how we can collectively improve the UX to make it a better experience for newcomers.
#2 is a really dumb criticism. Nobody is getting confused with having 3 feeds, as they’re fairly straightforward. You want just your subscriptions? Use the “Home” feed. The other 2 are just different flavors of Reddit’s “All” feed. Not that hard to figure out.
