This article is a response to Tim Chambers’ recent writeup, titled The Seven Deadly UX Sins of the Fediverse Web Experience (To Fix). It’s a pretty great read, and I’m writing this not as a rebuttal, but to analyze and expand on the points made.
This is a musing on 7 problems that have been pointed out, with some ideas on what progress has been made to fix them.
More like the Sean Tilley’s dream custom frontend wish.
I thought he would talk about text to speech, alternate text, auto describer, voice chat, etc… Instead I read what Sean wants his interactions with SNS to look like. I want even custom profile music+radios! Here’s how my lemmy profile is supposed to sound like!
Well, no, this was just responding to a critique on UX shortcomings, and highlighting how different efforts could solve various problems.
It sounds more like you’re talking about one of my previous blog posts, where I was talking about a super-flexible frontend that’s basically a pagebuilder. Make no mistake, I would love to see custom profile music and radios! And I agree that accessibility needs to be way better!
critique on UX shortcomings, and highlighting how different efforts could solve various problems
Which are solvable by creating a customized SNS frontend.
Lemmy is a community first centric ActivityPub network, thus most frontend tailor UX for community engagement, and not SNS.
Similarly Peertube is for videos, thus the UX will tailor for videos centric experiences.
What you detailed was a SNS tailored UX, not a community or video one.
I agree with Tilley that many of Chambers’s complaints seem Mastodon-specific, or at least not applicable to the threadiverse.
The only really big disagreement in philosophy I have is the complaint about direct messages not being private messages. We’ve all seen the way that private messages have been used to harass users on reddit. That direct messages don’t include an expectation of privacy on lemmy is, to me, a strength rather than a weakness; something that advantages the recipient over the sender, which is the balance of power we want.
My main critique is just that, within the Mastodon side of the Fediverse, the design is highly misleading about what the feature does. It resembles a normal DM feature, but the message addressing is purely handled by mentions in the message body.
Basically, it’s an antipattern, causing people to accidentally mention other people in what’s assumed to be a Direct Message. It’s less about privacy, more about poor telegraphing of side-effects.
I did not use Twitter before. So I am not using Mastadon now. Because I don’t give a ploop. I liked forums. Lemmy-ish…adjacent spaces are like forums. I like that. I wasn’t aware that DMs are not private, so strange. But yes, many people have been harassed. When I was on Reddit, I turned off any means of communication not public. Here, I wouldn’t to be honest.
I really like the pre-identity thing, especially if you’re going to other types of activity pub applications or switching instances.
Thank you! I’ve been thinking about it a lot, and I think it could be used to solve a bunch of different problems, like importing stuff from other networks, and having everything ready to go before you join an instance.
There’s some UX questions that have to be figured out, the last thing I want is some super-cluttered design that asks for a million different options. Also, platforms would need to provide some necessary APIs (for registration and data import) to make it fully useable.
Name, password, email. That’s it.
Edit: and avatar or a link to it.
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