“وَٱقْصِدْ فِى مَشْيِكَ وَٱغْضُضْ مِن صَوْتِكَ ۚ إِنَّ أَنكَرَ ٱلْأَصْوَٰتِ لَصَوْتُ ٱلْحَمِيرِ”

“Be moderate in your pace. And lower your voice, for the ugliest of all voices is certainly the braying of donkeys.”

aspe:keyoxide.org:LWJJT46QY6F7W5MOKRUD3W6IOY

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Joined 5 months ago
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Cake day: July 16th, 2024

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  • Good read, thanks for sharing. But i think both of us are over estimating the tech literacy of the average user. Many of them look at software, or ideas, or platforms at surface level, and don’t care much about how software works internally.

    The average user isn’t going to care about federation, and might not even understand it. To us and the OP of the reddit thread, we’re familiar with federation, and have gotten used to it. It seems easy for us.

    This is why i think the bluesky exodus is going to be useful, because it may inspire new users to learn about federation, and later on, the fediverse.

    https://xkcd.com/2501


  • We definitely should make a poll to understand our demographics, eventually. Maybe i’ll do it one day. It would be a huge benefit for us users and developers.

    As for reasons why people don’t choose to try lemmy, i remember before i joined lemmy that i heard warnings of the developers and community denying genocides, making up false information, and being toxic in general etc. I also couldn’t wrap my mind around instances. That definitely soured my opinion, to be honest. Of course, now i know those are only a couple of instances that could easily be blocked, but the average user isn’t going to understand instances, federation, etc.

    The reason why bluesky was so successful was because it’s easy. It has pseudo-federation, but it ““conveniently”” chooses the main server for you. That’s why most users are on bsky.social. Simple, but incredibly centralized. It defeats the point. Also, the UI is very similar to old twitter. Lemmy/mbin are more radical in terms of differences, this makes it more niche.

    I just don’t think people are ready for the fediverse, yet. Maybe in a couple of years, people will start joining us, but for now, we’re the minority.








  • After your first post, i’ve thought about your points, and i’ve changed my opinions a little.

    I agree, we should replace the default lemmy UI as a whole. Out with it. But photon wasn’t designed to be a “default” UI. It was designed as an alternative.

    The point of a default UI is to be as accessible as possible, yet still functional. That’s why most users on the fediverse usually use a 3rd party client (Including me, i use photon + raccoon on mobile). While the current lemmy UI checks the “performance” box, the functionality box? not so much. It feels like everytime i use it i am overwhelmed with information density, and the auto expand feature implementation is just bad. Photon does the opposite. It checks the functionality box, but scratches the performance box. Even on a modern PC, photon is choppy for me, and the frosted glass effect is not helping.

    I don’t think we should have a default lemmy UI, as in, every instance uses the same UI. As i said in the first post, it should be up to the instance maintainer to choose their own UI. This comes with its own problems. Lemmy.world’s photon is outdated, and so is lemdro.id.

    Ultimately, this is in the hands of the instance maintainers, and Xylight himself. He is rewriting photon for more performance, so my answer may change.



  • I also prefer the new (new-old, the current one sucks) reddit UI and love photon, and i don’t think it’s too far fetched of an idea to want it as the default UI. I think it should be left to instances, so for example, lemmy.world could use photon for the default, yet lemmy.ml could use the default lemmy UI.

    I’m still a little concerned over first impressions of a new lemmy user, when they try to use lemmy.world on a weak device, and realize it is slow, or laggy, and could sour their opinion on lemmy as a whole. A non tech savvy user might not completely understand the idea of lemmy, or clients, or even instances. They’d just blindly choose lemmy.world and assume that’s the “main” instance. (I also could just be underestimating the average user’s intelligence, lol.)

    That’s why i brought up performance as a main point to why we should keep the current lemmy UI. Maybe if photon is optimized and is more stable, i could completely agree that it should be the default.