this post was submitted on 08 Jul 2023
182 points (90.6% liked)

Fediverse

35143 readers
473 users here now

A community to talk about the Fediverse and all it's related services using ActivityPub (Mastodon, Lemmy, KBin, etc).

If you wanted to get help with moderating your own community then head over to !moderators@lemmy.world!

Rules

Learn more at these websites: Join The Fediverse Wiki, Fediverse.info, Wikipedia Page, The Federation Info (Stats), FediDB (Stats), Sub Rehab (Reddit Migration)

founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
 

The mastodon and lemmy content I’m seeing feels like 90% of it comes from people who are:

  • ~30 years old or older

  • tech enthusiasts/workers

  • linux users

There’s nothing wrong with that particular demographic or anything, but it doesn’t feel like a win to me if the entire fediverse is just one big monoculture.

I wonder what it is that is keeping more diverse users away? Is picking a server/federation too complicated? Or is it that they don’t see any content that they like?

Thoughts?

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] Freesoftwareenjoyer@lemmy.world 0 points 2 years ago (11 children)

What if we can't make it more approachable? Should we forever rely on corporations and their unethical platforms to be able to communicate? Just because people aren't willing to learn a few very basic things?

This is not a problem with the technology, but with people.

[–] loics2@lemm.ee 2 points 2 years ago (9 children)

This is not a problem with people, but with UX design.

We don't need a corporation to have usable interfaces. Right now, if you visit join-lemmy.org, the main focus is for people wanting to host an instance, which is only a small part of the advanced user base. The common user won't care about the fact Lemmy is made with rust or that there's a docker image.

I don't think it's only an issue with Lemmy, lots of open-source projects lack user-friendliness and onboarding.

[–] Freesoftwareenjoyer@lemmy.world 1 points 2 years ago (3 children)

Yes, Lemmy's UI is very bad. It would be pretty easy to improve it, if only developers understood this. But I think the part that new users complain about the most is federation. At least I've seen many posts and comments saying that it's too confusing.

[–] loics2@lemm.ee 0 points 2 years ago (1 children)

I don't think it's necessarily the job of the developers, the main issue IMO is that there's not enough involvement from other specialists such as designers in open-source communities.

[–] Freesoftwareenjoyer@lemmy.world 0 points 2 years ago (1 children)

Sometimes I try to help, but unfortunately not everyone is willing to listen. I've noticed there are multiple reasons why UI might be bad in a Free Software project:

  • developers are not UI experts and they don't know better
  • developers are not UI experts and they don't listen to experts or UI is not their priority
  • the UI code is so bad that changing it would require rewriting most of the application and nobody has the time to do that, so there is nothing that can be done (this probably doesn't happen in web apps)

I believe in Lemmy's case it's mostly the 2nd point.

[–] NathanUp@lemmy.ml 1 points 2 years ago

IDK about Lemmy devs, but point 2 is so, so common. Making a point about UX or accessibility in 99% of FLOSS project discussion spaces is incredibly stressful; you can have user research, industry best practice, and years of experience on your side, but you're inevitably met with dismissal and argument. Devs often treat designers as though they're a bunch of artsy crystal-healing crusties, despite the fact that good UX people base their work on actual research and theory grounded in human behavior and psychology. (Calling use of basic design principles "eye candy" for example) Of course, if a dev makes a decision on technical grounds, it must be treated as scripture as far as any remaining designers on the project are concerned. It's no wonder so many FLOSS projects have abominable UX.

load more comments (1 replies)
load more comments (6 replies)
load more comments (7 replies)