Mitigating the "7 Deadly Fediverse UX Sins"
Mitigating the "7 Deadly Fediverse UX Sins"
Thinking through Tim Chambers' writeup on how to deal with the sometimes very spotty UX of Open Social Web platforms.
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.
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 think it can very well be applied to the Threadiverse.
- Sin #1: The First-Move Problem - Doesn't really applies for the Threadiverse, because the instances (at least for me) do feel genuinely different, with a different culture, etc., which is one of the most exciting things for me here
- Sin #2: Navigation Inconsistency - Basically the same here.
- Sin #3: Remote Interaction Hell - Also the same here, right?
- Sin #4: Private Mentions Aren't Really DM's - Same here, right?
- Sin #5: The Phantom Social Graph - There definitely are synchronization issues on Lemmy, too (see the australian instance, which, I think has a latency of a week of so per post :D). Otherwise because the Threadiverse is still rather small, it seems to work mostly fine.
- Sin #6: The Discovery Problem - Much better on Lemmy. The algorithms are both transparent and make the threadiverse feel alive even though it has much less user.
- Sin #7: Basically doesn't apply here, because you don't follow users, but can be applied for communities. And multiple of the same communities on different instances are a big problem of the Threadiverse. Also abandoned communities. PyFed solves this with topics and Lemmy also has an upcoming feature for this in v1.0 I think.
I think the most pressing issue is sin#7 if applied to communities.
In an abstract sense, I see the Threadiverse as inversion of Mastodon: instead of posting messages to a personal account, which tags may be interesting to you to discover other similar content, in the Threadiverse, users post to hashtags and who posted them is only secondary important to you, but may be used to discover more content by the same account.
"federated next to useless?" nah it's my favorite. best way to find new people to follow
I used to feel that way, but there's so much crap on that timeline, especially when you're on a bigger instance. I used to use it for the exact same thing, discovery. A lot of it is just noise to me now, though.
very curious what server you are on? im on a server with 1k active users, so not big by any measure, and manually counted the federated timeline just now, and it shows at least 50 new posts per minute. like how do you even use that? do you just watch it until an interesting account pops up on there? im very confused by this idea of using federated timeline to find people
I'm on like 3 different ones, mainly defcon.social. All of them are under 5k users. I use a desktop app called Sengi to show feeds from all my accounts at once and group the federated feeds together, so yeah I can watch lots of posts fly by or scroll through at my leisure.
And yeah I pretty much just watch until I see a post I wanna favorite or boost. That's why I say it's the best way to find new accounts you wouldn't otherwise have thought to check out.
Generally my local and home feeds are much slower. So on mobile, when I'm done catching up on those I keep refreshing the federated. I would be so bored without the federated.
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.
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.