Your first sentence I agree with. Your second sentence I don't agree with. It's still early with the reddit exodus - things have been escalating incredibly fast and most people don't even know much about it yet, or are still processing what's happening.
Reddit was a big part of our lives for many people and it's not easy to let go. I was so deeply offended by what happened that I let go quickly even though it hurt me. But people who already used the official app? For them, it's a difficult conversation at best. But I'd say it is still early days.
So much this. Defederation is a catastrophic issue for an average user in its current form, as the interactions fail totally silently.
Give us simple but informative warnings on reading threads, warnings when trying to post, warnings when trying to subscribe, and warnings when our subscriptions become defunct. Then the user can make informed decisions about either looking for new communities, or maybe moving to a different instance.
You say that as if the blocks are a known factor. They are not easily visible to users, and instances can block others on a whim like beehaw did to some others very recently.
Worst of all, when users had subscriptions and connections active from a time when there wasn't yet a block in place, they don't even get warnings or notifications when trying to post or comment? Subscriptions don't give warnings either?
But that's not really a full solution, because instances seem to block instances on whims (recently beehaw blocked two other ones suddenly). And users don't even get warnings or notifications about it when posting or reading cached content...
It's pretty awful for an average Lemmy user, because you can get cut off from communities you already subscribed to, without any notification! So you might post and comment without realizing that your content is not getting published, even though you and your local instance still see it.
The user experience would be improved by getting a warning if you try to contribute to a community in this case. And also your subscriptions should show warnings about not working anymore, and those should come up as notifications on the account.
The default webui needs many updates to become more usable for a wider range of users. I also don't like how the page updates wildly when I'm trying to read through. Either the updating should work more smoothly to not make the user disoriented, or maybe have a preference for paged scrolling or something along those lines...
Great work! User preferences diverge - I wanted "no blur", but also "no auto expand" for myself.
While having this in my instance of choice is great, Lemmy as a whole would benefit from improving the default webui with things like these settings. Where could users pitch ideas like this?
Getting the blur disabled should be a user setting though in the web UI without installing anything.