3mo ago

Bluesky users five years from now

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Fediverse needs to get shiny and intuitive. This "just open the source code and change a few variables" github energy isn't good enough for a big boy platform.
Which probably means more people need to be working on it, because I'm certain the people who have made the functional thing we have now have their hands full maintaining it and making iterative improvements.
- Which probably means more people need to be working on it, because I’m certain the people who have made the functional thing we have now have their hands full maintaining it and making iterative improvements.
  There's enough funds to keep a couple of Lemmy devs beavering away on it and some grants to add specific features but that isn't going to lead to the rapid addition of features you get by throwing VC cash at hiring engineers. However, someone is going to want something in return for all that money and down that road enshittification lies. The rate of progress on the Fediverse is slower but it is sustainable.
- This "just open the source code and change a few variables" github energy isn't good enough for a big boy platform.
  Honest question, who is doing this? All android apps I've used have been completely fine and usable out of the box, and you can just go to your instance web address on your computer. Are you on some ancient alpha version of a client that hasn't been maintained?
  
  Seriously. I downloaded Lemmy connect when Reddit is fun shut down and have used it exactly the same. Setting up an account was the same. The UI is so similar I can't remember the difference. People choose to get in the weeds with the platform and don't realise that it isn't necessary at all.
- For the last year I've been thinking both Lemmy and Mastodon need a good hard UI/UX polish. But it seems that quite a few want a plain html bullet list for their feed and lose their mind over change. 🤷‍♂️
  
  As long as you give people choice you don't have to worry about change.
  Look at Reddit. If they hadn't killed the API myself and many others would still be there. I used Reddit is Fun for 10+ years. Reddit made hundreds of changes, many of them stupid, but I didn't care because no matter how many changes they made I could choose to ignore them and use the exact same client/UI I had been using.
  Also Lemmy and Mastodon have plenty of good UIs in the form of apps. If you want to change the default UI I say go for it, just provide the old one. If you don't want to maintain the old one, don't. Just give folks to the option to maintain it.
  
  Lemmy will get a new UI soon™, something much more modern using DaisyUI.

22 comments