This is a follow-up to Tim Chambers’ “The Seven Deadly UX Sins”, in which we collaboratively review where and how the network has improved over the past six months, with a lot of different initiatives to show for it!
I came to this post late, but though I’d add my 2 cents since it’s an interesting topic.
Sin 1: Instance Selection Paralysis - is a legit issue but is mitigated somewhat now we have meta websites like https://join-lemmy.org/instances, though it would be good to have it hosted by a fully independent group that cannot be claimed to be partisan.
Sin 2: Timeline Turmoil - the suggested fix of “Cut the interface down to one feed” seems ridiculous to me. Having a quick and easy way to switch between different feed types like local/new vs subscribed/active was fantastic from day 1. Maybe mastadon users simply prefer a more basic experience? The article does seem very mastadon centric.
Sin 3: Remote Interaction Purgatory - seems like a valid complaint. I mainly stick to lemmy and piefed for this reason.
Sin 4: DM Disasters Waiting to Happen - also seems valid.
Sin 5: Ghost Conversations and Phantom Followers - seems to be mostly technically resolved by now.
Sin 6 (Part 1): Search Without Surveillance - this is basically impossible to implement, because LLMs and search engines do not care about your personal preferences, and will scrape everything that is public. Unless we achieve a 100% block rate on scrapers (not likely) then one should assume everything you type is subject to surveillance. And even then, any 3-letter agency could spin up a server and ingest all the federated content with nobody being any the wiser. An illusion of security is worse than no security imo.
Sin 6 (Part 2): Content Discovery Mirage - fairly interesting and I like the way you can create and publish feeds of communities on a specific topic, for example, on Piefed. Would be great if that feature came to Lemmy.
Sin 7: User Discovery Hell - I really don’t understand the difference between this one and the previous one. Both seem to be talking about sharing curated / aggregated feeds.
#2 is a really dumb criticism. Nobody is getting confused with having 3 feeds, as they’re fairly straightforward. You want just your subscriptions? Use the “Home” feed. The other 2 are just different flavors of Reddit’s “All” feed. Not that hard to figure out.
the “sins” read like that have expectations that the fediverse will be just like the centralized platforms; it’s not and will fail if they try to become like them.
I disagree. Decentralization has its own quirks when it comes to usability. This is not a call to exactly emulate centralized platforms, but a recognition of where many of the pain points are, and how we can collectively improve the UX to make it a better experience for newcomers.
