MudMan

Oh, let’s not have the Masto instance chat here. Sure, the UX for onboarding is terrible and the community’s obsession with what is ultimately a trivial concern is a problem, but that’s not a problem in search of a technical solution. Masto would have stood a better chance if it just defaulted to Mastodon.social by default, because end users shouldn’t have to know or care what instance they are using on first contact. The only reason fedi advocates obsess about this to the point of borking the most important bit of social media UX is the fiction that all instances “deserve” the same level of discoverability for some reason.

Also, invite-only instances are already a thing, at least on Masto, and as far as I can tell nothing keeps you from making a new federated app that requires invites, so this feels like a bit of a non-issue anyway.

Yeah, but that’s solved through cross-login, which I’ve already seen used at least once in Pixelfed. Logging in with a pre-existing Masto account and importing your follows should have been the default solution, but I understand how the tech may not have been in place.

Yeah, but that’s bad, though.

Hypercustomization is way more of a hassle than a positive in most applications. I will take a couple of binary settings, I won’t design the UI for you.

My contention here is that the default UI for the *Bin is actually good.

You made me go check, and the signed-out site on an incognito tab does autoselect my browser-default dark theme. It looks much better than the light, incidentally, and the highlight to the Fedi tutorial link makes more sense in this context and is clearly restricted to signed-out users as a call to action/promo thing.

I don’t necessarily think the light theme is as awful as you’re claiming, and at a glance it definitely seems to be derived from Dark and not the othe way around. The more I look into it the less this seems like a universal problem with the UX in Mbin derivatives and more “the light theme has made some debatable color choices”.

Honestly, choosing whether to default to dark or light is pretty arbitrary, and pointless once the user sets a preference on login anyway. I’m not sure if there’s a reason you can’t default to OS/browser preference on a logged out user, but also don’t think it’s a big deal. Plus highlighting a “what is this app” tile makes more sense on the logged-out default, so there’s that as well.

Which is not to say that you’re wrong on the larger point. FOSS devs having the attitude that the UI is a secondary concern or wildly misrepresenting the ability of users to deal with friction or bad looks is an ongoing frustration. I guess engineers are more likely to attempt FOSS projects than UX designers.

I suppose that’s the point of interoperability. I would much rather support an ecosystem of apps doing the exact same thing to satisfy different UX preferences than the excruciating endless talk of “which of these identical instances all plugging to the same service should I arbitrarily joing as an identity-defining statement” you get in Masto.

Hold on, that doesn’t seem like an apples to apples comparison. You’re doing light theme in one and dark in another. The light theme has a different balance (also, ow, my retinas).

The default Fedia dark theme I am using does not look like that at all. Sure, both the main column and the tool column on the right have the same emphasis, but you still get hierarchy from both the relative sizes and the positioning (if you’re a left-to-right reader, at least).

Disagree hard with ugly and awkward. It being less of that han Lemmy is the reason I use it in the first place.

If anything, I’d swap the pros and cons around, because every time I accidentally respond to a Masto post over here and half the functionality is missing I have a few seconds of confused panic before I realize what’s going on and drop that conversation altogether.

I use Mbin (well, Fedia, but same thing), and honestly I do that because of the interface. Lemmy’s UX seems so much worse.

The microblogging thing is… there, but it mostly just serves some random post here and there. It’s fine to be able to have a microblog follow in there if you want, but I think the assumption that you’d centralize multiple AP services in a single app now feels entirely obsolete. That doesn’t get in the way and it’s still a much better client for Lemmy than Lemmy, though.

I admit I haven’t looked into this yet, but at as a headline my first thought was “that’s a terrible idea and it’s going to get someone killed”.

I did not, in fact, make a social media company. Rochko did.

And hey, I mostly agree with the diagnosis in your link. As always with business pitches, I’m more skeptical of the leap in logic from the diagnosis to the proposal for an alternative.

Also, if a software developer tells me they will have a project done in a year I immediately walk away. Show me a production plan or don’t give me a deadline. But hey, that’s just me and you’re not actually pitching.

For now, if Flipboard gets there with Surf we can revisit and talk about whether they needed 5 million and a year or not. I don’t think it’s a terrible idea, but also don’t think it’s going to explode. I’m ready to be proven wrong, though.

Can it? Because I wouldn’t try to run a social media company with less than that. It’s kind of shocking they make do with a tenth of it. Which I guess is helped by being staffed by the equivalent of a mid-sized McDonalds franchise.

If I was going to spend that much on anything beyond servers and full time employees I would spend it on marketing, though.

Also a hell of a pitch.

…users can also use Friendica as a publishing platform to post content to Google+, Google Buzz, WordPress, Tumblr, GNU-social, and Libertree.

Well, that’s a hell of a pitch. I hope the codebase gets updated more frequently than the blurb.