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.

  • ℕ𝕖𝕞𝕠@slrpnk.netEnglish
    101·
    2 days ago

    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.

    • blue_berry@lemmy.worldEnglish
      1·
      48 minutes ago

      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.

    • Sean Tilley@lemmy.worldOPEnglish
      8·
      2 days ago

      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.

    • profgrumpypants@midwest.socialEnglish
      2·
      2 days ago

      I did not use Twitter before. So I am not using Mastadon now. Because I don’t give a ploop. I liked forums. Lemmy-ish…adjacent spaces are like forums. I like that. I wasn’t aware that DMs are not private, so strange. But yes, many people have been harassed. When I was on Reddit, I turned off any means of communication not public. Here, I wouldn’t to be honest.