I actually think this post has a lot of solid points, many of which I have argued myself in the past. One thing was funny though. He says:
Today’s Reddit is a phone product. The “just use the web UI” crowd is not representative of mainstream behavior.
and then several users in the comments were turned off by the Web UI of Lemmy.
They may not know the phone apps, and if they’re on iOS there may not be any.
I mean, lots of people seem to like Voyager and mostly because it has been based of the defunct Apollo app that was only on iOS. I am sure if you search for Lemmy iOS app you should find it?
There are quite a few apps for Lemmy on IOS, actually it was a bit disheartening how many targeted exclusively IOS for a while or which were still web apps with IOS centered theming.
The moment reddit users went from being primarily old.reddit to m.reddit was the final day of decent reddit, imo.
Photon (and similar front ends) are pretty awesome on mobile. If Lemmy developers used it as a base for a new default webUI, it might solve all of the UI complaints.
It doesn’t help that Lemmy’s web UI is different depending on the instance. Personally I find dbzero’s really bad. But they might think that’s the Lemmy web UI and not realise it’s different on each instance.
Of course it’s all subjective but I suspect the people complaining about the UI are likely users that have only known reddits “redesign”, where as the older users will feel more at home on a default, unmodified Lemmy UI.
I disagree that having a variety of UIs is a bad thing. I wouldn’t want every instance to look like dbzero! It also highlights that Lemmy is not a single platform, it’s a federation of them. Heck even reddit has two UIs!
I’m not saying it’s bad to have a variety of UIs, but that there’s no “lemmy UI” because it all depends on which instance you land on. So when someone says “the lemmy UI is awful” then we don’t really know what they mean, because they might have gone to dbzero and thought that’s what “lemmy” looks like.
I understand what you’re saying, but what you want (conformity of UIs) is just not possible to enforce on a decentralized network.
I’m not saying I want conformity of the UI’s across instances. Maybe my original comment wasn’t worded great, but I think ultimately it’s a drawback of the decentralised nature of the threadiverse. People land on an instance and make an assumption that it’s all like that.
… ironically i 99% use lemmy on my phone, lol.
I have also had multiple people so far on lemmy just get livid about how i block out my sentences and paragraphs… you know, to make sense on the phone i am typing them on, to look nice.
I’ve had people get legitimately angry that i formatted a comment for a phone, seemingly not even realizing that there are… what, at least 10 different mobile lemmy clients that are reasonably popular?
actually I do think aggregated sublemmies would be a good thing for engagement and content discovery - it seems silly that there are 4 different communities all about the same thing (eg buyfromeu)
reddit also has the google search privilege which makes hard to beat, it actively hides lemmy site.
How delightfully European Union of them to debate debate debate in the face of a looming crisis.
Yes Lemmy has a lot of improving to do, but I’m not seeing many other alternatives!
The best way to get Lemmy/PieFed to improve is by using it. You can report issues and talk about them here, but talking about them in Reddit is talking to the wrong audience.
I mean, there’s piefed and the *bins, if we’re being pedantic, but especially outside of the fediverse I don’t think the distinction is too important.
Yeah, it also doesn’t address the Concerned™ poster.
If a user taps “subscribe,” store it locally. When they finally create an account, they should be able to “claim” those subscriptions. This is a small UX move that has an outsized effect on conversion.
Any evidence for this? Twitter tried something like this, but then moved to putting everything behind a log in wall so I’m led to believe that the latter has better guest-to-registration statistics.
I can’t think of any other site that does that. In fact, if I was using a site like that for a while and then lost all my subscriptions because my cookies got wiped, I might not come back.
Like it makes sense to me if an app does that. Is that what they could mean with it?
On an actual web browser I agree with you.
There’s also the issue of how you’d tell between a new user and a user with an account on the wrong instance. Imagine how confusing it would be to hit subscribe, see it goes through and when you go to your mobile app it’s not there.
That’s not even going to be practically possible for people with no account. You could do it for the instance they’re currently browsing from, but the cookie wouldn’t carry to others if they found themselves browsing from another instance as the sort of “front end”. Might be wrong, but that’s how I understand cookies to work.
Then there’s edge cases like them trying to psuedo-subscribe to a community that hasn’t been pulled down to the instance they’re on yet. If you wanted it to work like it does for a real user, that would have to be logged by the instance so it could fetch it. That would be open to a lot of abuse I would think. Unauthenticated visitors could force federation of illegal comms, or effectively anonymously DDOS the instance by overloading it with requests to pull down tons of comms. There’s plenty of ways to conbat that, but it would undeniably break the concepts behind how federation is meant to work (for the sake of storage and server efficiency) if you allowed it to be kicked off by guest users.
So at best it would be a brittle thing, locked to the instance the guest was browsing at the time and restricted to comms already federated with the instance.
Not completely useless, but it would be a hell of a lot of work for so little benefit.
