both companies notably ruined the internet in the 2010s by consolidating discourse then taking various steps to destroy the user experience and the feel of the communities for profit.
so, broadly, the web went from cozy, small hobby forums in the 90s and 00s, then with the 10s as a transitional period, the 20s being practically complete corporate control of online discourse.
it’s a bummer. but nothing lasts forever. where will we go next?
There’s a big diaspora right now.
If the fediverse can get more user-friendly instead of being a bunch of programming linuxites lying that their stuff is totally intuitive, it could be a lovely new home with lots of flexibility.
This is my least favorite part of the fediverse. I’m pretty tech savvy, and the jump to Mastodon when Elon took over and Lemmy when apps stopped working wasn’t easy. Having to pick an instance to sign up with was a huge roadblock for me.
Mastodon discovery seems harder to achieve than Lemmy, probably because there are only a few Lemmy instances with active communities, so as long as your instance is federated and there are enough users to have subscribed to most of the communities, you’re good.
On Mastodon I always felt like the number of different instances and different people posting (each being their own mini community) made it harder to assess whether you were actually seeing everything
99% of the time when I would get the most batshit insane replies to a comment, they would be from three instances that mine had not defederated from. i.e., instances are not just like emails - not entirely - but instead there is a whole culture associated with each, made more complex to learn bc people lie about them, especially each of us about our own:-).
Also links to communities are totally broken in the web UI - e.g. unless you happen to have your account at midwest.social, clicking [email protected] will take you away from your instance, where you can’t vote or comment and your preferences are all ignored ([email protected] will work fine, but there are zero indicators for that in the GUI, you have to know the secret knowledge and trust the process, or flip back and forth between the Preview button and editing).
But the codebase for Lemmy is in Rust so… not a whole lot of contributors to fix such things. Plus most people seem to simply lurk anyway, based on the differences between upvotes vs. comments in most content.
If you see it a few times, are you not going to notice intuitively how it works? Also, even if you don’t use a ! link, usually people with comment with one
Piefed is in Python, Mbin in PHP, Sublinks in Java. It’s more about the lack of contributors then the language themselves
Not everyone is tech savvy, e.g. creative writers who know how to work the English language rather than coding ones, like maybe poets.
And no I don’t think the exclamation mark followed by community name syntax is intuitive in the slightest - for one thing it runs entirely counter to how username tagging works, and for another if you allow the UI to guide you then it will give the wrong answer, so these “pitfalls” act as barriers to learning, which imho are the polar opposite of “intuitive”, for this matter. Instead, I end up memorizing three rules (usernames are like so, community links similarly are… NOPE, that’s a trap!, and instead here’s how community links actually go…)
Excellent point about the non-Lemmys - those have different barriers I believe. e.g. if you visit the Sublinks demo, there are no posts from sooner than 5 months ago (plus ironically sorting by New shows zero posts, so it seems broken:-). I doubt people are wanting to contribute to a project that isn’t released yet, but then again I can’t ascribe motives to everyone, it just seems to make sense to me that having to learn Rust would be one type of barrier (although not even the major one, since many people may want to do thus for their careers - Rust is arguably the hottest new language right now?), and a project not being able to be used is another type of barrier.
How so? Adding “!test” shows the dropdown menu, that seems quite intuitive :
How would you make it more intuitive?
For Sublinks, if people go on the Github (which you expect people wanting to contribute to do), they’ll see it still has active contributions: https://github.com/sublinks