Basically, It would be nice to point out what those platforms are & what are their “Killer Features”
For anyone who wants a quick glance at which platform might be suitable
Basically, It would be nice to point out what those platforms are & what are their “Killer Features”
For anyone who wants a quick glance at which platform might be suitable
(all is satire, I love you guys)
I can’t emphasize enough how bad Lemmy’s moderation tools are. It’s not just that they’re abysmally anemic (including that you can’t perform moderator actions on someone in your community without a comment of theirs to click the context menu on? what??). It’s not just that reports don’t synchronize correctly across instances (i.e. if you want to moderate a community on another instance, you’re at a severe disadvantage). It’s that they’re wildly fragmented, presented just all over the place like some kind of scavenger hunt.
I literally can’t even view a per-community modlog on desktop. I have to go out and find the Lemmy.World modlog (usually from a search engine) and then filter by action and pray that it was recent enough that I can find it in the rest of the heap.Oh, but don’t worry. There’s a third-party tool for viewing the modlog, which is just ??? What the fuck?? How is this in some random tool you have to go searching for instead of in Lemmy proper? And even then, this tool has its flaws.Edit: obviously no automod either, although I know that’s a much larger undertaking than any of the things I’ve listed thus far.
You’re on LW, newer versions of Lemmy are better in that regard.
https://tesseract.dubvee.org/ is a better frontend for moderation. Allows you to see votes as a mod, and ban users who never commented or posted.
There’s an orange “modlog” button in the sidebar of every community that shows the community modlog?
Whoops! I didn’t even notice the Modlog because (at least for me) it’s tucked away at the very bottom of the sidebar and nestled between the list of mods and some statistics I don’t really care too much about. :P Genuinely my bad, though; I should’ve looked harder. Appreciate it now that I can finally see it!
Don’t get too excited. It seems to be missing a bunch of stuff.
I don’t really know the explanation for why the Lemmy API seems to just randomly drop stuff out of the modlog if it’s more than 5-10 entries long, but you’ll have to search for the exact stuff you’re specifically looking for a lot of the time. Maybe I am misunderstanding what I’m seeing but I’ve gotten the strong impression that’s what I’m seeing. It’s similar to how looking at a user’s profile randomly drops comments out after a certain time and just switches to posts only, so it’s hard to search through for specific stuff you’re looking for. Apparently that is going to be fixed in 0.20.
The Tesseract front end is just completely superior for moderation imo. It took me a little bit of getting used to, but it is clean
Apollo was also better at moderating Reddit than whatever Reddit could put out so you could say Voyager goes above and beyond at cloning Apollo.
This but unironically. I could never get over it with Kbin and still can’t with Mbin. It’s a bad name for a community/sub and I’ll die on that hill. You can never get me to call a meme shitpost an “article” in a “magazine”.
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 mean Lemmy is pretty ugly and awkward too sometimes… actually I realized that I changed around my Lemmy theme so it wouldn’t look quite so bad to me. So maybe I’m making an unfair comparison of that versus stock Mbin. But check this out:
What’s the important stuff? Is it the high-contrast areas, like the “what is the fediverse” box or the always-vital “Add new link” button? Or the icons for the users, which are huge and in attention-grabbing high contrast for some reason? What does the pushpin do? Oh, that’s letting me know it’s a pinned comment. Can we just change the color for that, like every other platform? Is “People” really so vital that it needs it own big menu entry? Why is everything that’s in a bright contrasting color something that isn’t important, and the headlines are only a little shade different from the normal text? Why do we have giant boxes with speech bubbles in them, right in a super-prominent place, which sort of look like skeleton shapes because the page hasn’t finished dynamically loading yet, except that they’re actual final content elements? And why do they so skillfully separate the very unobtrusively colored vote counts from the things that they are counting votes for?
Compare that to this:
See how it does the same “what the heck is this place,” but it isn’t the most attention-grabbing thing on the screen every time you’re there, and put in a place where you will look if you’re first getting oriented (the first thing in left-to-right, top-to-bottom reading order), but not grabbing your attention every other time? See how “show me all the users” is way down at the bottom left in an unobtrusive list, because it’s not commonly used, whereas the main three types of feeds it can show you are the only things grabbing your attention up top, and then there’s a bar off to the side with a small handful of other actions separate from that you might want to do? And how, if you’re totally lost, the one button that’s most useful (create an account) is the most obviously high-contrasting thing?
Like I say, I am saying all this with love. Mbin has great features and Mastodon has a lot more eyes on it and people who want to chip in and make it attractive. I’m just saying that anything you use every day, you can get used to, and Mbin could look like the Mastodon interface and become to my eyes a lot less jarring. Put a little “feed settings” icon next to where “Explore” is now, that pops down a set of filters if you want one, get rid of a bunch of the stuff that gets thrown around on the screen that only very rarely is relevant, emphasize the stuff that needs attention and de-emphasize the stuff that doesn’t. That is my feeling.
Yeah, Lemmy’s UI has more gratuitous awkwardness in the actual design, maybe. Mbin does a lot more stuff, and generally has it pretty well-organized conceptually. Lemmy does a more minimal set of stuff and somehow still manages to make some of it confusing or hard to access. I think I was mostly just talking visually.
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).
I just opened fedia.io and screenshotted what it showed me. Same for mastodon.xyz. I wasn’t trying any kind of rigged setup. If there’s a simple change to the default theme choice which would make it less horrendous by default, or the layout is more logical on some screen sizes, then I think they should make the defaults better yes. Maybe I happened to hit on one badly-configured server or bad screen size, but I didn’t change anything on purpose, it just kind of feels like making it not-horrible visually is simply not a priority.
I would actually describe that as a problem for both Mbin and Lemmy. It really annoyed me when I was setting up this server that the default theme is kind of bad, the default sort is “Active”, and so on. It feels like there’s a pretty common mindset of “as long as it works for my account I don’t care what experience new users get.” I don’t think it’s deliberate, I think it’s just a natural outgrowth of working on the project because you want it to exist for you, not like trying to “grow the user base” necessarily or worry about what happens to novice users, like would be front of mind for a standard software company.
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.
If it was a good light theme, I would agree with you, but the light theme it chose to show me was awful. It sounds like if someone logs in and chooses light theme, they get this.
(And again, Lemmy does the same: Of the pretty unappealing theme options, the default is one of the most unappealing ones. If I remember, it likes to color unimportant UI elements in GARISH bright green and orange colors which are borderline alarming compared with the muted colors of everything else. Why not just default to “darkly”, because that is one that looks okay? Who knows.)
I was even questioning myself, like “why am I complaining about the pushpin”, and then I looked again at my screenshot and the pushpin is the only solid dark contrasting thing anywhere in the whole article listing, which explains why I was looking at it first and wondering what the heck it “did” until I figured it out. It’s so bad.
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”.
If you press the cog in the top right corner you can choose between six different themes, as well as moving the sidebar around, text size, and a bunch of other tweaks. :)