4 ms·

The reason why these things don't take off with non-nerds is because the UI and UX of open source tools almost always sucks. That's it. There's nothing more to

by fy20 3y ago

The reason why these things don't take off with non-nerds is because the UI and UX of open source tools almost always sucks. That's it. There's nothing more to it. Over the weekend there was a post about XMPP and somebody asked for a client with the same level of UX as Telegram. There were a few replies, but none of them were what I would say were anywhere near the same level. For example one of them had an option to choose between three different methods of encrypting chats, and it was one of the most prominent UI features in the chat window. That's great if you want to feel like James Bond and encrypted chat is your main use case, but 99.9% of people are just sending memes and photos of their cats and don't even know what encrypted means. Element is doing quite well in this department, but last time I tried (admitidely a couple of years ago) there were still some edge cases.

8organicbits 3y ago
> the UI and UX of open source tools almost always sucks. One interesting outcome of Reddit changing their API pricing was long-time 3rd-party Reddit apps shutting down. Some of those added Lemmy support to their existing UI and importantly thought through new user behavior (like showing a default instance vs forcing users to sign up). There's still work to be done, but if we're talking about the different between the Official Reddit client and the (now defunct) Boost for Reddit, the latter had better UX. Now that Boost only supports Lemmy and the Reddit app keeps getting enshittified the UX argument is harder to make.
mal-2 3y ago
This point is confusing to me because there are so many clients available. Not only in different projects (Misskey/Firefish/Sharkey, Akkoma/Pleroma, glitch-soc), but also from the various compatible clients in the web and mobile (Elk, Semaphore/Enafore/Pinafore, Ice Cubes, Fedilab). Many instances also tweak their frontend to make UX adjustments, which is a lot more difficult in closed source projects.
sleepybrett 3y ago
The mastodon web client seems pretty similar, qualitatively, to twitters web client. Granted cross-instance search is not a thing but in terms of the timeline and how you interact with it it's largely identical.

by fy20 3y ago

8organicbits 3y ago

> the UI and UX of open source tools almost always sucks. One interesting outcome of Reddit changing their API pricing was long-time 3rd-party Reddit apps shutting down. Some of those added Lemmy support to their existing UI and importantly thought through new user behavior (like showing a default instance vs forcing users to sign up). There's still work to be done, but if we're talking about the different between the Official Reddit client and the (now defunct) Boost for Reddit, the latter had better UX. Now that Boost only supports Lemmy and the Reddit app keeps getting enshittified the UX argument is harder to make.

mal-2 3y ago

This point is confusing to me because there are so many clients available. Not only in different projects (Misskey/Firefish/Sharkey, Akkoma/Pleroma, glitch-soc), but also from the various compatible clients in the web and mobile (Elk, Semaphore/Enafore/Pinafore, Ice Cubes, Fedilab). Many instances also tweak their frontend to make UX adjustments, which is a lot more difficult in closed source projects.

sleepybrett 3y ago

The mastodon web client seems pretty similar, qualitatively, to twitters web client. Granted cross-instance search is not a thing but in terms of the timeline and how you interact with it it's largely identical.