5 ms·

I like the idea of all of these federated services but why does the UX always feel like an afterthought when it is the most important factor for adoption?

cosmic_cheese 3mo ago
Same reason why the Linux desktop often suffers on the UX/UX front: people naturally drawn to these projects tend to lean heavily technical, and highly technical circles have a bad habit of driving out less technical contributors through devaluation of their work and lack of agency within the project among other issues. That sort of work also tends to be less well-compensated than that of SWEs which makes it more important to be paid for work (which most FOSS project cannot do).
- StableAlkyne 3mo ago
  UX work is often also a lot heavier and more subjective than the plumbing. I might open a pull request to support some new video code, and that might only require a few dozen lines over a few files. That's easy to review, and it either works or it doesn't. Worst case they say "our convention is to register codecs as a subclass of X class, but you subclassed Y class" or something equally straightforward. Let's say instead I wanted to change the workflow to register an account. Now I'm changing a bunch of JavaScript, CSS, templates, I'm adding pages, and I also need to update the backend. Even if someone is that into frontend work, it might take forever to even get reviewed by the maintainers because it's a massive PR. Plus, now we've moved into subjectivity land: "I'm used to the old workflow," (because they designed it) "The last one was really easy" (for an engineer), "I think we should focus on the backend before we work on the UI," "I don't like this font because the license isn't free as in freedom" etc. Even if you just mockup something on Figma or whatever, unless you're a maintainer it's probably going to just get ignored as a feature request. Because there's also the psychological aspect of basically being told that the UI you wrote is implicitly bad, if you're the maintainer reviewing the mockup.
- jollymonATX 3mo ago
  Maybe some devs in OSS are married to their horrid idea of how things should work?
- palata 3mo ago
  Not that I disagree, but I find it a bit harsh. I know many developers who make at least some open source contributions, be it to an existing project or by open sourcing their own. It has never, ever happened to me that a UI/UX person opened a PR saying "here, I made a logo for your project because I know how". I think that there is a cultural thing, where UI/UX people don't consider that they have to work for free on the Internet, and software developers have a tendency to believe they should, "for their CV" or something.
- account42 3mo ago
  Or maybe there is no universally better UX and people who work for free want to create what works for themselves and not some top down designers vision. After all most mainstream software completely ignores the needs of power users.
flaburgan 3mo ago
Do you have precise suggestion of what to improve? I'm genuinely interested.
- Jtarii 3mo ago
  Is it possible to just vaguely gesture at everything? The spacing of every component feels wrong, the font choices are off, the text is too small, there is way too much white space, the "other video" section looks like its just jammed off to the side. The overall feel of the website is very amateurish.
- jesse_dot_id 3mo ago
  Yeah, it's pretty simple. When I go to YouTube.com, I have access to all of the videos on that platform, sorted based on what I'm subscribed to and other things like what I watch. The first thing I see are videos. I'm off to the races. When I go to https://joinpeertube.org https://joinpeertube.org, I'm met with a double hero section that tells me about PeerTube, which is ultimately meaningless to 99% of the population. When I get to actual content on that page, it's not an aggregate of all of the most popular videos across the federation, it's a description of the types of videos you can find on federated sites with links to the sites and not video embeds. You're telling me on the front page that I have to do legwork to find the videos I want to watch. You're already not competitive. You already lose. Creators go where users go. If you don't build the platform to attract users, you will not get the volume of content that is required to hold people's attention. There's a reason why people come to YouTube, Reddit, Hacker News, Reels, etc. There are almost no clicks between the user and the content, and the content is plentiful. Every time I try to use PeerTube, I have to try to find where to find the videos. As someone who's been chronically online since 1995, it's not that big of a deal. I can find them eventually. But that UX sucks, even for me, so it's probably utterly untenable for the vast majority of casual users. You are trying to compete with slot machines by inventing a machine that makes the user read a bunch of stuff between each pull of the lever. It's not super difficult to see why that is a competitive disadvantage.
  - underlipton 3mo ago
    And the thing is that you don't even necessarily need to make a new slot machine to compete with the old slot machine. A lot of people hate the slot machine-ness of the old slot machine. They hit a button on their Chrome extension/Greasemonkey remote to turn off the flashing lights and loud attention-grabbing sounds and whatnot. So, if your new machine doesn't have those, maybe that's all for the better. Maybe your new machine gives players more control over how they play, and doesn't try to trick them into never getting up to get some water or go to the bathroom or whatever. Maybe there's no jackpot, just a chill or educational time. Maybe you get rid of the randomness of the outcomes, so that it's easier for people to just find what they're looking for. I dunno. There are a lot of ways it could go. But, boy, I do know this: when I sit down, I better be able to just pull the lever and start.
BeetleB 3mo ago
It'd help if you explain the problems you see in the UX. I picked a random instance and played a video - did not see any problems. And Youtube: I've hated their UX since they launched. It shouldn't be hard to make something with better UX than Youtube.
timbit42 3mo ago
Yeah, form is the most important factor. Function isn't necessary./s

cosmic_cheese 3mo ago

Same reason why the Linux desktop often suffers on the UX/UX front: people naturally drawn to these projects tend to lean heavily technical, and highly technical circles have a bad habit of driving out less technical contributors through devaluation of their work and lack of agency within the project among other issues. That sort of work also tends to be less well-compensated than that of SWEs which makes it more important to be paid for work (which most FOSS project cannot do).

StableAlkyne 3mo ago
UX work is often also a lot heavier and more subjective than the plumbing. I might open a pull request to support some new video code, and that might only require a few dozen lines over a few files. That's easy to review, and it either works or it doesn't. Worst case they say "our convention is to register codecs as a subclass of X class, but you subclassed Y class" or something equally straightforward. Let's say instead I wanted to change the workflow to register an account. Now I'm changing a bunch of JavaScript, CSS, templates, I'm adding pages, and I also need to update the backend. Even if someone is that into frontend work, it might take forever to even get reviewed by the maintainers because it's a massive PR. Plus, now we've moved into subjectivity land: "I'm used to the old workflow," (because they designed it) "The last one was really easy" (for an engineer), "I think we should focus on the backend before we work on the UI," "I don't like this font because the license isn't free as in freedom" etc. Even if you just mockup something on Figma or whatever, unless you're a maintainer it's probably going to just get ignored as a feature request. Because there's also the psychological aspect of basically being told that the UI you wrote is implicitly bad, if you're the maintainer reviewing the mockup.
jollymonATX 3mo ago
Maybe some devs in OSS are married to their horrid idea of how things should work?
palata 3mo ago
Not that I disagree, but I find it a bit harsh. I know many developers who make at least some open source contributions, be it to an existing project or by open sourcing their own. It has never, ever happened to me that a UI/UX person opened a PR saying "here, I made a logo for your project because I know how". I think that there is a cultural thing, where UI/UX people don't consider that they have to work for free on the Internet, and software developers have a tendency to believe they should, "for their CV" or something.
account42 3mo ago
Or maybe there is no universally better UX and people who work for free want to create what works for themselves and not some top down designers vision. After all most mainstream software completely ignores the needs of power users.

flaburgan 3mo ago

Do you have precise suggestion of what to improve? I'm genuinely interested.

Jtarii 3mo ago
Is it possible to just vaguely gesture at everything? The spacing of every component feels wrong, the font choices are off, the text is too small, there is way too much white space, the "other video" section looks like its just jammed off to the side. The overall feel of the website is very amateurish.
jesse_dot_id 3mo ago
Yeah, it's pretty simple. When I go to YouTube.com, I have access to all of the videos on that platform, sorted based on what I'm subscribed to and other things like what I watch. The first thing I see are videos. I'm off to the races. When I go to https://joinpeertube.org https://joinpeertube.org, I'm met with a double hero section that tells me about PeerTube, which is ultimately meaningless to 99% of the population. When I get to actual content on that page, it's not an aggregate of all of the most popular videos across the federation, it's a description of the types of videos you can find on federated sites with links to the sites and not video embeds. You're telling me on the front page that I have to do legwork to find the videos I want to watch. You're already not competitive. You already lose. Creators go where users go. If you don't build the platform to attract users, you will not get the volume of content that is required to hold people's attention. There's a reason why people come to YouTube, Reddit, Hacker News, Reels, etc. There are almost no clicks between the user and the content, and the content is plentiful. Every time I try to use PeerTube, I have to try to find where to find the videos. As someone who's been chronically online since 1995, it's not that big of a deal. I can find them eventually. But that UX sucks, even for me, so it's probably utterly untenable for the vast majority of casual users. You are trying to compete with slot machines by inventing a machine that makes the user read a bunch of stuff between each pull of the lever. It's not super difficult to see why that is a competitive disadvantage.
- underlipton 3mo ago
  And the thing is that you don't even necessarily need to make a new slot machine to compete with the old slot machine. A lot of people hate the slot machine-ness of the old slot machine. They hit a button on their Chrome extension/Greasemonkey remote to turn off the flashing lights and loud attention-grabbing sounds and whatnot. So, if your new machine doesn't have those, maybe that's all for the better. Maybe your new machine gives players more control over how they play, and doesn't try to trick them into never getting up to get some water or go to the bathroom or whatever. Maybe there's no jackpot, just a chill or educational time. Maybe you get rid of the randomness of the outcomes, so that it's easier for people to just find what they're looking for. I dunno. There are a lot of ways it could go. But, boy, I do know this: when I sit down, I better be able to just pull the lever and start.

BeetleB 3mo ago

It'd help if you explain the problems you see in the UX. I picked a random instance and played a video - did not see any problems. And Youtube: I've hated their UX since they launched. It shouldn't be hard to make something with better UX than Youtube.

timbit42 3mo ago

Yeah, form is the most important factor. Function isn't necessary./s