The Fediverse needs UI work. The new world needs a new internet.
I’m thankful we have this glorified hobbyist project of a micro internet, because it’s awesome. It’s time for real layout work to make things more intuitive, instead of this “just solder it” open-source-in-the-bad-way energy that sometimes gets half-assedly splattered around.
For everybody who has and is working on the Fediverse, thank you.
“The UI is bad” is the stock attack on any open-source project. Doesn’t matter how good the UI actually is, or how bad the corporate version is, “bad UI” is such a nebulous criticism that you can apply it to anything.
There was a point in time in OG Facebook, maybe the early 2010s, when they let you have really granular control of the timeline. Like they allowed any post to be clicked and you could change the amount you saw from that person or page on a sliding scale, and it actually worked! They of course got rid of it
Well, people make good code that is open source, even though it doesn’t make them any money. Same with wikipedia articles.
So why are we not seeing more contributions in the form of better UX/UI it the open source world? I don’t see a logical reason why that has to be the case. The question is what can we do to change it, and also get UX-designers on board?
I’m not saying it’s a matter of desire. It’s a matter of time. A full-time developer has to feed their family, so they have to put most of their time into the stuff that makes them money. That means that their passion project is just naturally going to get less time as a function of the number of hours left in the day and the amount of energy for coding that the developer in question has.
Further, ux design is a less “atomic” process; small amounts of time working on ux is going to have less impact than small amounts of time in coding. A programmer could conceivably fix a bug or make a minor improvement or feature request in ten minutes, and a Wikipedia editor could spend ten minutes improving the grammar and punctuation of an entire article; but the ux process requires mockups, iteration, asset creation, and coding for every change—and even if that can be done in ten minutes, the rest of the ui will look completely different, meaning that the overall ux will be worse than before, despite that one thing looking better.
What can we do to change it? Companies that rely on FOSS should contribute to projects so that the people who work on them can afford to do so at least part-time, or empower their own employees to contribute to FOSS on company time. Those are really the only two options, barring some sort of UBI or public grant for open source software.
Thank you for expanding on this topic, and I get what you’re saying about proper UX and how it requires a holistic understanding.
It least that is what is required to climb from “ok, I guess” to “good”. But is there something that could get us from “terrible” to “ok, I guess”? What’s your take on better, clearer design guidelines for example?
The reason I dislike this comment is it characterizes the work of many different people as “don’t care.” I would bet money that there are people who work on fediverse projects who care very deeply about UX but have to settle because they have day jobs.
The UI’s aren’t that bad. They’re replicating existing apps/styles and then bolting on features. In some clases like immich, they’re replicating them so closely they’re probably open for lawsuit :)
Loops is 75% TikToc. Lemmy is 60% Reddit.
If we had a couple of UI artists and Usability people join the projects and crank out designs, I wonder if the devs would implement them and spend the time making the output true to the design.
I only used sync on reddit and that’s all I use on lemmy, tried many of the others and they’re good but not perfect, for both the closed source and open source projects
If they made it so your average joe could contribute to the Fediverse with their own hardware I’d contribute. Tired of seeing social media be owned by Billionares.
“You want this thing to be better? Well why don’t you single-handedly do all the work yourself then? Obviously only those with the skill to do something can hope for that thing to happen!” /s
God I hate this attitude. It’s so obviously wrong and yet people fall for this trap again and again. Stop doing this please, think about it and you’ll realize it’s stupid.
I already know, but I also hate the “wow this shit we have sucks why isn’t it better god someone please donate their skill to improve this thing I consume for free already and also show up to complain about while doing nothing”
The Fediverse needs UI work. The new world needs a new internet.
I’m thankful we have this glorified hobbyist project of a micro internet, because it’s awesome. It’s time for real layout work to make things more intuitive, instead of this “just solder it” open-source-in-the-bad-way energy that sometimes gets half-assedly splattered around.
For everybody who has and is working on the Fediverse, thank you.
“The UI is bad” is the stock attack on any open-source project. Doesn’t matter how good the UI actually is, or how bad the corporate version is, “bad UI” is such a nebulous criticism that you can apply it to anything.
It’s a stock attack because unfortunately it’s generally a pretty safe attack vector
Which is amusing, because the UX for Facebook, X and TikTok are horrendous also. So much stuff buried under layers of settings
And none of those settings will give you the experience you actually want.
There was a point in time in OG Facebook, maybe the early 2010s, when they let you have really granular control of the timeline. Like they allowed any post to be clicked and you could change the amount you saw from that person or page on a sliding scale, and it actually worked! They of course got rid of it
Well, that’s intentional though. The stuff that’s buried is the stuff that doesn’t make them money.
Bad ux in open source is because nobody has any money.
Well, people make good code that is open source, even though it doesn’t make them any money. Same with wikipedia articles.
So why are we not seeing more contributions in the form of better UX/UI it the open source world? I don’t see a logical reason why that has to be the case. The question is what can we do to change it, and also get UX-designers on board?
I’m not saying it’s a matter of desire. It’s a matter of time. A full-time developer has to feed their family, so they have to put most of their time into the stuff that makes them money. That means that their passion project is just naturally going to get less time as a function of the number of hours left in the day and the amount of energy for coding that the developer in question has.
Further, ux design is a less “atomic” process; small amounts of time working on ux is going to have less impact than small amounts of time in coding. A programmer could conceivably fix a bug or make a minor improvement or feature request in ten minutes, and a Wikipedia editor could spend ten minutes improving the grammar and punctuation of an entire article; but the ux process requires mockups, iteration, asset creation, and coding for every change—and even if that can be done in ten minutes, the rest of the ui will look completely different, meaning that the overall ux will be worse than before, despite that one thing looking better.
What can we do to change it? Companies that rely on FOSS should contribute to projects so that the people who work on them can afford to do so at least part-time, or empower their own employees to contribute to FOSS on company time. Those are really the only two options, barring some sort of UBI or public grant for open source software.
Thank you for expanding on this topic, and I get what you’re saying about proper UX and how it requires a holistic understanding.
It least that is what is required to climb from “ok, I guess” to “good”. But is there something that could get us from “terrible” to “ok, I guess”? What’s your take on better, clearer design guidelines for example?
“The UI is bad” = “It doesn’t feed me new and popular content automatically”
Basically sums that up.
What is a “Good UI/UX” ?
“That what I am used to with years of muscle memory and anything that is different is bad UX” usually…
The reason I dislike this comment is it characterizes the work of many different people as “don’t care.” I would bet money that there are people who work on fediverse projects who care very deeply about UX but have to settle because they have day jobs.
The UI’s aren’t that bad. They’re replicating existing apps/styles and then bolting on features. In some clases like immich, they’re replicating them so closely they’re probably open for lawsuit :)
Loops is 75% TikToc. Lemmy is 60% Reddit.
If we had a couple of UI artists and Usability people join the projects and crank out designs, I wonder if the devs would implement them and spend the time making the output true to the design.
I only used sync on reddit and that’s all I use on lemmy, tried many of the others and they’re good but not perfect, for both the closed source and open source projects
I’m using Voyager. It’s amazing that we have choices.
Reddit and Facebook’s interfaces aren’t any better than anything we’re using, and they’re full of sponsored content.
Voyager is pretty slick. I think it’s UI is almost perfect and waay better than the Reddit UI.
We have https://phanpy.social/ for mastodon, it’s great
Lemmy is lucky to have alternative frontend like Photon, Tesseract and Alexandrite
This will never happen without funding. Open Source severaly lacks funding big corporations have.
If they made it so your average joe could contribute to the Fediverse with their own hardware I’d contribute. Tired of seeing social media be owned by Billionares.
I wonder if you’ll mention Gemini, just for fun
Waiting on your obviously so skilled patches to make it happen.
“You want this thing to be better? Well why don’t you single-handedly do all the work yourself then? Obviously only those with the skill to do something can hope for that thing to happen!” /s
God I hate this attitude. It’s so obviously wrong and yet people fall for this trap again and again. Stop doing this please, think about it and you’ll realize it’s stupid.
I already know, but I also hate the “wow this shit we have sucks why isn’t it better god someone please donate their skill to improve this thing I consume for free already and also show up to complain about while doing nothing”
After you