Comment by loics2@lemm.ee on Does it feel like the fediverse is exclusively used by older tech nerds?

The mastodon and lemmy content I’m seeing feels like 90% of it comes from people who are:

~30 years old or older
tech enthusiasts/workers
linux users

There’s nothing wrong with that particular demographic or anything, but it doesn’t feel like a win to me if the entire fediverse is just one big monoculture.

I wonder what it is that is keeping more diverse users away? Is picking a server/federation too complicated? Or is it that they don’t see any content that they like?

Thoughts?

I don’t think it’s necessarily the job of the developers, the main issue IMO is that there’s not enough involvement from other specialists such as designers in open-source communities.

Sometimes I try to help, but unfortunately not everyone is willing to listen. I’ve noticed there are multiple reasons why UI might be bad in a Free Software project:

developers are not UI experts and they don’t know better
developers are not UI experts and they don’t listen to experts or UI is not their priority
the UI code is so bad that changing it would require rewriting most of the application and nobody has the time to do that, so there is nothing that can be done (this probably doesn’t happen in web apps)

I believe in Lemmy’s case it’s mostly the 2nd point.

IDK about Lemmy devs, but point 2 is so, so common. Making a point about UX or accessibility in 99% of FLOSS project discussion spaces is incredibly stressful; you can have user research, industry best practice, and years of experience on your side, but you’re inevitably met with dismissal and argument. Devs often treat designers as though they’re a bunch of artsy crystal-healing crusties, despite the fact that good UX people base their work on actual research and theory grounded in human behavior and psychology. (Calling use of basic design principles “eye candy” for example) Of course, if a dev makes a decision on technical grounds, it must be treated as scripture as far as any remaining designers on the project are concerned. It’s no wonder so many FLOSS projects have abominable UX.

True. I feel like usually anything I say about UI is interpreted as just my opinion, which in developer’s minds is just as valid as anyone else’s opinion. It maybe kinda makes sense, since those developers don’t really know me, but there is nothing I can say to change their minds. So they remain stuck with a bad, inefficient design for no good reason.

GNOME desktop environment is a good example that having a good UI is possible.

In Lemmy’s case users are forced to take matters into their own hands: !plugins@sh.itjust.works

Hi there! Looks like you linked to a Lemmy community using an URL instead of its name, which doesn’t work well for people on different instances. Try fixing it like this: !plugins@sh.itjust.works

Exactly. I once made a point about excessive indicators of visual / information hierarchy increasing cognitive load without additional benefit on a subreddit and got downvoted to oblivion. That was not my opinion; that’s what industry research indicates!

Got to say though, I think GNOME is pretty, but a usability nightmare.

It’s not based on the same 30 years old design that all popular operating systems are. So it might take some time to learn how to use it. Is that what you meant or do you think that it’s badly designed?

Here is an interesting video about this topic: https://youtu.be/GkxAp2Gh7-E

Here is an alternative Piped link(s): https://piped.video/GkxAp2Gh7-E

Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.

I’m open-source, check me out at GitHub.

Yea, I think they make honest to god bad design decisions that hurt usability. A common thread is hiding features / reducing discoverability while making no attempt at progressive disclosure, requiring memorization to complete certain tasks with the interface. This isn’t only bad UX, it’s an accessibility issue for users with attention and/or memory deficits. Creating a new paradigm is one thing, but with that comes the task of building affordances that help users with the transition, like skeumorphism did back in the day (…and to an extent, skeumorphism should have never been abandoned in the way it was…), something that the GNOME project simply does not do. They also ignore common accessibility recommendations, for example, by using icons without text in their applications, and utilizing mystery-meat navigation methods like hamburger menus, and ignoring long-established patterns for even very basic tasks, like allowing titlebars to become cluttered with interface elements leading to confusion when the user wants to move the window and widgets are in the way. I don’t think it’s bad at all that the GNOME project is trying to build their own paradigm, but they do so without consideration for the most fundamental usability guidelines.

Also, I always have to have a chuckle when I see what clients produce on their own. Like, they’ll cheap out and produce absolute garbage that they’re somehow happy with, but the minute you, a design professional, submit a concept or mockup that is far beyond their ability to produce, the client is absolutely full of feedback: “Make the logo 5x bigger!” “Let’s use this barely visible shade of blue!”

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Does it feel like the fediverse is exclusively used by older tech nerds?

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