The mastodon and lemmy content I’m seeing feels like 90% of it comes from people who are:
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~30 years old or older
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tech enthusiasts/workers
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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?
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.
I see. I haven’t thought of that before, but when I look at Windows 11 file explorer, the one in GNOME seems way easier for me to understand despite it having the flaws that you mentioned. Maybe I just got used to it.
