[PieFed] seems to be strongly opinionated about how people should behave and it kinda gives me an icky feeling about its culture

Yea, I get this same feeling. It’s not that I mind that culture or being mindful of how people behave and such - I just don’t think that is the domain of the software to decide. Individual instances can decide that for themselves, but the software shouldn’t influence that kind of thing, I feel.

Well, that might be the cause. Kinda scary you get recommendations like that just due to no history.

Wow your YouTube recommendations are very different from mine.

It’s not meant to be a messenger, it’s not meant for privacy. Everything being public and transparent is part of the core design of the Fediverse. The idea of private groups/posts on the Fediverse seems counterintuitive to me.

Just want to counter this: Privacy is in fact a part of ActivityPub. Stuff is only meant to be public if it is sent to the Public collection, otherwise it should only be delivered to the intended recipients, much like email. This is part of the core protocol, not any extension.

I wouldn’t consider it rude in the Danish communities we have in Feddit.dk, but that’s also cause basically all danes are fluent in English, so it shouldn’t be an issue.

Thanks anyway. Personally I haven’t been impressed either by the stability and performance of Lemmy. It is what it is I guess.

Since email is no less secure than snail mail

I would disagree with that. The attack surface on snail mail is much, much smaller (only whoever can get in physical contact with my mail) and any attack scales incredibly badly. It is also often hard to read snail mail without making it obvious that it has been tampered with (i.e. opening the envelope).

Meanwhile the attack surface of email is huge (basically the entire internet), any attack can scale wildly and it is impossible to tell if anyone else read an email.

By and large, physical stuff is much more secure than digital stuff, just less convenient.

It rather abruptly stops at a few thousand users and after that it becomes much harder and more expensive to scale further.

As a fellow Lemmy admin of a smaller instance, do you have any advice? Any resources that might be worth checking out?

I think every government should be providing email service the same way they provide physical mail service

The problem with that is that email is not really secure enough for sensitive stuff like your bank account statements or your health/medicine journals from your doctor.

That is why in Denmark we don’t have the government provide actual email, but there is rather a digital mailing system where you authenticate with your digital ID and can receive secured mail from banks, municipalities, health authorities, tax authorities and others.

Would be cool if they also participated on Lemmy instances sometimes, it is written in Rust after all :)

It’s not that bizarre when you think about it. As a technical piece of software, Sims is actually quite complex.

You need a sophisticated character editor with a vast array of clothing options. You need a house editor that allows you to build any house you can imagine. You need a huge array of possible interactions between people and all kinds of objects. You also need lots of randomized interaction and AI (as in traditional game AI) to control NPCs. You need to have all these things be affected by the characters traits and you need them to go through life stages while still being interesting.

It’s a whole lot. It’s basically impossible to build a game like that as an indie developer. You really need a large team and that means funding. And that’s where it gets hard cause you are up against Sims and I don’t imagine many sources of funding want to make that bet.

Hmm I guess some people might like this but I’d be a bit afraid of mixing different communities just because the same link is posted in them. Different communities might have different rules and different expectations for participation and such. This kind of mixes the different communities together.

Like imagine someone posts a link to an article to !nyheder@feddit.dk (Feddit.dk news community), which is already posted in !world@lemmy.world. If I understand correctly, I’d then see comments from both communities on the same page? But the comments on Feddit.dk will be in Danish and will probably largely be about how the news story affects Denmark, while the comments on lemmy.world will be in English and from a more international perspective. But muddling these things together takes away the “identity” of the community and suddenly you’ll be seeing stuff you maybe won’t want to see (i.e. danish comments for instance if you are not danish).

I think there at least should be a user preference to disable this, and an option for moderators to opt out of this, to avoid the above situation.

Yes, Lemmy is dominated by people with a certain propensity towards tech. You can’t use Lemmy users as a gauge for what is good UX I would say.

I couldn’t agree more and I see it everywhere as well. It’s systemic.

Which would you choose based on their website?

Problem is, people on Lemmy are techies who might actually prefer the Gimp site. But any “normal” person would not.

Måske det hjælper hvis man skifter til dansk, så vi ikke bliver forvirret af sprogbrugen :)

Som @meldrik@lemmy.wtf siger så er fediverset decentraliseret - det vil sige at i stedet for at der kun er en udbyder (fx Reddit), så er der mange udbydere af sociale medier som hænger sammen. Man plejer at kalde hver udbyder en “instans”, altså Feddit.dk er en instans, lemmy.world er en anden instans. Så man vælger en udbyder/instans, ligesom man vælger om man går i Netto eller Rema (selvom de jo tit har de samme ting).

Mastodon fungerer på samme måde, dvs. der er mange instanser der kører Mastodon-softwaren som alle hænger sammen. Faktisk hænger Mastodon og Lemmy også sammen, da de bruger samme underliggende protokol. Det er der hvor det bliver rigtig fedt for så kan man begynde at skrive fra Mastodon til Lemmy eller den anden vej. Det ville svare til at skrive fra Twitter til Reddit eller den anden vej, noget man aldrig kunne forestille sig i de traditionelle kommercielle sociale medier.

Jeg forstår godt at meget af det her er anderledes end hvordan de traditionelle centraliserede sociale medier virker, og jeg er sikker på du ikke er den eneste der er forvirret. Jeg tror faktisk det ville være rigtig fint hvis du stillede dine spørgsmål og forundringer som et indlæg i !spoergsmaal_og_svar@feddit.dk, så kunne andre på Feddit.dk også måske få glæde af forklaringerne :)

You can make your own alternatives, that’s the difference. If you think the mods/admins of those comms/instances aren’t doing well, then you could do better yourself. That’s the freedom that the fediverse gives you. You could not do the same on Reddit.

There’s also a link to Matrix, which I’m guessing is the preferred way to jump in and ask questions about how to contribute.

Yes but asking directly instead of consuming already-written guidelines is a much higher psychological hill to climb and doesn’t feel welcoming. You need to be very passionate to go to Matrix. Also, frankly speaking, UX people are very unlikely to have a user on Matrix or even know what it is or how it works. Developers on the other hand can easily figure this out. You need to be mindful of tech literacy when you’re trying to cater to UX people - they won’t know anything about Matrix probably.

In general, I recommend coming with the intention of being assigned work

I don’t think that’s bad, but for developers this is very easy with all the guidelines and the “good first issues” and all that. For UX people, none of these resources exist.

Where would you naturally look for this? With developers it’s easy, you look for “CONTRIBUTING.md” or similar in the repo, as well as hints from templates in issues and PRs. Some will have extensive style guides and whatnot, but most are pretty bare bones.

Should this go on the main website? Somewhere at the start of the technical docs? In the repo in a special place linked from the root?

At the very least this could be in the contributing guidelines on GitHub, but I think having it on the main website (a place much more familiar and friendly to non-technical people) is much better.

What about tooling? Should projects set up something like penpot (found after a search for FOSS Figma)? Or are designers okay with images on a wiki or something? Is it reasonable to ask them to submit a GitHub issue and engage that way (they could link to something else)?

I don’t know, I’m not a UX person. Ask them when they arrive. But I would think they can probably figure out to interact on GitHub issues if directed to do so. Developers intuitively know “Oh I want to contribute so I’ll need a GitHub account and then need to go look at issues” but UX people don’t know this.

To me, linking a chat and the repo is enough, but maybe it’s not.

I definitely don’t think that’s enough - UX people probably don’t even know what a “repo” is.

What do you mean by “invite”? What would that look like?

I don’t mean a literal invite - I mean that projects are rarely inviting for product managers and designer (let’s call them “UX people”) and rarely do they encourage those people to contribute.

Let’s take a look at Lemmy as an example (and please don’t misunderstand, this is not to bash Lemmy specifically, this happens for so many FOSS projects). Let’s put ourselves in the shoes of a UX person who wants to contribute to Lemmy. How would I (the imaginary UX person) do that?

Well, on join-lemmy.org there’s not really any links to anything to do with contributing but there is a link to “GitHub” in the contact information. As a UX person, I may have a vague idea what git and GitHub is, but obviously that’s not a tool that I use. So then I land on the git repository on GitHub. Oh great, there’s a “Contributing” section! It says:

Read the following documentation to setup the development environment and start coding

Oh. So that’s contributing code and stuff. So that’s not me. But okay since there’s nothing else, let’s try and go to the contributing guidelines anyway. But this just gives a technical overview of the different software components of Lemmy, and then goes into how to setup local development. This is all mumbo-jumbo to me, I know nothing about coding, I am a UX person.

My point is (and again, Lemmy is just an example here), none of these contributing guidelines are helpful unless you are a developer, and the fact that the contributing guidelines only caters to developers makes any UX person feel out of place, as if their expertise is not wanted or needed. This is what I mean when I say it is not very inviting to UX people. It is very inviting to developers though.

That’s how it should work for design as well. Contribute some designs that you think will improve the UX and if they’re desirable, someone will take up implementing them. If it’s easy (e.g. a new logo), it’ll get done right away, and if it’s more involved, it’ll get done as devs get time.

I agree! But how are designers supposed to know where to even start? There are “good first issues”, but those are also only for developers. Where’s the contributing guidelines for non-developers? You say “Designers and product managers are certainly welcome”, but this doesn’t look that welcoming to me!

My perspective of designers and product managers is that they like to own projects.

I think this is a bit of a mischaracterization. I don’t think a product manager has to “own” the project to help and be valuable to a project.

One project that does this quite well is bevy. See this video from one of the product manager contributors to bevy: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u3PJaiSpbmc

people good at UX don’t seem to care as much about FOSS and the open web

I’m not sure this is true - at least I have an alternative explanation.

People who do the UX design and all that are rarely invited into the process. Open source projects often look for “maintainers” but this almost exclusively means “developers”.

There’s documentation and contributing guidelines for developers. Where is the same material for product managers or designers?

We don’t get product managers and designers in FOSS because they’ve never been invited.

The major platforms are convenient.

But the open web offers something better: genuine ownership, community governance, and independence.

This has a kind of underlying connotation that the open web can’t be convenient. This is not true.

It is true that lots of platforms on the fediverse (Lemmy included) don’t have the best user experience and user journey flow. But that’s not how it has to be. We don’t have to accept that as a given.

It’s the same problem that Linux faces, where UX issues aren’t prioritised because the user base is technical enough to deal with the bullshit. We can’t let the same thing occur to the fediverse.