nit: you mean yaml.safe_load().

I think we have far more that we agree on in this conversation than we disagree on

👍

For better or worse, these folks have come to believe that “slick looking” = thoughtfully designed = featureful and advanced. And that “sterile/boring looking” = amateur UX design = complicated and difficult

Well that’s a good point, I’d say if someone’s attention cannot be captured by the content, then that’s a different kind of audience.

I’m probably the opposite: my favorite chat technology is (you guessed it) IRC. (Not despite, but, among other things, because of its minimalism making it much more accessible, since with clients like control over color themes is a non-issue, as well as over distractions such as pictures, website previews or animations.) It’s a learned lesson though, I’ve just been using computers for long enough that I’ve simply learned that things that are full of whistles and bells are almost always ADHD minefields, if not outright waste of time. I’ve learned far, far, far more from man pages in terminal than Stack Overflow (and that’s not even whistle-bell-ey thing.)

Human preferences can be mind-boggling. For f-'s sake if there’s anything that traumatized me more than having to use threads in Google Chat, it’s that I’ve heard people say they liked it. Yeah, I don’t think I’ve ever recovered from that. It’s like clicking the really wrong link on p||nhub.

We can’t break that mentality in the general public by simply repeating over and over that they’re wrong. It just doesn’t work that way, sadly

That’s why I’m not suggesting to do that.

The right way is just to do the right thing and let the users find out that (or whether) the stereotype is wrong. It’s an uphill battle but IMO that’s just how it works; the good forms will win over long time; they just need to be maintained with patience and honesty. That’s why I’m against this proposal which seems to be just guessing what some unspecified (but large, trust me) group of users surely want.

It’s an “abopt, extend, extinguish” approach and it works. There’s a reason corporate enshitification pioneered that strategy. We can use it too, but for good :)

I guess my point is that you taking it on yourself to distinguish what is “good” or “bad” – that’s the problematic part. (I see that you did not mean that seriously, though…)

I think you badly misunderstood my take.

Nah I just responded to a minor part (which I might have misunderstood). Sorry … 😈 🤣 .

I actually agree with everything in your post.

I think a good attitude is “let there be a thousand boutiques” and “let everyone know there is choice, and let’s work together the choice is real (ie. as little lock-in as possible)”. It’s not necessarily bad if there is one or few big ones. I’m perfectly fine with people going to Starbucks (heck, even I used to, before I moved to a place where there’s a superior small coffee shop right next to my house).

I don’t think the point about “weakness” of small groups is a very strong one. (No pun intended.) What other types of small groups are weak? Are music bands also weak? Maybe not Metallica, but what about your local alt rock band? What about families, are they also weak?

The “weakness” is relevant if we’re thinking about the potential of other subjects abusing or exploiting them (an boy do we know how capitalism excels at this game). That’s why we should have systems in place which serve to protect them: not just merely on the basis that they are weak, but on the basis that the diversity is good, if not necessary, for the society as a whole.

But back to Lemmy: well, I agree with basically all your points, but do we agree on what constitutes “accessible to newcomers”? We might not.

Personally I think current UI is pretty close to perfect: things like zoom, middle click (to open new tab) just work, it does not run too much Javascript, the text editor is responsive, layout of the page is obvious and efficient, overall there is not too much clutter–for me those things are SO much essential in how welcome I’m going to feel here.

And well, people will often say that maybe my tastes are niche because I’m a tech-savvy user or whatnot, I’m tired of that BS already. I don’t think my mom would prefer cluttered, unreliable page which breaks or loses focus the moment you dare to zoom or change width of the window (eg. by flipping phone on a side). (Here I’m not at all describing Photon at all, I’m merely listing things that annoy me on so many other pages, while current Lemmy UI just gets them right.)

If people want change, they should back it up with more than what I see in this thread, most of which boils down to

• “I like Photon more” – fine (also subjective),
• “I think (it its obvious that) newcomers will like Photon more” – sure, but kinda arrogant to push that too hard without a really good evidence.
• “The other [insert some big site which is a BS comparison as their success heavily relies on lock-in or marketing] page looks more like Photon, and that means they are good to newcomers, we should mimic that (…lest we perish)!”, yeah, let’s be a cargo-cult.

What is the difference between

• (A) - an opportunistic capitalist capturing the market and drive community maintained options into obscurity
• and (B) - someone trying to convince a small community to change, purportedly in order to avoid (A)?

If you trying to protecting a small community, but your solution somehow requires that community to be more like the big ones, then I guess you don’t understand the point why small communities even exist in the first place.

It’s like coming to a small coffee shop somewhere in a side street of Prague and arguing that the shop should be more like Starbucks, because if you don’t become more like Starbucks, Starbucks will win. Win what? If all you care is money then yes, but again, that’s not why small businesses exist. (Which is what (pseudo-)capitalists and tech bros find so impossible to understand.)

Human greed is not inherently bad, greed can often be legit justified as attempt to safeguard for future. That’s fine, we should do that, but it becomes destructive when it’s not balanced with the reasons behind why things are the way they are now.

I love the Lemmy UI.

But I’m a gen Xer.

So what?

I’m sure you know that the value of a user or an opinion has nothing to do with their age.

Why be ageist to yourself?

I believe adopting Photon as the default UI could make Lemmy far more appealing to the average Reddit user.

How are you supporting that belief? Any data? Any A/B testing?

I don’t want to sound too harsh, but you have sort of marked yourself as a representative of “average OG ex-redditor” or “average joe”. Actually, you refer to “average” quite a lot. But honestly, without any supporting evidence, it’s just words to make the proposal more appealing or relevant. If we remove all this cruft (which might be supported by anecdotal study, but that should barely count, if even), what arguments are here that actually remain?

Don’t get me wrong, if you said that you like “something like Photon” more than the current default UI, then great! It is awesome that other alternatives exist and when people find them, it’s great to share the review. (It’s how I have discovered so much of great software!) But then again, it’s all subjective, right? In your proposal, you seem to tend to state lot of these subjective opinions as if they were objective, which to me makes the proposal just far less convincing.

why on Earth would we make an entire mirror organism that’s has the potential to do the same but way, way worse

it’s in the article: because of fAsCiNaTiOn!

I think we have one free chair left after UK, so…

2 down, 14 more to go. Nice.

Right? We are going to do all of the basic 16 terminal colors, right?