Big Tech Wants You Trapped. The Open Web Sets You Free
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John Mastodon.
My grandfather met John Mastodon in 1861. He says he was very nice.
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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.
What do you mean by "invite"? What would that look like?
My perspective of designers and product managers is that they like to own projects. FOSS generally works based on merit, where you first contribute and members of the project decide whether to accept it.
For developers this is easy:
- Contribute code
- Code is accepted or rejected
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.
Project management is trickier because that requires buy-in from the devs. To get there, you need go earn their trust:
- help triage bugs (propose a severity system if there isn't one)
- help organize a roadmap
- do some leg work marketing whatever the project needs (go find designers if needed).
If you do a good job, they'll let you do the above more autonomously. But they're not just going to hand over decision-making to a rando off the street, especially since "they" can change day to day.
Developers don't like being told what to do (esp since it's usually a hobby), but they do want the project to be more successful. Designers and product managers are certainly welcome, but the onus is on any contributor to demonstrate the value they bring.
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This post is... Well a little lacking in my opinion. I am someone who believes that if we can't tolerate different opinions in different spaces that isn't a good way to engage in good faith anyway. While I like the fediverse. Example: Mastodon and Pixelfed. The platforms themselves isn't always the most user friendly and to me at least is a little lacking. I'm also confused as to why this post flat out doesn't mention bluesky as well but I digress. It's a very new thing to look at what social platform people use as a political statement. Of course we all know MAGA supporters use Truth Social and X (Twitter). At the end of the day when less and less people refuse to come to the table and find common ground the more violent and destructive the world is going to become. Violence only creates more violence. imo.
I am someone who believes that if we can't tolerate different opinions in different spaces that isn't a good way to engage in good faith anyway
So you've not been paying attention the last 20 years? Letting Nazis be Nazis on your platform just turns it into a Nazi platform
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What do you mean by "invite"? What would that look like?
My perspective of designers and product managers is that they like to own projects. FOSS generally works based on merit, where you first contribute and members of the project decide whether to accept it.
For developers this is easy:
- Contribute code
- Code is accepted or rejected
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.
Project management is trickier because that requires buy-in from the devs. To get there, you need go earn their trust:
- help triage bugs (propose a severity system if there isn't one)
- help organize a roadmap
- do some leg work marketing whatever the project needs (go find designers if needed).
If you do a good job, they'll let you do the above more autonomously. But they're not just going to hand over decision-making to a rando off the street, especially since "they" can change day to day.
Developers don't like being told what to do (esp since it's usually a hobby), but they do want the project to be more successful. Designers and product managers are certainly welcome, but the onus is on any contributor to demonstrate the value they bring.
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
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That's fine by me. I'm capable of ignoring that. Call me anything you want. Insult my family, my life, my person, my culture; I literally don't care. I'm either going to ignore you or respond accordingly. Let the extremist come in. Everyone that can't handle it is a weak wimp that isn't worthy of the free internet.
If they stay on the net fine, but no amount of tick skin n is bullet proof. Its not if but when those extremists move off line.
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Great read, thank you for sharing.
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I agree with the sentiment of this post. In fact, I was trapped (and extremely discontent) on Facebook for the first half of my digital-life; before finding open-source - and the rest is history.
I am afraid that we are not doing nearly enough however. This (like most things in this world) is a multilayered issue with no quick-fix, but the core of it is that many (and I mean MANY) of us are tech illiterate. Worse so, even more of us are math illiterate.
This generally means that most cannot cope with the current world we live in, and are experiencing extreme levels of inertia. I was here at one point, so I know how difficult this transition is.
An open web existing (on its own) won't do much - its the culture that needs to change. We need to be equipped to think, fight, and adapt - or our spaces won't survive. We are in a constant arms race with bad actors and ALL OF US need to be capable to win this fight. When the bots come to Lemmy (and they will), are most of us prepared to handle filter-lists, run servers, and potentially create a web-of-trust? I doubt this.
I would really like to see a return to real-life communication for most things (as humans are, from birth, well adapted to this) and the open-web only be used for automation and coordination. I think the most freedom comes from stability and the internet (in general) just does not offer that.
I think you're forgetting Lemmy already has a pretty high barrier to entry tech wise, I think most of us will be fine.
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I am someone who believes that if we can't tolerate different opinions in different spaces that isn't a good way to engage in good faith anyway
So you've not been paying attention the last 20 years? Letting Nazis be Nazis on your platform just turns it into a Nazi platform
Everything you're saying is just fear mongering in my opinion. Also bad faith as you only point out the most extreme examples right off the bat. I don't engage with extremism you ARE a part of the problem.
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Any great app on Android for mastodon?
check also here for more apps
https://joinmastodon.org/apps -
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.
Back in the old days, you could register an account without giving your phone number. Nowadays, pretty much all the big social medias won't let you register an account without a number. I guess that's not a big problem for people who don't care about privacy, but for me that's a total deal breaker.
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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
You make an excellent point, and I've never thought about it this way before.
Devs are not newbie friendly at all. We were all noobs at some point and (if we're being honest) remember the excruciating pain it took to become versed. Most people are not going to go through this, so FOSS naturally loses a lot of non-tech talent (including UX).
What I didn't think about is that there really isn't a way for UX people to contribute at all. GitHub Issues, at most, allows for people to make feature-requests - but beyond that it's just not viable.
For example, I am a UX designer and would like to contribute or iterate a layout. My demonstration includes several images and a video. First off, where do I do this? I could use GitHub Issues, but this is an extremely painful process that is likely far removed from my normal workflow. I could use YouTube, and then link on GitHub issues - but then I have to jump through several annoying hoops for a still sub-optimal workflow.
Git itself also has worked very poorly with binary files (png jpg mp3 wav...) until the recent advent of git-lfs. Binary iteration using base git is just a non-starter.
I am shocked to say it, but I cannot think of any development UI that is actually decent for non-tech people. If anyone does FOSS UX, and I am wrong about the tooling, please correct me.
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I think you're forgetting Lemmy already has a pretty high barrier to entry tech wise, I think most of us will be fine.
This is true, but only for now.
The point of decentralized social platforms is to eventually include everyone. This is not to say this is Lemmy's goal, but it is certainly the goal of its users. The tech-illiterate will show up en-masse (they always do) and what will be our answer for it? From what I see, we have none - this is no different than living on borrowed time.
We have to remember that "enshittification", before all else, is a cultural issue. When the people that have this culture arrive, the whole platform will suffer for it (hence what I said earlier). Humans are just better with dealing with this in real-life, but the internet poses a lot more challenges that I just do not think we are ready for.
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Everything you're saying is just fear mongering in my opinion. Also bad faith as you only point out the most extreme examples right off the bat. I don't engage with extremism you ARE a part of the problem.
No, they're completely right. Destructive, hateful opinions are not "just different opinions", they are actively destroying and bastardizing the discussions and making people feel unwelcome. They are not to be tolerated unless you want all normal people to leave and only the assholes to stay, just like what is happening with Twitter.
Fuck nazis and their sympathizers.
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Everything you're saying is just fear mongering in my opinion. Also bad faith as you only point out the most extreme examples right off the bat. I don't engage with extremism you ARE a part of the problem.
The problem is giving them a platform has let the extremists on the Right to come to power in the United States. Hearing differing opinions is one thing, tolerating the attacking of minorities and the destruction of a functioning government is another. How much debate are we supposed to engage in before we say enough is enough?
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This is true, but only for now.
The point of decentralized social platforms is to eventually include everyone. This is not to say this is Lemmy's goal, but it is certainly the goal of its users. The tech-illiterate will show up en-masse (they always do) and what will be our answer for it? From what I see, we have none - this is no different than living on borrowed time.
We have to remember that "enshittification", before all else, is a cultural issue. When the people that have this culture arrive, the whole platform will suffer for it (hence what I said earlier). Humans are just better with dealing with this in real-life, but the internet poses a lot more challenges that I just do not think we are ready for.
1: we've been waiting for the masses to arrive for about 2 years now, there was a peak, then a significant fall off
2: there is a solution, and we talk about it all the time: simplify onboardingI think you may just not be hanging around in the instance development and community servers if you're not seeing these conversations
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Back in the old days, you could register an account without giving your phone number. Nowadays, pretty much all the big social medias won't let you register an account without a number. I guess that's not a big problem for people who don't care about privacy, but for me that's a total deal breaker.
Yeah but who doesn’t have at least a cell phone these days (unless you’re making many accounts)? They’re useful for 2 factor authentication too.
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And you will be the one deciding what constitutes hate, whose voice to cut off?
It will be me. You have freedom of speech. I am also free to ignore, mock or ostracize you if you spout hateful nonsense near me.
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Yeah but who doesn’t have at least a cell phone these days (unless you’re making many accounts)? They’re useful for 2 factor authentication too.
Pretty much everyone has, but that's not the problem here. What if you don't really want to give them a unique identification number like that? What if you don't want them them to know you that well? What if you're not even planning to use your real name at all.
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You make an excellent point, and I've never thought about it this way before.
Devs are not newbie friendly at all. We were all noobs at some point and (if we're being honest) remember the excruciating pain it took to become versed. Most people are not going to go through this, so FOSS naturally loses a lot of non-tech talent (including UX).
What I didn't think about is that there really isn't a way for UX people to contribute at all. GitHub Issues, at most, allows for people to make feature-requests - but beyond that it's just not viable.
For example, I am a UX designer and would like to contribute or iterate a layout. My demonstration includes several images and a video. First off, where do I do this? I could use GitHub Issues, but this is an extremely painful process that is likely far removed from my normal workflow. I could use YouTube, and then link on GitHub issues - but then I have to jump through several annoying hoops for a still sub-optimal workflow.
Git itself also has worked very poorly with binary files (png jpg mp3 wav...) until the recent advent of git-lfs. Binary iteration using base git is just a non-starter.
I am shocked to say it, but I cannot think of any development UI that is actually decent for non-tech people. If anyone does FOSS UX, and I am wrong about the tooling, please correct me.
What's your normal workflow?
Our designers use Figma and send us a link so we can see the various user flows, leave comments, etc. It's not very FOSS-friendly though, but the workflow is pretty good.
Here are a few options that I think could work:
- wiki - many projects use them for documentation, and you can easily upload images and videos, track revisions, etc; can also be used for project management
- something self-hostable, like penpot - more UX-specific tools, but probably not what you're familiar with
- forum - similar features as GitHub issues!/discussions, but maybe less intimidating? Keeps GitHub focused on implementation details and less chatty
- something else?
What infra do you expect to be there before you jump in? I'm working on a project I'd like to unveil hopefully this year that could really benefit from UX, so I'm genuinely interested in figuring this out.
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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
Thanks for the video, it was great!
What frustrated me, though, was that she joined Bevy by keeping at it and going out of her way to prove her worth (i.e. the way devs get into projects), but then suggests devs go out of their way instead to attract project managers (and designers, presumably). That's not very fun to hear, but I guess that's the way it is.
there is a link to “GitHub” in the contact information.
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.
In general, I recommend coming with the intention of being assigned work ("I'm a UX designer and I'd love to help mock up stuff"), but also with ideas on how to improve what's there (e.g. "I found <X> frustrating and would love to show some mockups on how to improve it"). That's the ideal scenario IMO, because it offers to reduce work of existing maintainers without asking for anything in return.
However, that's apparently not happening.
Where’s the contributing guidelines for non-developers?
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?
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'm genuinely interested here because I'm hopefully going to launch a FOSS project this year, and I would like to facilitate that type of discussion, I just don't know how to do that effectively. To me, linking a chat and the repo is enough, but maybe it's not.
