Big Tech Wants You Trapped. The Open Web Sets You Free
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enshittification. Reddit , mozilla and tiktok has recently joined the ranks/.
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Totally agree. These platforms have no discussion culture. They are only designed to gain followers. This means only polarizing content of a very small group of users gets attention and all the rest is not even visible to other people.
Reddit or Lemmy is very different in that sense. Even a new user can start a rich discussion because of subs/communities and without the need of followers. Thus the quality of the whole network is overall better.reddit was different, now its extremely hard to even comment, let alone mod or start a sub .
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Typically if you're gonna deploy a bunch of bots on lemmy, it's easiest to do via your own instance, which is fairly easy to filter out.
Luckily the federated aspect will help with this a little bit.
its nice it wont spread like cancer, like with reddit, wheres its mostly political botting by RU.
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Yeah though I think it's a little bit too political at times. I get it, Trump and Musk is destroying the USA from within, but I don't need to read about it in every second post...
thats what reddit has become, even worst they allow the con sub to be on the front page all the time.
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There's plenty of good, open source UX in FOSS. Have you seen the Gnome family of apps? They look great and are easy to understand.
They're also pretty light on features, and GNOME itself is quite foreign for new users.
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But that's the problem though, devs are notoriously bad at UX, and people good at UX don't seem to care as much about FOSS and the open web. At least that's my experience.
So we need people to speak out so devs can fix these little paper cuts in UX
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.
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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.
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And the extremism follow.
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.
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That hasn’t been true for a long time. Filtering bots has increasingly become more difficult, expensive, and sophisticated. Not to mention that there are still plenty of state sponsored bad actors using real people and hybrid approaches.
What's your solution to that? Not filtering out bots? Or manually moderating? The latter is even more expensive.
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What's your solution to that? Not filtering out bots? Or manually moderating? The latter is even more expensive.
Your proposal is equivalent to just letting bots completely control the internet. It kills it. We either want an internet or we don’t.
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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.
