• h14h@midwest.social
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    1 year ago

    This kind of gatekeeping and elitism is bad for Lemmy and for FOSS.

    It makes this community a less welcoming place and leaves new folks with a bad first impression. Much better to be welcoming and let people learn/see the benefits of FOSS at their own pace.

    • dzonc@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      I’d given up on lemmy because every so I had tried was unfinished and unpolished. I tried sync and finally felt like the user experience wasn’t getting in the way of content.

      I’d love to support foss, if a genuinely comparable experience existed.

      I’m glad to say that sync has revived my interest in lemmy.

      • machinaeZER0@lemm.ee
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        1 year ago

        You should check out Thunder, even if you gave it a try at some point - it’s super polished and it’s gotten even better week after week. In my opinion it has the best compact mode of all the lemmy clients, as long as you don’t mind swipe actions!

        • thimantha@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          I was using Thunder last week until Sync’s open beta got approved and the User Experience and the interface of Thunder is nowhere near Sync. It’s a night and day difference, and a difference that would have made me use Lemmy less and less.

          • machinaeZER0@lemm.ee
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            1 year ago

            Thunder is like a month old - it’s still growing and will continue to improve with the community’s help :) if you think anything could be improved, definitely shout it out on the GitHub page!

            • thimantha@lemmy.world
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              1 year ago

              I understand that it’s new, and it is definitely the best FOSS Lemmy app out of the dozens that I used. But it has a very long way to go to achieve the same level of User Experience that Sync has. It’s not even close and I don’t think anything bar a major UI/UX rehaul could fix that.

        • xenspidey@lemmy.zip
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          1 year ago

          Not OP, but I’ve tried thunder. It’s OK. Sync is light years above all other clients I’ve tried. (same with reddit as well) swipe actions? Sync is the king of swipe actions.

          • machinaeZER0@lemm.ee
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            1 year ago

            I mostly meant if OP was interested in FOSS :) Sync has been fine too in my short time with it today, but personally I’m still quite taken with Thunder. Excited that all the Sync fans are excited!

      • Zalack@startrek.website
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        1 year ago

        IMO FOSS has really great offerings when it comes to libraries or other highly technical code.

        But something about either the community or incentive structure results in sub-par UI/UX. Obviously not a rule, but definitely a trend I’ve noticed.

        • Meloku@lemmy.zip
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          1 year ago

          Don’t forget the community’s reaction to comments like yours, why down vote him if he’s stating the obvious? FOSS projects often focus so much on technical features because everyone wants to flex their code-fu, but nobody gives enough time to UI/UX. Just look at pretty much every Lemmy web frontend, fugly webpages with early 2000s look-and-feel, usually slow and/or buggy, and with little to no user feedback.

        • Khotetsu@lib.lgbt
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          1 year ago

          I’ve seen it for years and years now, and I can only conclude that it’s down to the kinds of people who are attracted by these kinds of projects.

          They’re tech literate at a professional level by necessity in order to engage with these things at an early time in their development, and this seems to drive a mentality that makes UX design kind of an afterthought, since they already know how to do the things they want the software to do, and they’re not focused on how less tech literate users will handle it.

          Then you add in the small minority of gatekeepers that wind up in every community, who feel that a larger, more generalized userbase would be invading their niche community, and you end up with stuff like the Linux forums where asking a simple question would get you a series of remarks that essentially boil down to “go fuck yourself, you should know how to do it already.”

          I feel like the people concerned with UI/UX come into these kinds of projects later on after they’ve matured a little, rather than right from start, and this causes resistance to their changes because the userbase is already entrenched in the current UX, especially from the gatekeeper folk in the community who see a higher tech literacy threshold as a good thing.

          • Zalack@startrek.website
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            1 year ago

            That’s very subjective. I have yet to find a Linux desktop I like as much as MacOS, especially when it comes to WACOM drivers. The stylus response time/curve almost always feels wrong.

            Also, I’ve worked with designers who can get something that looks and feels fully professional on a first pass, so it’s not just newness for Lemmy.

      • penfore@lemmy.world
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        2 months ago

        It’s been one year of this conversation, but I just found it now.

        Sync has also made me use Lemmy more often, but I was still missing a good web environment until recently when I started using photon. It is the best web experience I had using Lemmy and now I’m using as a progressive web app.

        Photon repository here! Give it a star or start contributing to it.

    • DigitalPortkey@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      This is why I unsubscribed from the Android community. I love Android, I use nothing but Linux at home and really appreciate open source software.

      But the FOSS…enthusiasm is starting to border on zealotry. It’s getting really unpleasant.

        • Resistentialism@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          I had to leave the Linux memes community because I swear nearly every post was shitting on Windows. Yes, I get it. Windows isn’t all that great. But, much like Ios, it just works for what I need. And I haven’t had any issues that weren’t ny fault with it.

          If the game I play most, and the number one reason why i go on my pc, works on Windows, but won’t work on Linux. Which OS is better for me?

          I thought all this software war crap era was over. That was shit I cared about when I was 14 or something. Just let it herself use what they want and explain the benefits of alternatives, only if they care.

        • rbits@lemm.ee
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          1 year ago

          I use Linux as my daily driver, yet I 100% believe Linux is overrated. It’s great if you’re willing to put in the work to get it working well, or maybe if you have someone else to do all your tech support for you, but it’s just not a good option for the majority of people.

          I hate when people keep trying to push it on Windows users, especially when they go on about how “easy” it is. It’s not. And doing that will get people to try it out with high expectations and then get disappointed when they try it out and that’s not the case.

          • Rodeo@lemmy.ca
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            1 year ago

            I honestly feel like people who say this stuff either haven’t tried Linux since 2008 or went straight to Arch.

            I use Manjaro as my daily driver and I never need to fix the system. It really does just work, and these a bunch of disyros out there that do.

            The only thing you might find terrible is trying to run windows programs on Linux, to which I say: dual boot! Even with all the progress Proton, Lutris etc. have made, it’s still way easier to just boot into windows on the occasion you want to play games or whatever.

          • DigitalPortkey@lemmy.world
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            1 year ago

            This drives me nuts. I like Chrome. It’s simple, it’s fast, the extensions I want run on it (for now), and I love the Google Account Sync because I have an Android phone. This greatly pisses off people for whatever reason, despite the fact I’ve never had a bad opinion about Firefox and love what they’re doing too, and I never criticize anyone for choosing Firefox.

            As with everything open source communities need nuance and understanding, otherwise they start to feel like cults.

            • Misconduct@lemmy.world
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              1 year ago

              For whatever reason? They’re trying to DRM the internet lol. You’re certainly entitled to your opinion but there are some pretty big reasons to be mad at Google on a good day. Nobody should take that out on you but I understand the frustration. People letting things slide because it doesn’t bother them specifically until it’s too late is how everything keeps getting worse.

    • Poggervania@kbin.social
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      1 year ago

      100% agree. Going “haha, aren’t I COOL for NOT using this one popular app or software!?” contributes absolutely nothing and actively makes the community uninviting. I’m all for FOSS, but if a closed-source app is better than the FOSS options, I ain’t gonna knock on anybody for using it.

      Also why even use an app outside of accessibility reasons? Been using Kbin on a mobile browser and it’s been a pretty good experience.

    • snor10@lemm.ee
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      1 year ago

      I don’t understand how promoting FOSS in favor of proprietary software is bad for FOSS?

      • Meloku@lemmy.zip
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        1 year ago

        This is not promoting FOSS. This is mocking closed-source/paid Lemmy clients.

    • StaySquared@lemmy.world
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      8 months ago

      Dood the automod is wild… people getting banned for, “suspicious activity”… and then there’s no way to ask the mods why the ban.