I was wondering what the point of lemmy was, if we can’t get a certain number of people, we won’t be able to thrive as a community and I don’t see lots of people joining even though it is an open-source and decentralised forum unlike reddit.
There are many obvious things lemmy could do better, should I make a report about it? I think we are lagging behind and not doing things which are obvious. A better GUI for mobile website would be one of the top suggestions I have. thoughs?
No, because its just a copy. Lemmy just takes reddit and slaps decentralization on top of it. Therefore it has the baggage of walled garden philosophy.
Something that would replace reddit is a platform that is willing to embrace the strengths of decentralization and truely design around its strengths. Design around human connectedness, community building, community collaboration, accessability (even for technically illiterate), detoxing.
What kinds of things would you want to be different in a system “embracing the strengths of decentralization”?
Having an underlying design philosophy that emphasize the humane.
@libre_warrior @triplenadir Could you be more specific? What exactly isn’t humane in Lemmy’s design?
Justifications for design choices, backed up by principles that creates the foundation for a humane platform. There needs to be a justification for how a platform is presented like it is. What is the purpose of the platform? Who is the target audience? And build everything from there.
This is helpful. There’s also the ethical.net definition of “humane technology”. It would be amazing for someone to do some user research, or a usability study. Are you volunteering? 😉
@libre_warrior In addition to my reply to another of your comments let me add
The justification for a design doesn’t matter as much as the result itself. Just because something wasn’t built thinking about the usecase you have in mind doesn’t mean it cannot fit that purpose.
“We build software for humans”
excuse my ignorance, but how is Lemmy not doing this already?
Because you cant just copy paste a centralized platform and expect that the design reflects the humane.
@libre_warrior @salarua You seem to both say that
To me this does not make any sense. Which features of Lemmy do you think make it not humane? Wouldn’t a clone of Lemmy stripped off of these features be a humane software?
There isn’t really a walled garden philosophy here given that you can choose open instances to join and interact with other instances at ease too.
I agree, lemmy is not a walled garden. What I’m saying is, lemmy is lacking an underlying design philosophy. Design should be guided by principles, rather than replicating the feel of reddit. Functionality should be created to serve human needs rather than from trying to replicate reddit functionality.
We shouldn’t look to the people of cyberspace to understand how to develop platforms, especially not the centralized parts of cyberspace. Instead we should look to the people of earthspace. The offline people. People and communities. What do they want? Or what do they say they want?
To be clear this is a criticism not targeted specifically at Lemmy, but the fediverse as a whole.
@libre_warrior @altair222
The online people are the only one that are going to use it too. I would think that the purpose of humane social media would be to liberate people from too much online activity, rather trapping even more people into it, no?