It’s a really cool technology, but the main problem is that letting people around the world inspect and verify just isn’t needed in most use cases. It does a great job at removing the central source of truth, but rarely does anyone explain what the problem with a central source of truth was. Especially when you’re talking about a company setting, startups don’t want to build open source software without a source of truth, they want to be the source of truth
From a design perspective it still has a lot of friction on signups though, we’re asking users to make a server choice before they even remotely understand what that entails. That simple decision made me spend a week understanding the fediverse before settling on Lemm.ee, but the average user won’t do that, they’ll get confused and then leave.
From a more traditional UX standpoint the general feed is also fairly bad, reddit has built in feeds for the things people care the most about (trending and subscribed) that pop up by default when opening the app or website, and gives the advanced controls off to the side. Lemmy on the other hand defaults to a feed that shows basically nothing, and only gives the advanced controls to fix it. For a new user that isn’t tech savvy, the fact that the feed defaults to local is enough to make Lemmy seem completely dead if they happened to join a small instance.
These aren’t major issues for us, but they are major issues for widespread adoption. It needs to be so easy that you can use it accidentally, and the UX isn’t there yet. I’m sure we can fix issues with the feed and the app, but I do worry that the server choice problem isn’t going to get a good solution
LG had some phones like that in 2016ish, on the G5 the entire bottom of the phone slid out to reveal a big battery slot and on the V20 there was a button that let the metal back of the phone pop off so you could change the battery. I had an external battery charger and a couple of spare batteries for my V20, so I could just pack spare batteries and swap them whenever it got low. I never even bothered to plug my phone in, it was always just faster to pop in a battery that was already fully charged. It didn’t have any water resistance, but it was a pretty small price to pay for endless battery life
It’s a shame that LG’s whole phone division went under, because they were making some of the coolest phones that came out that whole decade
Tesla adding CCS as an option at superchargers would have been good, but unless they actually switched connectors on their cars it never would have led to long term consolidation. For better or worse, tesla has 3x the US market share of the rest of the EV manufacturers combined, so no solution could ever be a universal standard without their support. In practical terms, this move means that we’re closer to a universal standard than we’ve ever been, we’re going to have 95% of cars and a majority of charging infrastructure all use one plug. Once we get to that point, there’s no chance anyone else will use CCS, nobody else has the influence necessary to keep it alive
This looks great, I’ll definitely be trying it once it’s out. It seems like you’ve got plenty of things to work on, but if I could suggest one extra thing that jerboa is missing, see if you can add the ability to swipe between posts while you’re in the comments. Sometimes I just want to swipe through every post in my feed instead of picking the posts I wanted to open
Fundamentally the risk to the community is similar, all it takes is for an instance administrator to decide to nuke the community and there’ll be nothing we can do about it. But unlike on Reddit, there’s no single administrator that can nuke every piracy community. There will always be a piracy community somewhere on Lemmy, even if it isn’t this one
Honestly, the fact that apple used usb-c on it’s “pro” iPads but not the regular iPad is all the proof we need that even apple thinks usb-c is better