you’re right, my initial reply was harsh, i wish i had waited a bit longer before replying. i hope my points won’t get lost in the rant because i stand by them. i really wish this enthusiasm was spent on other hurdles rather than chasing big monoliths. i don’t want to curb enthusiasm, just move it elsewhere
So let me get this straight. Are you really saying “we the developers are going to build this however we see fit, and you the user can go fuck yourself, or else learn how to code and build it yourself”?
you’re putting it in rather extreme terms, but yes. even if you were completely right in your opinions, the person investing their free time to do work and sharing freely the result is entitled to work as greatly or badly as they like
Don’t like the feedback? Great, feel free to ignore it, or tell me why I’m wrong
honestly yes I’m doing exactly this: I’m ignoring your suggestion and telling you why i think you’re wrong. i also shared some of my reasoning behind which i think is still valid, and i will reiterate it
This alternative has existed for a long time, but still has a fraction of the users as other alternatives out there. Aren’t you at least curious as to why that is?
not at all because i know a good reason for it: fediverse doesn’t scale well if expected to replicate fully and be a “central plaza”. every server owning every post from billions of users is a very prohibitive design, especially if you expect self-hosters funded by their wallet or donations
i really think we should try to change how we do social media, not make the same thing again. if you just want that, atproto is likely more fitting, AP is decentralized, not distributed! things like nomadic identity would make the “server issue” obsolete. replies collections permit on-demand fetching of replies. activity signing and forwarding could provide real network-wide broadcasts
if we’re cooking ramen, we appreciate knowing if it’s too salty or bland. coming to complain about ramen not tasting like burgers, and proposing to add some ketchup, is useless at best, a bit disrespectful at worst
this feels useless at best and entitled at most: if you want these, get working. this is not reddit or Facebook: there is no profit or product, nobody is making money and no money is being spent on development or making sure your requests are met. all the time you spent writing this or replying could have been spent actually researching the app. not a dev? not entitled to complain
simplify user sign ups
you’re basically proposing a centralized service over a decentralized network. who runs that service? how is it guaranteed fair? which servers should be in the pool? what if a server is worse than another spec-wise? what if the assigned server shuts down? the solution to the server issue is you picking a server for your non techie friends, not cooking more centralized complexity on top.
polish/add functionalities
if you really want features developed, make a bounty! pay developers! expecting others to work for your appeasement for free is distastefully entitled. or do it yourself. as you can probably assess, expertise and free time don’t grow on trees.
how to attract more users
i think most of this disconnect stems from you wanting this to be just like big centralized services. it’s honestly delusional. in another reply you state that “lemmy.world couldn’t handle 10M users”. maybe, but decentralization is only going to make it worse. every lemmy server needs to broadcast every action to every other server which has users in that community. every post and like needs to be stored in all relevant instance dbs. this generates an insane amount of traffic and data. if the lemmy network suddenly gained 1000 servers, each with 10k users, the new replication traffic may stomp smaller instances to the ground.
the idea of a “global square” is naive and we should move over. it just limits us all because a platform which caters to everyone must be built around the common ground, and the common ground for everyone isn’t that much ground. a platform that caters to everyone caters to no-one: see mainstream social media and how it’s going. fedi is great because it’s a whole different model: small islands which can interconnect. this is why picking a server is so important and you should not hide it from the user: you’re not signing up to mastodon, you’re signing up to furry.engineer or fosstodon! you can interact with the other instance just fine, but it matters where you register!
this is the core of the disconnect: we should not bend the fediverse to what mainstream social media is, we should either teach others about this or be fine living as a niche. auto enshittifying ourselves hoping to be another facebook or another reddit feels really silly to me
honestly hashtags is 100% lemmy’s fault: groups/communities are “audience” AP field, lemmy some time ago aiming to be “more compatible with mastodon” made it so that posts in communities get automatically added an hashtag, and hashtags get sent into communities. this is honestly stupid and should be undone, you’d better aim your anger at lemmy devs.
regarding mentions, Twitter-like software needs them for addressing: lemmy implies that replies are addressed to replied-to user, other software doesn’t (you may want to contribute to a conversation without mentioning user directly above). if they don’t mention, you don’t see it, you’ll have to just deal with this. you could cook yourself a client that finds mentions in object “tag” and removes them from the body itself if you care this much