this post was submitted on 18 Mar 2022
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Asklemmy

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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?

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[โ€“] [email protected] 4 points 2 years ago (3 children)

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.

[โ€“] [email protected] 5 points 2 years ago (1 children)

What kinds of things would you want to be different in a system "embracing the strengths of decentralization"?

[โ€“] [email protected] 0 points 2 years ago (2 children)

Having an underlying design philosophy that emphasize the humane.

[โ€“] [email protected] 5 points 2 years ago (1 children)

@libre_warrior @triplenadir Could you be more specific? What exactly isn't humane in Lemmy's design?

[โ€“] [email protected] 1 points 2 years ago (2 children)

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.

[โ€“] [email protected] 1 points 2 years ago

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? ๐Ÿ˜‰

[โ€“] [email protected] 0 points 2 years ago

@libre_warrior In addition to my reply to another of your comments let me add

Justifications for design choices

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.

[โ€“] [email protected] 2 points 2 years ago

"We build software for humans"

[โ€“] [email protected] 2 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (1 children)

Design around human connectedness, community building, community collaboration, accessability (even for technically illiterate), detoxing.

excuse my ignorance, but how is Lemmy not doing this already?

[โ€“] [email protected] -1 points 2 years ago (1 children)

Because you cant just copy paste a centralized platform and expect that the design reflects the humane.

[โ€“] [email protected] 1 points 2 years ago

@libre_warrior @salarua You seem to both say that

  • Reddit is not humane because it is centralized
  • decentralizing a Reddit-like platform doesn't make it humane

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?

[โ€“] [email protected] 1 points 2 years ago (1 children)

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.

[โ€“] [email protected] 2 points 2 years ago (1 children)

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.

[โ€“] [email protected] 1 points 2 years ago

@libre_warrior @altair222

The offline people.

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?