Money presumably. It's a lot easier to get a good design for your site or app if you have a decent amount of money to pay professional designers. Which most open source foundations and charitable organisations don't have.
Edit: Though I guess it could also be because a lot of alternative software and services are created by people with a 'hacker' or 'programmer' mindset, where very little attention is paid to the UX and everything is focused on the features/tech stack. They're the same people who seem to think IRC, email lists and newsgroups have decent UI.
Exactly! We agree that email and newsgroups do not have the most useful or accessible UI, and aim to offer a much better design. Needless to say, our design is constantly improving.
Not the parent, but I have two specific suggestions about the on boarding process.
One, please add a directory (feed?) of public conversations that can be viewed without logging in. I want to see how the platform is used by other people and whether that fits me - but if you ask me to create an account first, I'm going to bounce.
Two, here on HN you say the team is mostly cog sci and engg people, which sounds awesome and piques my curiosity about why you made this. But the web site itself doesn't mention that, or anything about the people behind it. Please add an 'about the team' page so that I can understand more about the people who are inviting me to use their platform.
We have been thinking carefully about whether to include a public conversation feed. Public communications are not Lyra's central use case, and as most conversations are private at the moment, such a feed would be quite sparse.
As a nonprofit which is not funded by advertising, it is not our main goal to support viewers without an account. There is no charge to sign up.
If you’re trying to be a new alternative to Big Social, you should aim to be better or at the very least more interesting than the competition. There’s no way your network can be THE network for all people but you’ve gotta get them in the door. Good design goes a long way, the bare minimum is MEH.
A quest to remain "more interesting" leads to constantly changing platforms, dark patterns, and intrusive notifications. A useful and effective platform enables communication in a reliable and stable way.
Thanks for your comments; we are very open to any more specific or detailed feedback on improving the platform.
Mmm, no. I don't think it should be a "quest". That's what Facebook is doing and I've never heard an FB user say they like any change that gets made.
I don't have any specific feedback about your platform (heck, I'm building my own social network at the moment), but I will say that your site is VERY text-heavy. I've seen your other comments about the common person not wanting to create a Mastodon instance and while I agree with you, the common person also doesn't want to wade through an essay just to find out what you're promoting.
Simple and Stripe are great examples of sites that have a LOT of text but it's designed in a way to make it not look tedious to peruse.
Lyra values language and aims to be an effective tool for large conversations; we're not worried about large amounts of text. We especially don't want to patronise users by hiding or folding up messages which they have taken time to write.
Huh? What does making your site less cluttered have to do with patronizing users and/or hiding their messages? Sounds like you're so wrapped up in Lyra land that everything you do is awesome.
Edit: Though I guess it could also be because a lot of alternative software and services are created by people with a 'hacker' or 'programmer' mindset, where very little attention is paid to the UX and everything is focused on the features/tech stack. They're the same people who seem to think IRC, email lists and newsgroups have decent UI.