[catapart]

I've used PeerTube for years and it has always baffled me how laughably bad its user experience is. Literally so bad that I've never told someone about it without them immediately just asking me stuff instead of getting the information - or even better: videos that the person wanted to see - from the website(s).

Maybe the mobile client is a step in the right direction? I can hope! But the fact that I have to tell people "okay, so sepiasearch is kind of like the youtube front page...ish?" is already just infinitely dumb. Make a damn client whose name indicates, in some way, that it's a video website. And then shows some damn videos on the front page. Randomize them if you really can't stand "algorithms", but honestly, just put some videos on a page with "videos" in the url (or something similar), and you can cut down on most of the confusion I've seen.

Engineers get so lost up their own asses about this stuff because they can't see that UX is entirely divorced from functional processes. The user needs to do thing X, and the computers can only provide processes Y, Z, etc; forcing the user to reconcile with Y and Z just because they want X is the definition of "programmer design". It's refusing to engage with the very real ways in which users understand and interact with services, for whatever sake the engineers want to make up ("I don't like to obfuscate what is happening", "this is not complicated. users should be able to understand", "it would waste resources to provide a more streamlined experience", etc. These are all terrible reasons to not bridge the interaction gap between developers and users). Bluesky is my favorite example of people abstracting away the complications of this stuff. Yes, they had to centralize some parts to start with, yes they had to compromise on features - but the damn thing is instantly recognizable to anyone familiar with microblog social media. That's all peertube has had to do for years now, and they have just staunchly refused to do it.

Like I said, hopefully the mobile app is their first steps in the right direction with this stuff. They've been doing the dev stuff - made it work, made it fast, made it good! Now they just need to do the user stuff - make it simple, make it familiar, make it accessible.

[api]

> Engineers get so lost up their own asses about this stuff because they can't see that UX is entirely divorced from functional processes.

This is one of the main reasons that open source has never penetrated beyond engineers, IT people, and computer hobbyists.

The problem is that when you are good at using computers it's not easy to see how unbelievably confusing they are to people who are not good at using them.

The other is that there's no funding system to pay people to do the not-fun parts of programming or to maintain the more user-facing aspects of projects.

[cosmic_cheese]

The crazy thing is that in many cases there isn’t even really much novel work required to end up with a user-friendly product. Devs can easily benefit from the vast amounts of time and money put into UX research by simply pattern-matching on the mountains of prior art now out there. It’s not like it’s still the early 80s where graphical UI is still in its infancy and there are no examples to follow.

[godelski]

  > This is one of the main reasons that open source has never penetrated beyond engineers, IT people, and computer hobbyists.

This is also the reason there's so many multimillion dollar businesses that are essentially front end interfaces to open source projects. Hell, how many for ffmpeg alone?

  > The other is that there's no funding system to pay people to do the not-fun parts of programming or to maintain the more user-facing aspects of projects.

I think there are plenty of people that make things looking nice. I do, but I hate web. Maybe this is why TUIs are taking off? But there definitely is a funding problem. My partner is doing a PhD in economics and whenever I talk to any of them about open source software, and how much of the world is dependent upon it, they get very confused and it's a lot of fun to see. I highly recommend (plus, I'd love to see the actually thinking about these kinds of frameworks. Clearly us devs haven't figured it out and it's worth asking for outside viewpoints)

[api]

For a while at least Apple was the most valuable company in the world, mostly on the back of caring a lot about UI/UX. Under the hood it’s just BSD and a bunch of services and libraries.

[godelski]

It's true. BUT I think they are currently making a fatal mistake. They are ever increasingly being hostile to devs and powerusers.

I see a lot of sentiment (including around these parts) that one should not care about those groups because they are a small percentage, but you could say that about any group. These groups definitely give your stuff a lot more value. I mean what is a smart phone with no apps? That's the real reason they took off. Arguably the same reason computers did too. Unless you really think you can do everything in house, then you need devs and power users (besides that it helps with finding bugs). You don't need to make the platforms geared towards them, but I think there is a difference when you start acting hostile. I mean isn't the reason Silicon Valley is full of macbooks in the first place is because mac felt more nix like and we could program on them more easily than windows? Seems short sighted.

Edit: fatal is too strong of a word. Google is doing it too and its monopoly behavior

[blackeyeblitzar]

The problem is all the competitors are also megacorps. Apple and Google and Microsoft are all hostile to power users in different ways. They can all make different fatal mistakes and it won’t matter because there is no real competition to this oligopoly in tech.

[godelski]

It’s why I made the edit. I still think it’ll end up being fatal in one way or another. Maybe someone can get past the excessive barrier. Or maybe because well behaving monopolies are less likely to get forcefully broken up. But yeah, we’re on the same page

[abnercoimbre]

Indeed. To this day, that's really all it is.

[adra]

I mean in reality, this is an excuse. We can and do build good software for many and all people, but the bad ones make it look like every engineer is out to lunch. Counterpoint, it's rarely an incentive to OSS software (individuals) to sit down with focus groups of early adopters to gather valuable feedback that can help iron out rough spots, so maybe a classic a little of A, a little of B here.