The Bard in Green

Back in the day I had like five Reddit accounts. I still log into one of them sometimes (no it’s not my main one, that one turned into obscene invitations for u/spez to bugger himself with a hot poker, I’m not exaggerating).

I read a really good article recently about how people from different generations process information differently and so their UI preferences are wildly different.

The gist of it was

• A Boomer walks into a bookstore to buy a book. They feel overwhelmed by the sheer amount of books. There are too many ads for books, so they tune them all out. They choose one by an author they know, that their friends said was good.
• A Gen Xer / Millennial walks into a bookstore to buy a book. They check the various authors they like, check that the cover art is appealing and read the backs of the different books, figuring out which one they want to read, then they buy that one.
• A Zoomer walks into a bookstore to buy a book. They feel overwhelmed by the sheer amount of books, and feel bombarded by the ads for books. They check the authors the influencers they subscribe to on Youtube and Tik Tok say are good. They grab one of those based on the color of the cover, ignore the back and the cover art, flip it open to a random page, read that page and if what they read grabs their their attention they buy that book, but if it doesn’t, they move on.

As a result, each of these people will prefer to interact with vastly different UX.

Of course these aren’t hard and fast rules, set in stone and there are tons of exceptions, but it’s a definite trend.

The Lemmy demographic skews hard to the older Millennial / Gen X demographic and is mostly people who were on reddit 15+ years ago. It’s UI appeals to those people.

Even if so, they may see that as a plus. Twitter survived the massive cutting / culture change that Elon brought to it (as a gross little shadow of it’s formal self, but the vultures don’t care).

I was once a Facebook using programmer guy like you, then I took an arrow to the knee did some work for Meta and got a close up and personal look at their internal culture. It beyond pissed me off and creeped me out. I just couldn’t.

Now, people have to text me to invite me to events and parties and stuff. I don’t know what’s going on with major chunks of my friends group half the time. I have to get my news and gossip the old fashioned way.

Before my Meta subcontractor experience, I spoke like you. But after, I don’t even miss it. Thinking about logging on to Facebook is like fingernails on a chalk board.

I do run an instance, but I don’t use Cloudflare, so I’m not sure I can be much help.

I think you badly misunderstood my take.

JoA never killed anybody. She just went into battle. Many people also believe Saint Patrick committed genocide against the druids in Ireland, but this is an historical myth, originating from the speculation of Elizabethan era scholars. The actual historical record only supports him preaching in Ireland, not being violent (plenty of the people who listened to him were THEN violent).

However, there are a bunch of saints who led armies (or were just soldiers) during the crusades, at least one saint who was a Viking leader who then converted and helped to (violently) Christianize the Nordic countries (Saint Olaf of Norway), and Saint Peter of Verona was an inquisitor who zealously hunted heretics in Northern Italy in the 1200s (very likely ALSO a torturer in addition to a murderer).

Fun fact: if you think that ppl sticking to old designs is silly, Panasonic has a whole $$ niche in Japan selling modern-internal, vintage-external laptops with DVD drives and old-style keyboards. https://old.reddit.com/r/thinkpad/v0t06p literally has both a VGA and a thunderbolt lol

Just in Japan?? I’ll buy one of these right now!

I love the Lemmy UI.

But I’m a gen Xer.

There’s some great analysis floating around of how different generations actually interpret UIs (and make decisions about how or whether to engage with them) very differently. So there is no “one size fits all” that will make everybody happy. Change the Lemmy UI to something like Photon and I’d be like… “this is dumb.” Making a bunch of very different options is a lot of work. If you want to do it… no one is stopping you. The Lemmy project is opensource and you could go start contributing and making pull requests today. You could go run your own instance and make it look like whatever you want and get the average redditors to join that. I run my own instance. We have a whole two users. It works exactly the way I want it to and federates with exactly who I want it to.

Frankly, I’m not sure Lemmy needs to go out of it’s way to appeal to the average redditor in order to have a thriving, healthy community. Sure, there are some things I miss about having a giant user base to engage with, but honestly, I’ll trade them for the MUCH MUCH lower toxicity. I don’t know that “growing Lemmy” should be our focus. It’s not like we’re getting paid.

Better name than X.