Before the site has given me any reason to join, it makes me choose between 7 virtually indistinguishable options of providers with subtle technical advantages and disadvantages.
Ah, GNU projects. Never change.
Ah, GNU projects. Never change.
Some people need others to think for them. Some people like to make their own decisions. GNU is for the latter ones. GNU has always been freedom of choice.
Design is overrated. Functionality and reliability are more important. Even Apple has to admit that.
If you are presented with 6 choices and you cannot reasonably tell the difference between them without spending 15-30 minutes researching all of the options, you have a bad user experience.
Design is important. People like using things that look good.
UX is vital. If a user can't figure out how to navigate through an app in a reasonable amount of time without a great deal of existing knowledge (which they may not even know where to find), your app sucks. People, even technical ones, will abandon it, even if it is more reliable and has more features than the next guy. Making things that are intuitive is really difficult. That is why people get advanced degrees in it and start consultancies that specialize in it. Usability does not just stop at GUIs on your laptop, but also jet fighter cockpits, vending machines, ATMs etc... Think about this, what good is a jet fighter if nobody can actually fly it?
That is not even to begin talking about how people with low vision can operate things. WCAG exists for a reason.
Bottom line... usability is really important.
Having watched kids, teens, and 20-somethings, I've concluded that "a reasonable amount of time" to them is something on the order of 5 seconds on the outside. On a PC, they might look around and thoughtfully click on things. On a tablet or phone app, they just mash their fingers for about 3 seconds, then if they haven't seen something, move on.
This even extends to 20-somethings and game controllers. I've seen 20-somethings walk up to an 80's emulated arcade game, waggle the sticks on a controller for 2 seconds, not understand why the screen was shaking, then walk away.
> If you are presented with 6 choices and you cannot reasonably tell the difference between them without spending 15-30 minutes researching all of the options, you have a bad user experience.
That's the price for freedom of choice. If you are not willing to invest some time to choose than others will force you on their ways to go. This spares you some time but at the end it costs you much more because you have to give up your privacy at FB etc.
There are many more than seven existing servers. Consumer choice is a good thing. User confusion less so.
If people are not willing to invest five minutes or so what to choose then they should stick with FB and Twitter where they don't think about the consequences of releasing all their private data anyway.
I'm delighted that there is a general network of users, but that's not why I started it.
Currently, the only fix is to create a brand new account on a different federation and start again.
There isn't really any "different federation". You just follow whoever you want to follow, regardless of what server they're on.
You have to start from scratch.
I can't even.
I guess there's a certain logic behind it, then -- but as a name that (1) creates a positive emotional feeling and (2) is intuitively obvious, it falls very short.
I'm not sure if the founders of email would care for names like Thunderbird and Icedove, but you'd have to ask them.
what lessons can we learn from slack vs irc? from whatsapp vs email? from usenet vs reddit? etc.
WhatsApp is SMS, isn't it?
But GNU social isn't a product. If you want to take it, add your own interface, marketing, etc... I think you'd have a product.
https://git.gnu.io/gnu/gnu-social
Then again, you're right... some things never change.
This is not a "blame the people who complain for not contributing" thing. This is a "the people who are presenting the project are doing a horrible job of it."
I think there's a misunderstanding in this submission, and perhaps around the project in general. The goal of the project isn't to provide a social network, or to provide an alternative to Twitter, but rather to provide some software that can be used for a bunch of things, and using it instead of Twitter is a subset of that.
I chose the name because I didn't want people to think of it as a "GNU social network" (GNUbook, GNUspace, etc) but rather just software that could be used to enable communication between people.
Some people have made interfaces for it that mimic Twitter, and a lot of people are using it for that kind of communication, but I don't think the project website has to make it easy for people who want to quit Twitter to use GNU social, but we can certainly point people at servers and interfaces that do that job.
People who just want twitter should just get that.
Do we just flip through a big list and show one per page load?
Right now you have "Join the federated social web No matter which server you're on, you're part of the family!" which mentions 'federated social web' - a term most potential users probably aren't familiar with; and 'family' which doesn't have a very specific definition (i.e. is it part of the same family just because you're running the same software or does this imply a greater connection between the different servers - my understanding is that it's the second, but I'm not really sure)
I would suggest adding more info such as "You can join any server and still follow people on separate servers. Once you have an understanding of how the system works you may want to start your own server so that you can choose your own settings and have complete control of your own data!"
Also, the home page is very sparse on info. IMO the 'What is GNU Social' section shouldn't start with info about the StatusNet project, since anyone new to GNU social wouldn't know what that is. It should be something like "GNU Social is a free and open source social network (i.e. a replacement for Facebook/Twitter). It is a protocol that allows anyone to run their own server (or join someone else's!) and connect to people around the world. You can have control of your own data and the communication is as secure as you make it!" and then you can add the other info.
Some other suggestions:
The about page doesn't really say anything about what GNU Social actually is, it's just a history. The FAQ page should be linked, or included in the same page.
The FAQ page is pretty sparse and still doesn't tell much about what it actually is used for. And given the sparsity of the rest of the site, I would suggest including the FAQ page as a top level header, rather than under Resources. And a few more suggestions on questions:
"What does the federated social web mean? - It means you can run your own server and connect to other people with their own servers" or something along those lines
"How do I choose which server to join?" - You can join any server and still connect to people on separate servers, or you can start your own server!
"How do I install it myself??" - link to the install info
Also, I just clicked through to the git page, and the info you have there is a much better intro imo: "It helps people in a community, company or group to exchange short status updates, do polls, announce events, or other social activities (and you can add more!). Users can choose which people to "follow" and receive only their friends' or colleagues' status messages. It provides a similar service to sites like Twitter, Google+ or Facebook, but is much more awesome."
We're looking at revamp of our site, and this will be good feedback for that.
http://www.skilledtests.com/wiki/List_of_Independent_Statusn...