I wanted to get a pulse check on how new members are finding the general experience/website. Is it more confusing than Reddit or are you finding the instance system a better way of doing things as it can give you more freedom of where you choose to create an account?

I’m a new user myself but have found the experience to remind me of Reddit back in the day, lol. It’s definitely giving me old-school yet modern vibes and it’s great to see something that isn’t Reddit growing in popularity!

  • haganbmj@lemmy.mlEnglish
    5·
    1 year ago

    Feels very early. The site design needs quite a bit of work.

    • The usual confusion on fediverse domain boundaries and usage. Seems very easy to accidentally route to another server rather than viewing that content within the current server (community/user links).
    • Doesn’t retain sort/filter options on the home feed. I get that the default is local to promote some growth, but when I switch to subscribed I want it to stay that way.
    • Excess visual space, cluttered design with avatars and community icons and excess padding. It falls into some of the traps that make me despise the reddit redesign.
    • Strange prioritization of elements; visual emphasis on features that seem pretty niche or obvious (crosspost, tooltip text post preview, comment language, usernames), while more important elements get dwarfed or lost in the noise (timestamps, comment delineation + nesting).
    • Live reloads are confusing and would be nice to be able to disable.
    • There’s a real lack of dom class tagging that would make it easier for me to remedy some of those issues with custom css and the number of !important definitions doesn’t inspire confidence.
    • Ultimately the above are all things that can be worked out. If the core systems work well enough then the design is something that can be augmented. I’ve had some navigation issues (including a page that wouldn’t load because it received a malformed json response from internal service), but the core functionality seems to be mostly there. Whether it’ll hold up to more load we’ll have to see.