we already collectively dislike a substantial number of 0.18+'s UI decisions, most of which are minor but are already adding up to be that much more annoying collectively. maybe we can sand some of these off with theming in the future. for now though please hang with this and petition them to merge better decisions in the future, thanks
This post makes the Beehaw admins look really bad, to be honest. Personally, I had not even really noticed any big differences, so if you hadn’t told me I wouldn’t even know about them. The small differences that I did notice seem like improvements to me.
However, this post seems to be needlessly criticizing the Lemmy devs without any actual constructive feedback. The post is nothing more than “We would like to make you aware that the experience got worse and you SHOULD BLAME the devs!!” to me. It doesn’t help anybody. It just makes you look very unprofessional, entitled and will damage your relation with the Lemmy devs. If you can’t code and improve Lemmy yourself that way, that’s totally fine. Don’t like an update? That fine too! But if you want to be actually helpful and have your voice heard, go to Lemmy’s Github page and give the devs constructive feedback. Report bugs when you run into issues or do a feature request for changes you’d like to see. Enter discussions about other bugs/requests. There are so many things you could do without the need to be a programmer.
But don’t post a vague complaint to your community, pointing fingers and hoping to get more people angry to pressure the devs into what you want. I came to Beehaw because it promised to be a safespace. A positive place. The fact that an admin posted this complaint here doesn’t reflect that idea at all to me.
I really hope you guys can see why this behaviour is not desirable and a one-time thing. Otherwise, I can’t keep supporting Beehaw and would have to leave the instance for another, which would be a shame.
What makes this further interesting is that the lemmy back end and front end are actually two different stacks so theoretically anyone can make a front end to their liking.
How is that interesting?
The front end being decoupled from the backend means updating the server doesn’t require getting a crappier front end experience if someone wants to build a different UI.
I don’t know how that makes the frustration of someone trying to use lemmy as a hub for a community of users interesting.
It’s interesting in its technical aspects.
Assuming good faith needs to go all directions and we’re asking for a little bit of empathy to vent some frustrations when we see them. Not everything we say is with an admin hat on. This is explicitly in the chat community, and it’s specifically titled ‘informal’. We don’t desire to be stuffy and impersonal all the time because then you have no insight into who we are as people or the issues we go through.
Lots of toxic behavior in social media is people venting frustrations. So in that sense what you are doing is not that weird.
Now think about the community you say you want to foster here and the values you say you want uphold.
This should not be Reddit or Twitter, right? We expect better from people, right?
Please, think about the optics, reflect and do not double down, unless you are 100% sure this is the kind of criticism you are ok with having in Beehaw, because is what you are going to get.
Ever since Beehaw defederated from the major instances I’ve noticed less activity here. I much prefer Lemmy.world these days. I feel like the Beehaw admins should have asked for feedback from the community before defederating. Communities live and die through their users.
so much this! creating a community comes first, and if that means people have to put up with a few weird posts here and there, so be it. later on it should be on the users as well to block what they don’t like, not on what’s basically the guys providing the infrastructure. in general, I feel instances are being treated a bit too much like subreddits at the moment.
also, a functioning community is a precarious and precious thing (as I’m sure reddit is finding out right now), and splitting it in two should always be an absolute last resort. choosing that nuclear option without real need is the admin’s right on their own instance of course (even though it makes them more ban-happy than reddit ever was, and they don’t even have any shareholders to keep happy!), but I personally don’t really agree with it still.
I’m assuming you don’t know what you’re writing about when you say “a few weird posts”. Lemmy isn’t ready for what is needed concerning moderation. The vast majority, nearly all Lemmy instances are choosing the only option available to them which is to defederate from other instances. Lemmy.world is doing this as well with no feedback or discussion from users. You’re only noticing it on Beehaw because they decided to value all of its users rather than primarily those unaffected by the malicious actors.
Constructively criticize – remember that the decisions they made seemed like the right ones to them. Remember the human. And be specific: “Make better decisions” isn’t useful, but “now that Lemmy does this, unfortunately that happens for me as a result” might just result in the changes you need.
Whoa buddy what’s all this empathy stuff doing here
I’d ask for you to remember that we’re humans too - we just put a bunch of resources into a very messy upgrade. We’ve been asking for plenty of other fixes, busy running a website, collecting moderators, setting up services for our users and to manage the site, ensuring that emails send because the app doesn’t notify approval/denials, and in general scaling up for the unprecedented growth. We also had to defederate and caught a lot of flak for it, have had to deal with a lot of unsavory users, and in general have had very few people sympathize with our position.
I think it’s absolutely fair to be upset about changes and to vent that frustration. I also think it’s fair to point out it’s not constructive, but please see it from our perspective- it’s another headache we don’t know how to deal with right now, and it’s incredibly frustrating. It’s upsetting to see parts of the platform regressing, many of our concerns glossed over, and to face pushback from many users not even from our instance.
not a good sign to find myself on a platform where fellow admins are criticizing the developers like this. in a healthy ecosystem we’d leverage more formal channels to help direct the development. if you haven’t already, it might be good to document the regressions and start/join the discussions on github or matrix (link for it can be found on the Lemmy github page). i’ve used these in the past for this project and the devs were reasonably quick to reply and apply fixes.
not a good sign to find myself on a platform where fellow admins are criticizing the developers like this. in a healthy ecosystem we’d leverage more formal channels to help direct the development.
if lemmy can’t handle us personally saying we dislike a significant number of the software-wide UI choices made by 0.18+, an upgrade that mind you we can’t go back on, i feel like that speaks to a much less healthy ecosystem than this post. in any case, they’re busy, we’re busy, and most of the fixes we want aren’t in the pipeline at all because they’re administrative in nature, not cosmetic.
if lemmy can’t handle us personally saying we dislike a significant number of the software-wide UI choices made by 0.18+, an upgrade that mind you we can’t go back on, i feel like that speaks to a much less healthy ecosystem than this post.
If, they can’t, should Beehaw plan to fall out with them and lose the ability to be heard about our concerns for the direction of development, or to try to be diplomatic and foster a good working relationship that doesn’t hurt their feelings whether we think it is legitimate for them to be that sensitive or not?
I think the latter would be far more productive and in better alignment with the ideals of project. The former seems needlessly antagonistic.
As I said elsewhere, I think it’s completely valid for you (and other people involved in Beehaw’s administration) to be frustrated by problems that occur because of upstream decisions and to want to share and process those feelings with your peers. I’m not sure that this is the best context and way to do so.
There’s two separate things going on here. There’s your feelings as an individual trying to work with this frustrating situation and there’s the Beehaw admin’s responding to that situation and trying to mitigate it now and influence it to improve in the future. I think both those things are important but that it’s difficult to balance the one against the other effectively.
If, they can’t, should Beehaw plan to fall out with them and lose the ability to be heard about our concerns for the direction of development, or to try to be diplomatic and foster a good working relationship that doesn’t hurt their feelings whether we think it is legitimate for them to be that sensitive or not?
if they can’t handle “wow we don’t like the new UI decisions” and that causes a falling out then i question why we or anyone else would even continue to use their software. in any case though i severely doubt they care. we’ve openly called their political views abhorrent and said we disagree with them in the very context of justifying why we even use their software and are still amicable with them. they’re adults who do this for a living, they’re probably more weirded out by users thinking it’s strange to have admins on this software disagreeing publicly with some of the directions they’ve taken it if anything
Have you guys reached out to the Lemmy developers to give feedback on their new UI changes?
Have you guys reached out to the Lemmy developers to give feedback on their new UI changes?
no, lol. if we’re gonna go to them for anything it will not be for cosmetic stuff which we can live with and theme around. we have actual substantial feature requests we’d much rather them do to make administrative function on this software much easier and more powerful than it currently is
Not being able to revert the change is annoying, but can’t you stage these upgrades first? Seems like a good idea to find out if the UI is going to seriously regress before deploying it to every user.
Not being able to revert the change is annoying, but can’t you stage these upgrades first?
we basically did do that–almost all of the problems here jumped out after we upgraded because we were latecomers to doing so. unfortunately these are essentially one-way decisions–especially 0.17.4 to 0.18±-for both software and practical reasons. the two versions have a bunch of differences that make going back a huge headache (we tried) and our site already didn’t work with a bunch of apps by using 0.17.4, so a lot of people would have to compromise using the site on mobile if we reverted/continued to not upgrade. also all of the 0.18.1 rcs so far have catastrophic bugs which seem to make the site unusable for some people, so that’s not great! overall, that we even got it to this state without losing a bunch of user data is kind of a miracle, and we’re gonna spend most of today trying to sort out all the new problems updating caused that aren’t just cosmetic
Oh no, criticism! How will Lemmy ever survive!
Wait until you find out that at least one of the main authors is a literal tankie
That seems like a bit of a needlessly hostile response to someone who was offering constructive criticism and encouraging others to do the same.
Didn’t mean to come off as hostile. I just don’t think it’s quite that bad of a sign to see admins criticizing Lemmy on Lemmy instead of only “on official channels”, like admins aren’t allowed to criticize the platform where us plebs can see it
I actually think it’s more about the nature of the criticism here rather than it’s existence. Do you think that the post provides constructive criticism that encourages active discussion?
I mean you’re not wrong about it not being all that constructive, but I really don’t see much harm in admins venting frustration. They’re regular humans too and it’s understandable they get frustrated with things, it’s probably a bit of a turbulent time for them.
They’re regular humans too and it’s understandable they get frustrated with things, it’s probably a bit of a turbulent time for them.
I completely agree with that, but I am concerned that A) if it’s happening in a way that could filter back as “the admins of Beehaw” that may be poor for external relationships and B) in isolation it implies that those admins may not be taking a constructive approach to these issues, which would be obviously be bad.
I’m not sure exactly what the best answer is but I do think it would be good for the admins to think about it a bit and consider the best options for inevitable future circumstances like this.
I suspect that if this post had been one with a more constructive angle but that expressed those personal frustrations in addition to that then it would probably be ok. Unfortunately, when you take on responsibility as administrator for a community you do need to consider how what you do might affect that community and that does lead to feeling more restricted than if you were just a regular user.
I do get where you’re coming from even though I don’t agree. As you said, we’re looking at this post in isolation; I don’t think a random rant about a huge platform update that hasn’t gone terrifically well is indicative of Beehaw admins not being constructive about it in general. It’s still a < v1.0 service after all and there are some huge problems with eg. federation and whatnot that are causing admins and users of all instances nontrivial amounts of hassle.
It’s a bumpy ride and there’s going to be annoyances aplenty, but I do trust that in the end everyone is handling things OK even though annoyances sometimes flare up
Yeah, a more diplomatic wording could probably have preempted the backlash here.
people debating whether it’s constructive are kind of funny to me just because we made this post and then spent two hours after it went up trying to make the site work and to revert our original upgrade to something stable enough people could even post at all. we have substantially bigger grievances at this point than just the UI and basically all of today is already blocked out as “hunt down all the bugs and extremely bad behavior we couldn’t fix last night from what we had to resort to”
I know the impulse is the want to know what needs to be fixed, but I think they are just managed a difficult upgrade and are expressing frustration and asking for some patience. In any case the correct place to put bug and feature requests is elsewhere and there’s no reason to suspect they are not or will not do that.
This post lacks constructive feedback. Just complaining - without proposing any solutions or fully describing the issues - is a smooth-brain move.
Personally I like the UI changes. I no longer have to zoom the page out to get a decent font-size. Comment-collapse buttons are now on the left so it’s easier to collapse comments as you move down the page.
I would like to see a bit more indentation for comment replies. Currently scrolling down threads where many comments have single replies, the replies have more highlighting that the comments themselves, and the indent margin isn’t quite wide enough to obviously set replies apart from top-level comments.
However, all of my comments could be easily fixed with CSS in either a theme or with a user-applied style.
I thought beehaw was supposed to be less toxic. This thread is a yikes.
Yeah, I have to admit I’m pretty disappointed with this… I’m honestly not sure what UI changes are being complained about and blaming Lemmy for it like this seems pretty immature. The tone is off at least… I think if they said “Hey, sorry that the UI changed, it’s part of the Lemmy upgrade that we needed to do for more stability, we’re looking into it / reaching out to see if we can get some of the changes we’d like” I’d be like “cool, makes sense, and good to bring up in case the admins are getting flack for it” but “blame Lemmy for all the shit” is pretty toxic and entitled sounding :/.
Obviously they are frustrated with the Lemmy devs regarding the 0.17 to 0.18 changes, which is understandable. But you’re correct that they let that frustration taint their attempt to communicate in a nice way.
I think it’s reasonable to be frustrated about the changes, but I don’t think it’s reasonable to be frustrated with the Lemmy devs for making the changes, if that makes sense? It’s their software and they can make the changes they think are best. It’s good if they can consider how other people use it, but it’s not reasonable to expect them to tailor the software for your specific needs. I think it’s pretty uncool to expect them to put in a bunch of free labor to make things work exactly how you want them to work. Obviously it’s great if they can accommodate everybody’s needs and can listen / respond to feedback, but this doesn’t seem like a productive way to communicate that, and I think this kind of communication really isn’t a good look for this platform, and might signal that this is acceptable behaviour on here… and I kind of hope it’s not?
What’s worse about it?
I like the smaller fonts, fits more content onto each page. I don’t know what all the angst is about, I can’t be the only one who is largely enjoying the design changes. 🤷
I noticed it got smaller, which is why I zoomed in the page. Problem solved!
What about something like this?
“¡Hi! You might have experience some changes in the interface of Beehaw. The admin team is not really happy with them but remember, we do not build the software that powers this community, so if you are experiencing problems make sure to report them to the Lemmy developers. We are already doing it.
In the meantime we are making some plans to mitigate this problems with theming on our end.
If accessibility is being a problem, take a look into these alternative clients.
In the end Lemmy is still in an early stage and it’s the responsibility of every instance to help in any way we can to help make it as good as it can be”
No need to throw anyone under the bus. To be honest it’s not the kind of criticism I expected from this community. Maybe you would be chillier if you had a downvote button to get all… that… out of your system.
You sound really adversarial against the people that build our tools. Even if you are frustrated, this leaves a really bad taste.
Idk everything looks better to me? Font size looks about the same, I can see all the buttons. Scrolling is a lot smoother. This is on Safari iOS
I suspect it is mostly an issue on desktop, as I also can’t say I noticed any difference on mobile.
Also on mobile and haven’t noticed anything glaringly wrong yet.
On both and both seem fine to me.
ignoring all the reasons i hate these changes from a design standpoint, from an accessibility standpoint, this is objectively a worse build in almost every way
Well on the plus side, the Lemmy frontend is designed to be replaceable; there’s even an old forum style frontend for Lemmy as an example. If Lemmy-UI shits the bed too hard, then we can always make a better one.
While I understand that most of Beehaw’s administrators are not programmers, I think it would be helpful if you reached out to the developers and ask that the Lemmy software offer greater levels of configuration when it comes to the UI. Making a vague post about “issues” on your own forum ensure that whatever issues you have will never be heard by the developers.
While I understand that most of Beehaw’s administrators are not programmers, I think it would be helpful if you reached out to the developers and ask that the Lemmy software offer greater levels of configuration when it comes to the UI
with how many feature requests they (and we) already have on their plate i’m gonna be honest i cannot imagine this is significantly more actionable to them than the OP is. it’s not like they can just snap their fingers and give us that ability
I have to say (and it’s probably just me being oblivious) but I haven’t noticed anything different. What’s changed?
All I know is the comment collapse button is now on the left of the username which is so much better than before, and the main feed doens’t constantly automatically refresh causing you to lose your place.
I feel it’s different but tbh nothing bad has jumped out at me yet. Feels sleeker and more compact which is an improvement, the old layout had a lot of empty space everywhere.
Honestly I dont mind it that much,
It’s smaller but I ctrl+ on my keyboard and blow it back up. Some of the layout of the posts is different on the main page but I wasnt the biggest fan of the original either so thats more a wash. The comment box has a different formatting button layout which is fine.
Being on the all tab and not having a random subinstance federate with or update all at once is excellent. It was so annoying to try to click something, and wind up being too slow as what I wanted to click got bumped down. Usually by porn. Nothing against the porn instances, mind you, but I was trying to click some silly meme not get an eye full.
oddly enough I prefer the new ui over to the old ui. Feels snappier
(Probably because I’m on mobile though?)
Having spent some more time on both mobile and desktop I can say I am just unaware of whatever issues it is that people are having. I’m sure they exist but I’m not encountering them myself and noone seems to be saying “my problem is that X has changed in Y way”. So, it’s hard for me to have a productive conversation about it. There are lots of little differences that seem to add up to it all being a little smoother and slicker than before. I don’t know if those are the changes in question seen through different eyes or not.
I think I saw something about the text being smaller and ive definetly noticed that could be an issue for some people
Yeah I’d seen that too. It does have to be A size by default though and it won’t ever be everyone’s preference so this isn’t actually an issue of “it’s the wrong size” so much as “there aren’t good enough options for instances and users to set their font size yet.”
100% the mobile experience is so much better it’s night and day. It’s easy more enjoyable to use now.
On mobile it seems pretty decent? At least nothing that had bugged me so far.
Don’t sweat it guys, I think most of us understand that Lemmy will have a somewhat bumpy road ahead and are fine with it! It’s kind of fun to be here during it’s growth :)