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
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.
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, 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 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?
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.
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.
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Yeah but they weren’t saying don’t talk about the shortcomings. They were saying, go do that in the most high impact most likely to cause change way possible.> I can agree that the comment you replied to was kinda hostile but this is FOSS, something that strives on dissent and criticism from the people that use it. Saying we shouldn’t talk about Lemmy’s shortcomings is like saying that Engineers are great Designers which isn’t exactly true.
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I dunno, ask Colin about the opinion he expressed not me. I was just disagreeing that his comment said anything to the effect that “we shouldn’t talk about Lemmy’s shortcomings.”
I’m not even convinced they are saying that the devs shouldn’t share their opinions here as well.
The exact phrasing was:
“not a good sign to find myself on a platform where fellow admins are criticizing the developers like this.”
Not:
“not a good sign to find myself on a platform where fellow admins are criticizing the developers.”
Those aren’t the same statement.
Personally I think that it probably is good for the admins to discuss their concerns about software development of Lemmy both directly where that will have an impact on the development and here within the community.
But I think in both cases, because they are representatives of Beehaw, that should be in the form of productive criticism that is explicit about what they think should be different and why.
This post is more about emotional venting about their frustration without even spelling out explicitly what they are frustrated about. Which is productive in the sense that it’s important to process one’s emotions and discussing them with your peers is a way people like to do that. However, I actually don’t think it is appropriate for the administrators of an instance to do so in that context because it potentially sets a negative tone for the discussion between the admins on behalf of the Beehaw community and the people actually working on the software about what Beehaw’s needs are from that software. This could actually undermine having Beehaw’s voice heard in an effective way to help get these issues resolved.
I think that this post acknowledges that there should be a line drawn between official communication by the Beehaw administration and their personal venting as a user (ie by titleing it “informal PSA”) I think it might be better to just not make it at all, process those feelings off-site, then come back with a more formal, detailed and specific, and more neutrally worded statement instead. It’s not the end of the world or some unforgivable sin to have made a venty post about how they feel but I do think it would be better to handle things slightly differently in future and it is good for people to share that feedback.
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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.
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.