friendica.eskimo.com
With each new #Facebook scandal like the recent WhatsApp-related one, the #Fediverse welcomes a wave of new users and admins. #Friendica gets its tiny share of the newly converted to decentralized social media. Some stick, most don't, but there's always this one guy (it's always a man) whose first few messages on GitHub are to angrily complain that Friendica isn't user-friendly enough and that it is spelling doom for a project they didn't know the day before and for the #Fediverse as a whole.
This has been going on ever since I joined the project in 2016, and we're still here. 🤷♂️
@Hypolite Petovan joined as a Programmer or as a user?
When did @Michael Vogel join?
How did you two happen to start programming for Friendica?
Yeah I've been seeing those types my entire life. It's not just the Fediverse, or Friendica.
What I've also noticed about those people is they seem to complain the loudest when they wish for something to be improved, but expect that someone else should do it for them for free.
To be frank, I'd rather not. Over the years we've received similar reports and complaints about the same areas of Friendica, install (un)ease, confusing and/or dated interface, poor onboarding, sporadic and heterogenous documentation.
So we absolutely know the pain points of using Friendica, including because we use it ourselves, but these are domains that aren't very gratifying to work on for most of us core developers, so we don't spend much of our limited volunteering time on them and they simply don't improve as a result.
So we don't need someone else to point out what is painfully obvious for us. Of course we always welcome respectful feedback, but at this point we don't necessarily need additional feedback about Friendica's user-friendliness or lack thereof.
@Robert Dinse important as a admin is to use Relays and add some tags for the server to follow.
For the users it is important to
1. Write a newhere (make that a tag too!!) post with as many words as tags as possible. Do not make it look spammy, but include up to 10 tags of things you're interested in.
2. Follow all those tags after you sent the post, ie. click on them and add them by the plus in the right upper corner. There might nothing be shown there, but in the next days it will change. As the server (at least when properly configured) will receive posts tagged with these tags.
3. Follow anyone that seems remotely interesting. I they turn out to be not interesting then unfollow again.
I think these are very important for starters.
Yeah, staying polite can sometime be a real challenge 😀
But of course it is important to stay open for critics and new suggestions. But I think that we did it mostly well over the years.