Big Tech designed their platforms to keep you trapped.
YouTube, X, Instagram, and TikTok aren't neutral spaces. They're businesses built on capturing your attention and data. Their algorithms, notification systems, and content policies all serve one purpose: keeping you engaged on their terms. And their terms alone. There's no freedom
Agreed. I’ll try asking our UX people and see what they’d expect/want.
I think that’s a feature, not a bug, at least in the abstract sense.
For example, I think federation is a terrible solution to the general problem we’re trying to solve here. It requires too much hosting costs for everyone to self-host, requires too much trust in the admin to properly horizontally scale, and is inherently complex, which scares people away (and some of that complexity seeps through to the user).
However, a lot of people think it’s the bees knees, hence why we have Mastodon and Lemmy. I still think it’s poorly designed for scale, so my projects aren’t federated, but I certainly appreciate the people working on it in the meantime (I see it as a stopgap), and I do contribute fixes here and there (I was somewhat active in fixing bugs when I came to Lemmy).
This is tricky because there is no one community. It’s better managed as separate communities instead of one large FOSS community.
So maybe projects just need a better way to gather feedback from users other than issue trackers. Projects really should do more polls.