Eiri

Well, it's not because something has the potential to be addictive that it's necessarily bad. After all, a video game that isn't addictive at all could also be called boring.

I think the line between an enjoyable experience and unhealthy addictive features is drawn in user choice and the absence of malicious intent.

1. The apps are kinda meh. I haven't found one that doesn't come with significant disadvantages yet, and I've tried FIVE.

2. There's no recommendations feed. You see what you're subscribed to, or everything. No in-between. You can't see what you've subscribed to, and a few posts that the algorithm thinks you might like. People like to complain about the algorithm, but one reason it's so addictive is that it's useful.

3. Notifications don't work in every app

4. Just having a feed that behaves normally seems to be really hard to do for apps. Stop slowing me posts I've already scrolled past, and when I click home/pull down to refresh, I want new posts, not the same thing again that I've already scrolled past and ignored. Some apps have settings (that are somehow not on by default) to hide read posts and mark posts read on scroll, but I haven't tried an app where that works every time.

5. There's no "main" app. Think about Reddit before the API fees. There used to be a default app. It had its issues, but most features worked out of the box, and most things were intuitive and normie-friendly. You could use that to get comfortable with the social network itself, and then eventually try other apps when something got too annoying.

   Compare that with Lemmy. You want to try it, and you already have to deal with choice paralysis. A ton of apps on the website, with utterly unhelpful descriptions ("an open-source Lemmy client developed by so-and-so"; wow, exactly zero of those words help me pick) and a random order that doesn't even let me default to one most popular one.

   Quite a few apps focus on niche UI features like swipe-based navigation while still not having the basics down right. I'm several months into having joined Lemmy and I still haven't found an app that feels somewhat right. That is a challenge not one of the other social networks has managed. Congrats, Lemmy. Impressive.

6. Picking a server and signing up in general is complicated. And it's an impactful decision that you have NO tools to make so early, unless you start researching like it's school homework.

   .world? That's popular but you'll be judged for having joined it, plus you lose access to the piracy community. .ml? Hope you like communists and DRAMA. And if you get it wrong, there's no intuitive and easy way to migrate. You clunkily export your settings and re-import them; the servers will NOT talk to each other. And even then you lose some stuff.

   This UX issue is tough. I don't have an easy solution. But I'm sure a UX expert could find one.

7. Manual validation of your sign-up by a human. What is this, a Facebook group? If you introduce a 24-hour delay so early in the process, of course people are going to fall off.

8. The mouse logo is kinda ugly, won't lie. I'm sure it's a more potent people repellent than you think.

9. There is a LOT of tribalism. On Reddit, there's r/Canada, that's full of convinced conservatives that won't hesitate to artificially skew the discourse. And there's r/OnGuardForThee, basically the same but with progressives angry at the conservatives.

   On Lemmy, that feels like the rule, not the exception. I just joined communities based on my interests, and my feed is full of communist vs communist vs non-communist drama. Can we frickin' chill?

   If I need to start filtering out whole fields of interest that were taken over, joining less popular community clones or literally defederating instances to get a good experience, we've got it wrong. Normal people don't wanna do that when they literally just got here. They'll just leave.

10. Somehow even more US-centric than Reddit. So... Much... American politics.

Frickin' mobile games. Got sucked into giving KonoSuba: Fantastic Days nearly an hour of my time every day for a few months. I even gave them nearly a hundred dollars. And it felt like WORK, because I didn't want to be inefficient and miss quest rewards.

Never again.

That's good and all but man is that person a big fan of aria properties.

To be clear, they're not bad, but they're a little brute-forcey. There's often a way to achieve the same purpose without them.

For instance, instead of aria-pressed with buttons, you can just use radio buttons and labels. And your can just put heading elements in your sections instead of naming them with aria properties.

Oof, one more really bad word I now know about, I guess.

That would surprise me. It just doesn't sound like their flavour of bullshit.

Very little of what you mention was obvious to me. From the courtyard forward was the only place I wasn't completely lost all the time.

Before that, the multi-level section around where you get locked in with a knight, the labyrinthine rooms around the kitchen, the rampart tops and rooftops, the outside sections... Everything was pure confusion. Kept coming back to the same places, entering one of the million nearly identical looking doors, going round and round without ever reaching the place I was trying to reach...

Subtle hints don't really suffice for people without a sense of direction.

You know Stormveil is a nightmare in which people get lost and confused for hours, right?

Not quite as bad as Leyndell, but I've had very bad times getting lost in those places. Almost dropped and game over it.

I'm trying to avoid Chromium clones altogether. I really don't like the engine quasi-monopoly we have and I don't want to participate in furthering it.

It's not in Firefox mobile.

Sure, I could probably find the URLs to add it in at a new custom search engine. But if you're gonna make such a bombastic announcement, I expect you to have the update ready beforehand.

Do they not realize that mobile is most Web traffic nowadays?

I'll be honest I find it hard to understand for sports as well.

The supreme court, after such an amendment miraculously passes:

"Well actually, this sentence doesn't mention the president of the United States in particular, so it means every president of every company ever. But a company president doesn't have pardoning powers, so this makes no sense. So this amendment is invalid!"