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(this is also a joke, pixie.town is perfect and has never slowed down)

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sorry this joke will take some time to hit, we're having some load issues

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it's nice to have all the @joepie91 quality (software) takes on mastodon now :p

How UX apathy leads to corporate capture 

"No, $software is fine, users just need to learn how to use it"

"That's a stupid feature, nobody should ever need that"

If you've spent any amount of time in FOSS circles, you've probably seen sentiments like that all over the place. Unfortunately, they're a big part of why dubious corporations (eg. Microsoft, Google, etc.) have been able to co-opt the FOSS community.

Why? Because regardless of what you, as a technical FOSS person, believe is "necessary"... users are not going to care about that. They have certain expectations from their software in terms of feature set and ease-of-use.

Either you meet those expectations, or users go elsewhere.

Now, "it's FOSS, it gives you freedom" can sway that decision *somewhat*, but it only gets you so far. Most people care more about getting their stuff done, than they care about (to them) abstract ideals of "freedom".

And because of that, you're setting yourself up to be vulnerable to corporate capture - because corporations can superficially *claim* to do FOSS, but provide an actually accessible user experience, and suddenly everybody flocks to the corporate thing.

And sure, corporate FOSS has real problems compared to community-run FOSS. But understanding that requires a degree of nuance that most people won't see, and that you frankly cannot expect from people for whom FOSS isn't their whole existence. It's specialized knowledge.

Which boils down to a very simple reality: either *you* provide the UX that users want, or a corporation will do it for you, and with none of the community governance and long-term sustainability. Those are the options.

A great example of this is systemd; yes, it has plenty of problems. But because of the widespread insistence in FOSS circles that "nobody needs more than SysVinit", everybody flocked to an actually usable alternative the moment it appeared, monolithic design and corporate governance be damned.

Don't be that person. Listen to users about their needs. Take complaints about UX and accessibility seriously. If you don't, then you're not helping FOSS; you're harming it.

my Tropos is still fine-ish but some of the interior stuff is tearing more, and not really fixable

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looking at backpacks again, if the Osprey Nebula goes on sale next week im going to buy one for when my Tropos eventually kicks the bucket

it'd be neat to design a hardware meds tracker but also there's no way to use 7 segment displays that doesn't look like a bomb

Bad people on Fedi 

I've had a bunch of scoffing "User safety? What could you possibly mean? It's a website, nobody can actually hurt you"-type comments flung at the admin account when explaining that some servers are suspended or limited from Scholar for user safety (among other reasons)

So here's a fairly decent place to start on learning just how absolutely shit people can be to each other on the internet

cbc.ca/radio/day6/kiwi-farms-o

And yes, the Kiwifarms people were (probably still are) on Fedi

so far 'did i take my meds' on f-droid works best, except tapping their widget doesn't work and there's no reminders (widget does show the time)

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I'd make it myself (woo another project) but I'd really like a widget and there's no way to do that as a PWA web-app..

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there's multiple apps that do have an intend setting, but you still have to schedule the first intake... which completely defeats the point

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why are there no good need tracker apps with flexible schedules..
you'd think this would be more common, especially with ADHD. I don't have a set schedule, but I do want 3 reminders spaced 2.5hrs apart after first intake

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