A month or two ago I made a few posts on reddit to nudge people to join PieFed
More details here
The posts got 500,000 views and a couple thousand people joined PieFed.
This is the insights of a Reddit community, as you can see the vast majority of people prefer using a mobile app.
~98% of users are using a mobile app.
One issue I kept seeing in the comments was that there’s no “PieFed” app on any of the app-stores.
I want to be able to tell people, “Hey there’s this cool PieFed app, just search for it from the App-Store”
With age verification and other BS looming, the next Rexit is coming, we need to be ready. Ideally people can just comment, “Yea Reddit sucks, Just download PieFed from the app-store”
Can we make this happen? I’m sure it’ll greatly benifit Voyager, PieFed and the Fediverse
It’s not closure, but a simple plea for love and kindness.
The Fediverse is based on four pillars:
Honestly, you can’t ask app developers to double their work (development, release, store registration, updates, etc.) because users don’t read the instructions! 🤣
Users have a huge responsibility: to support, test, and fund the volunteer community (1, 2, and 3). If users don’t even want to read the instructions, then the Fediverse has no hope of surviving. Those users deserve to be devoured and digested by Big Tech, by profiling logic, and by the predatory attention economy. Amen
Blorp dev here. I agree, but it’s also good to know the pain points. Someone people are correct that a problem exists, but incorrect in their proposed solution.
For example, the are probably ways I can update the App Store listing to make it more obvious that we support PieFed.
You’re right, but it’s also important not to be subjected to the thousands of requests from the community. I’m a Lemmy administrator, and initially I only allowed communities to be created by request. I can say that many of those who asked me to start a community didn’t even bother to follow it… Similarly, users continually ask software and app developers to add unnecessary features that burden developers with commitments and man-hours that rarely yield any benefits.
It’s certainly right to evaluate users’ needs, but developers have a primary ethical duty to take care of themselves and avoid burnout. Giving developers a nervous breakdown is the easiest way to kill the Fediverse!
Totally fair! I don’t know if I’ve crossed the user threshold yet with Blorp to be overwhelmed by the feedback, so maybe I’ll regret my earlier statement. Since Lemmy/PieFed is so privacy focused, I collect 0 analytics data. So that user feedback is kinda the only way to know that people are actually using my app.
I understand Lemmy/PieFed is very anti AI, and honestly for good reason, but I have found it helpful to collect a dump of the comments mentioning “Borp” and then have an LLM categorize what are the top feature requests/bugs. So sometimes that feedback is also helpful indirectly.
I guess my point is, I can’t really do anything with no feedback, but I can find ways to comb though a large quantity of feedback.
What do you mean by if users don’t read instructions the fediverse has no hope to survive? Literacy on instagram etc. is probably not very high, yet it’s one of the biggest platforms.
Also making it clearer what the app supports doesn’t double the work for devs.
Users are one of the four pillars on which the Fediverse stands. Their contribution is both to exist and to contribute financially to the Fediverse. A functionally illiterate user can’t even understand how and where it’s best to contribute. If these are the users of the Fediverse, then they will be prey to scammers or commercial platforms.
Commercial platforms have a business unit dedicated to capturing the illiterate, the distracted, and the not-so-intelligent.
Creating two apps almost creates double work. Advising developers to create two apps is cruel…
They don’t have to create two apps, it feels like you’re trying really hard to strawman the situation.
There are a few apps already that support both Lemmy and PieFed, saying create two apps, implies doubling the work. When it’s not that at all, it’s just adding compatibility where one differs from the other. Lemmy and PieFed are 90% the same thing, if not more.
You’re making false and stupid accusations. You yourself used these words:
The next time you accuse someone of twisting your words, try rereading what you don’t remember saying first!
As someone who develops apps for a life. and has ~15 years experience building software.
It does not fucking double the work, developing the app is 90% of the work.
Changing the name and releasing 10 of them doesn’t add a lot more work.