I hate the damage that Apple seems to have done in this regard. I also hate it when apps hide features because “they’re for power users and regular users won’t understand them”.
Sure, there’s a difference between UX being so bad that it’s frustrating to use and “we need to simplify things because we don’t want to scare the users”.
Lemmy UI has its problems to solve and features to add, but it’s not bad, even on mobile. I’ve been using it extensively and it does fine all things considered.
Anyways, at this point I believe there’s even a benefit to making a UI a bit ugly and scary, so you end up with a higher quality of users instead of quantity, as cold as it might sound.
it didn’t come off that way to me - just more so that the high quality users may be the more technical ones who put effort into understanding and acclimating to a new site.
Having new people come in and expand the culture of this new place is good!
However, having there be a little bit of a barrier to entry that requires people to read and think to understand isn’t a terrible thing. It’s always a balance.