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
I really hate the gatekeeping I see on the Fediverse, it's one of the few things I don't like about this place.
For how nice everyone is here, and how nice the interactions are, the "Oh please no, don't come here to this place, you are dumb/lazy, and I don't want dumb people here" is gross.
You don't know what's going on in peoples lives, if they have reading disabilities, or if they might speed read or have ADHD.
God forbid they don't thoroughly read through every line in a search result.
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! π€£
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 itβs 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.