I would like to help an open-source project with UI design and UX design. I have over 18 years of experience in the field and have worked with desktop and mobile software on Windows, Mac, iOS, Android and Windows Mobile/Windows Phone. Unfortunately my knowledge of Linux is very limited but I’m eager to learn. Could you help me find a project? @thelinuxEXP @linux @macrumors @windowscentral @windows
You actually posted to a Lemmy instance from your Mastodon one fwiw.
@Piers Yeah, I did not know what Lemmy was, thought It was some random instance. Very much a newb at FOSS. *Embarrassed*
Yeah no problem. It gets confusing because Lemmy, Kbin, Mastodon and the other big one I currently forget the name of are all their own set of software that people use to make their own instances with that can all talk to each other across the different instances and platforms but also, many of the big instances use the name of the software they use as part of their own name. ie mastodon.cloud (which is how you are presumably accessing this conversation) is a Mastodon instance (or whatever term is used for the Mastodon equivalent of a lemmy instance) but it is not Mastodon itself, just one example of Mastodon in action. Similarly in Lemmy-land you have major instances called beehaw.org (a Lemmy instance that my account is on and through which I am interacting with this post), lemmy.ml (which is the instance this post is actually on and is the oldest Lemmy instance run by the people who started the FOSS Lemmy project) and lemmy.world (the biggest Lemmy instance.) All three of those instances are run by entirely different people for different purposes and they all intercommunicate (to some degree, I think maybe beehaw.org currently is defederated from lemmy.world due to the challenges of moderating users from a large open instance in line with beehaw’s goals), they are all Lemmy instances but none of them are actually the Lemmy FOSS itself. However, people often think that either lemmy.ml or lemmy.world is exactly synonymous with Lemmy or that beehaw.org is a seperate thing.
Really imo all the Fediverse stuff should have set a standard that would require consistent clear naming across all instances (IE, perhaps they could all be required to have an actual name independent of the name of the underlying technology and then also include what they actually are, ie beehaw-lemmy.org, beehaw-mastodon.org etc) but we’re well past that point now I think.
@Piers that is very confusing and I did think lemmy.ml and mastodon.cloud were the official instances. I guess this makes it really easy for someone to host an instance pretending to be a company/project that it is not?
Potentially yes
It certainly does pose an issue from that perspective but I’m not sure any more than websites in general. It’s not actually that hard to rip off a website’s design and so it’s quite common to see phishing scams of that nature. In some sense it’s less likely to happen with people impersonating a Lemmy instance simply because actually setting up and running one is more work than impersonating just a regular website.
Yes, someone could create an instance called “officiallemmyinstancedotcom” and pretend to be the one single official lemmy to try to trap people searching for Lemmy not entirely knowing what it is, but I don’t think the fact that people already think places like lemmy.ml or lemmy.world are synonymous with Lemmy is a prerequisite for someone doing that. If anything, people who mistakenly think one of those two is the only “real” Lemmy are probably less likely to be taken in by a malicious one.
Still…
Providing clearer on site messaging to help avoid this sort of confusion sounds like something a good UX designer could perhaps assist the Lemmy FOSS project with?