Kbin badly needs a facelift
Kbin badly needs a facelift
With the abandonment of Artemis (formerly kmoon), kbin is now only really usable by the mobile site. The site is really not suited for mobile devices however, and there have been minimal user-facing changes in the last few months.
I know Ernest is trying his best, however with the current pace I worry about growth (and I'm not alone, as shown by mbin). If there is another Reddit exodus, for example, or if we get a surge due to the Threads thing, I feel like many will just turn back due to the UI alone. Some of the gripes are below:
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With the "+" button, what is the difference between the four types? I know the answer (as do experienced kbin users) but it is not "newbie friendly"
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When you go back, you are forced to randomly scroll up and down the feed to find the post you were just looking at (this has been an issue for months)
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Images load when they enter the viewport instead of just before (also, images are not cached and as a result they need to load again when you back out of a post, leading to excessive data usage)
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A slight but very noticeable lag when backing out of posts or clicking on them (presumably while data fetching is happening)
... etc. There are more (such as issues with certain HTML / code templating stuff, seeing "span" and other tags instead of the actual code block), but these are the main ones in my eyes. I was assuming that there would be fixes by this point for these sort of issues, but I haven't noticed the interface change for a hot minute and it's seriously hampering the experience (as a solely-mobile user).
When can we expect stuff like this to be addressed? I don't mean to be a downer or belittle the efforts by the kbin contributors (I love kbin, that's why I care enough to make this post!), but this has all been consistent since July and I worry that these will just become cruft that never gets addressed and will simply be something new users need to "deal with" or "learn", when we are the only site that has this unusual flow and these bugs.
Thank you!
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Hey, I will get back to this thread and the comments at the beginning of next week. I am able to quickly address some of the issues you mentioned in your post. Changes will undoubtedly be implemented gradually, but for now, the redesign of the ActivityPub module takes higher priority. Once that is completed, the development of the frontend part of the platfrom will truly pick up pace.
Additionally, the suspension of other work was a conscious decision on my part. I believe that the code at this stage needs to be deeply refactored, and that's exactly what I am doing. Solid foundations are the only option for the project to survive and grow in the long term, and to be properly scalable. Adding more blocks to what I have always considered a prototype (which forks do) makes no sense to me.