Mobile-first design is definitely taking over the world. Facebook, Twitter, Google+, Instagram, Path, Snapchat, WhatsApp and many other social platforms are trying to conquer our small screens. But what about us? What about diaspora*?
If diaspora* doesn’t focus on mobile, it might miss the boat in my opinion. Mobile is a strong opportunity for diaspora* to take off, especially in places where Mozilla wants to popularize Firefox OS.
Right now, it is pretty obvious that the mobile experience is an afterthought on diaspora*. From a personal experience, the design is honestly not yet ready on mobile. The buttons are too small for a thumb to reach them, the icons are blurry-pixelated on a retina display… With the progressive switch to Bootstrap, do you think the mobile form factor should become the top-priority for design and features?
Note: This discussion was imported from Loomio. Click here to view the original discussion.
Maliktunga, the problem isn’t lack of ideas or lack of will to improve Diaspora - the main problem the project faces is a lack of developers and designers. At the moment there is just a handful of developers and designers, all working in their spare time.
Making loads of proposals ain’t going to get anything done faster. Everyone knows that the mobile site is incomplete - the problem is that at the moment there are two people working on it, when they can find some time among all the other things they have to do. The ‘mobile experience’ is not an ‘afterthought’ - it’s just that there aren’t enough people able to work on it.
Finding more developers is really the main - the only - priority at the moment. And the next priority is to sort out all the problems with infrastructure and architecture. Fine-tuning the glossiness of it will be more important when Diaspora is in the position of wanting to attract end users rather than wanting to attract developers. At the moment, the project is not in the position.
If you can help improve the mobile site - or anything else - please do jump in and offer to help. It will be much appreciated.
@goob Thank you for clarifying the situation. Unfortunately I am neither a developer nor a design, thus there is nothing I can really do except use diaspora*, file bugs and make suggestions…
@goob I know it’s getting off-topic, but does the Diaspora community use bounties to correct bugs and attract developers? Something like Bountysource could definitely help.
When it was first launched (however many years ago?) it was literally ground breaking back then (in terms of mobile design).
I’ve recently come back to D* and I still find the mobile site as fluid and as nice to use as I did back then. The only thing I would add/change is a ‘show more’ for large posts to stop me having to swipe the mobile screen so often.
Personally I would love if the current UI’s were just ditched and a new one coded from scratch that would be responsive and work with desktops and mobiles. Having different code is just duplication.
But of course in a project like this with no funding and only hobbyist devs it’s not going to happen and the question “do we want to go mobile first” is nice, but answering it will not really change anything
@jasonrobinson The new SPV and the conversations already work ok on mobile devices. For the conversations view some javascript code is required to improve the usability (e.g. less scrolling) and we also need a rewritten responsive header. It will take some time until the whole UI is responsive but I think we make progress.
