More than one group of custodians, ideally with conflicting interests, watching one another? Essentially some system of checks and balances?

Jesus! Fucking! Christ!

As someone who fears bugs and is browsing Lemmy before going to sleep, my nightmares thank you, good sir!

Alan Dix’s book (aptly named “Human Computer Interaction”) is quite good, even if somewhat old by now. HCI is an actual academic discipline with, yes, tons of theoretical and empirical results that govern what a good UI should be. Many of which are indeed grounded in psychology, others in physiology, etc (what we call Human Factors). There is a whole special interest group of the ACM just about it: SIGCHI.

Do not confuse this with fashion/trends/taste. These change, resulting in widely different possible flavors of UI over the years. But the underlying principles are the same.

Another thing to remember is that the fact that Apple, Google, or someone else implemented an UI in a certain way doesn’t mean they are following best practices and guidelines. Novelty sells, even if at the end of the day it does a worse job of things…

Edit: added link to SIGCHI

Neat! I’ve always been a fan of roguelikes!

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That makes total sense. Still, it removes the pressure of choosing a server, since migration and use of several servers becomes seamless. As it is right now, there’s the resilience and future lifespan of an instance to consider, plus fragmentation of your identify as defined not by your username but by your actual “online persona” constructed from your posts, etc. (unless you’re really going for alts, of course). You can create other identities on other instances but they are separate, you “lose” your posts, etc. if something happens. if I understood correctly, that becomes less of an issue with nomadic identity?

IMO, this seems exactly what the fediverse needs to thrive. The whole “choose a server” thing is a big disincentive to adoption by most people.

I reluctantly started reading ebooks years ago for a very practical reason: owning some few thousand physical books, I pretty much ran out of room in the shelves in my small apartment. So nowadays I only buy physical art books and the like. Having said this, I actually easily grew to like ebooks, for their ubiquitous availability and, of course, not taking up precious shelf space.

Have to read them in an ereader for a proper experience, though. Tablet/smartphone displays tire my eyes a lot if I read for any meaningful period of time.

One more, then!

Ditto

Open. If my kids need help and call out in the middle of the night, I would like to hear them!

Closed, to keep the monsters in…

I say a variation of this to my kids almost every week. It boggles the mind how, with such an easy access to all the information in the world, they don’t know something and just shrug it off instead of searching for information (90% of times a simple google search would do). I imagine myself at their age with such resources at my disposal: I’d have been a much happier (and knowledgeable) kid!

For better or for worse (obligatory remark on how in a federated model there should be no “main” or “flagship” instance) that would probably be lemmy.world on the sheer number of users alone?