Well, I gave Quanta a go and upon following the user guide to just add a Mastodon account (mine) to follow, having it fail each and every time, I’ve decided that it’s simply not ready for actual users yet.
Problems I noted:
My friends list (which should have been empty) was filled with garbage content from a bunch of places.
My friends feed (which is different from the “Friends” list—information design is a vital skill programmers suck at!) which should also have been empty was filled with a bunch of crap from all over the Fediverse, about half of it being #MAGA-waving twits.
My federated feed was also filled with a bunch of (half-#MAGA thug) content from all over the Fediverse, but at least it was a different bunch from my should-have-been-empty “Friends” feed.
I was unable to follow anybody. I tested with my own Mastodon account a few times, and then random other people from the federated feed. The former went through all the motions of following right down to saying I was following … but then lost its mind when I actually went to check my friends list, insisting that I wasn’t friends. WIth the latter it was even worse: I kept getting bizarre error messages about this not being my instance.
I was unable to block anybody, which is a problem considering the sheer quantity of #MAGA bullshit on the feeds. Again I got bizarre error messages about this not being my instance.
Quanta is an absolute mess right where it needs to be best of breed: the user experience. I’m sure there were solutions to all the problems I experienced, but I can’t be arsed to sit down and debug other people’s code when it’s so painfully obvious they didn’t debug their own. The developer of Quanta needs to gather a bunch of new users from different disciplines (ranging from technical users to non-technical users) and watch them thrash around with his software, taking notes so he understands what the pain points are and why Quanta, as is, will not take the world by storm. Nor even by zephyr.
Well, I gave Quanta a go and upon following the user guide to just add a Mastodon account (mine) to follow, having it fail each and every time, I’ve decided that it’s simply not ready for actual users yet.
Problems I noted:
Quanta is an absolute mess right where it needs to be best of breed: the user experience. I’m sure there were solutions to all the problems I experienced, but I can’t be arsed to sit down and debug other people’s code when it’s so painfully obvious they didn’t debug their own. The developer of Quanta needs to gather a bunch of new users from different disciplines (ranging from technical users to non-technical users) and watch them thrash around with his software, taking notes so he understands what the pain points are and why Quanta, as is, will not take the world by storm. Nor even by zephyr.