I’m using the mobile web version of kbin for the first time right now and it’s pretty dang solid… I honestly might like it better than the desktop web interface. I spent this morning writing a stylus script to get something closer to old.reddit. (less whitespace, mostly, but a few other changes too)
Here are the issues for me:
I think most of these problems have relatively straightforward fixes. As for the UX issues I’d like to see two things:
an instance which combines communities/magazines into “hubs” which users subscribe to simplify the UX. Users could can then tweak their hub experience by toggling which instances feed into their hubs. So instead of having kbin.social/m/news, lemm.ee/c/news, lemmy.world/c/news, etc… you just have something like /h/news and you can configure what’s included in /h/news. The mods of the instance’s community would determine which communities feed into the hub by default, but users could customize this as they wish.
Better cross-site user and reputation management. I’m not sure exactly how to make this work… but if, when you created an account on once instance, every instance its federated would somehow reserve or automatically create a matching account for you, then the anxiety around which instance to join can kind of melt away. The different instances could become windows into, effectively, the same account and same system.