What do you mean by “invite”? What would that look like?

I don’t mean a literal invite - I mean that projects are rarely inviting for product managers and designer (let’s call them “UX people”) and rarely do they encourage those people to contribute.

Let’s take a look at Lemmy as an example (and please don’t misunderstand, this is not to bash Lemmy specifically, this happens for so many FOSS projects). Let’s put ourselves in the shoes of a UX person who wants to contribute to Lemmy. How would I (the imaginary UX person) do that?

Well, on join-lemmy.org there’s not really any links to anything to do with contributing but there is a link to “GitHub” in the contact information. As a UX person, I may have a vague idea what git and GitHub is, but obviously that’s not a tool that I use. So then I land on the git repository on GitHub. Oh great, there’s a “Contributing” section! It says:

Read the following documentation to setup the development environment and start coding

Oh. So that’s contributing code and stuff. So that’s not me. But okay since there’s nothing else, let’s try and go to the contributing guidelines anyway. But this just gives a technical overview of the different software components of Lemmy, and then goes into how to setup local development. This is all mumbo-jumbo to me, I know nothing about coding, I am a UX person.

My point is (and again, Lemmy is just an example here), none of these contributing guidelines are helpful unless you are a developer, and the fact that the contributing guidelines only caters to developers makes any UX person feel out of place, as if their expertise is not wanted or needed. This is what I mean when I say it is not very inviting to UX people. It is very inviting to developers though.

That’s how it should work for design as well. Contribute some designs that you think will improve the UX and if they’re desirable, someone will take up implementing them. If it’s easy (e.g. a new logo), it’ll get done right away, and if it’s more involved, it’ll get done as devs get time.

I agree! But how are designers supposed to know where to even start? There are “good first issues”, but those are also only for developers. Where’s the contributing guidelines for non-developers? You say “Designers and product managers are certainly welcome”, but this doesn’t look that welcoming to me!

My perspective of designers and product managers is that they like to own projects.

I think this is a bit of a mischaracterization. I don’t think a product manager has to “own” the project to help and be valuable to a project.

One project that does this quite well is bevy. See this video from one of the product manager contributors to bevy: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u3PJaiSpbmc

people good at UX don’t seem to care as much about FOSS and the open web

I’m not sure this is true - at least I have an alternative explanation.

People who do the UX design and all that are rarely invited into the process. Open source projects often look for “maintainers” but this almost exclusively means “developers”.

There’s documentation and contributing guidelines for developers. Where is the same material for product managers or designers?

We don’t get product managers and designers in FOSS because they’ve never been invited.

The major platforms are convenient.

But the open web offers something better: genuine ownership, community governance, and independence.

This has a kind of underlying connotation that the open web can’t be convenient. This is not true.

It is true that lots of platforms on the fediverse (Lemmy included) don’t have the best user experience and user journey flow. But that’s not how it has to be. We don’t have to accept that as a given.

It’s the same problem that Linux faces, where UX issues aren’t prioritised because the user base is technical enough to deal with the bullshit. We can’t let the same thing occur to the fediverse.