Piracy

Somewhat yes, and still do. If I find a community I like the look of, there's often a non-functional login page where after entering my details (correctly!) there's just a spinner that spins forever without ever giving at least an error message, but if I prefer there are some !hier@oglyp.hics that look like an email address but aren't, that I can bung into some search page somewhere that doesn't always return anything but it might if I refresh it or it might not but if I keep trying then it might eventually but then it doesn't for days so I start fiddling around with some other stuff and find that it suddenly works, but that other browser tab that still has that interesting thread open won't register as subscribed no matter how much I refresh it even though the community works perfectly in the other tab, but then I can't find the message I want to engage with in the tab where it works.

I'm a coder so I'm used to being persistent and working around bugs and poor UX, but your bog standard pleb isn't going to be that patient with it - they just want to login, hit subscribe and it's done (although to be fair that's what I want too).

I'm sure there are good reasons for all this but when the Lemmy devs decide they have to prioritise a simple UX that Just Works no matter what context I think there's a good chance it'll be well placed to take over from previous chat communities. At least make that !random@ju.nk clickable taking me to a page that with just one click at most gets me logged in and linked; this copy and paste business where you can't double click it cos it's not a word and you can't triple click it cos then you get the whole paragraph is just dumb - OK, correction - hasn't been streamlined yet because nobody's realised how important this bit of a distributed system is yet.