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Bluesky CEO responds | 2023-07-22 Letter to the Community
(blueskyweb.xyz)
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I think that's quite likely yes. But that in and off itself indicates that management consider stuff like UX to be non-essential expertise that sits outside of what is required for a functioning lean operation.
Not entirely true, there are many other factors such as timelines to deal with. I am a professional developer and I have had projects where the timings were tough (competition, sometimes just contract/SOW delivery date changes, etc) and UX was specifically disengaged or delayed.
Now is the ideal time to strike, fediverse and IG threads/lemmy/mastodon/etc are all still in flux when it comes to community favorites. They are all motivated to get out to market first.
The thought behind this is to get the foot in the door functionality wise and revamp UX overtime based on user feedback once established in addition to internal evolution of UI. It’s not like they said “yeah fuck it let’s let ‘em name themselves anything”, and more likely prioritized issues in the backlog and being a startup, have more flexibility to leave UX for later or losing the finer details of community safety to different phases or whatever.
It’s truly difficult to point to the cause from the outside looking in, yet many here are happy to take this whole situation as evidence of either malice or incompetence. These days when you release a product it’s not done.
These days the following are common: Day-one patches, frequent weekly/monthly/etc. update cadences, pushing to dev/dit/qa/prod rapidly, always keeping production in line with or not far behind develop (aka, merging to dev, run CI/CD, waterfalling thru each environment all the way to prod).
I submit that this whole situation was a failure of management as you said but not the disaster people are trying to make it out to be. These things happen when the dev team is forced to move quickly, it says nothing about the company’s values or what it really cares about. They clearly care, it’s just that they see getting to market as the penultimate hurdle that all others are secondary to. I don’t advocate for this approach as I prefer the show not tell approach but I understand the thought process.
Bluesky is not even released yet, it’s still in early beta. How can anyone speak to their priorities and what is or isn’t essential to them when the product is still in active development with no release date in sight. Their sign up is a waitlist and the hosting provider (first question they ask) has options for dev and staging servers.