It used to be a banner above the comments. Now it seems to be in the sidebar. That’s a good design choice. It’s an improvement. It might not have scared my friend so much.

Here’s the earlier version I’ve thrown onto some image pasteboard called “pastebin”. The one that scared him.

Now they have the notification in the sidebar instead of under the comments. Following https://feddit.de/comment/2020091, it takes me to feddit, where the sidebar says:

You are not logged in. However you can subscribe from another Fediverse account, for example Lemmy or Mastodon. To do this, paste the following into the search field of your instance: [email protected]

This is actually a massive improvement. It gives directions, and the earlier one didn’t. It’s friendlier than the earlier version too. If I was given a link to your comment, and I wanted to upvote your comment, I would still need to 1) navigate to my own instance’s search tool and 2) paste your comment’s URL into that search tool.

And that’s still a complicated process for a lot of people. And this evolution badly needs to continue (since I don’t see how asklemmy’s front page is going to tell you anything about the federated instance signup process.) But I do really appreciate the direction the web app is going here, and the fact that they have gotten rid of the “vote” buttons and the “reply” buttons entirely now, and the fact that the banner now tutorializes a little bit.

These are all very good developments.

But they need to continue. We need a stronger tutorial.