Incrementalist UX

[erlend-sh]

Many key aspects of Commune's user experience are a product of incremental design, i.e. the art of introducing essential components of a feature in incremental order, one after the other, as opposed to all at once.

Incremental Encryption

Encryption is a paradoxical feature. By design it is meant to keep users' content as safe as mathematically possible. When used right, it achieves exactly that. But when used in error it can lead to the most destructive outcome imaginable by making precious data inaccessible.

And mistakes do inevitably happen because encryption involves extra steps, and every extra step is an opportunity for user error.

Therefore, Commune doesn't start with encryption as a default-on feature. It's not important for the norm of seed-stage community building which benefits from being done in public view. By making encryption an opt-in feature we:

• simplify the onboarding of new users by reducing the amount of concepts and, thus widening and shortening the lurker-to-participant funnel.
• make room for a dedicated teaching moment at a later time in the user's product journey, so they may fully appreciate the benefits and risks of encryption.

Incremental Federation

Federation is a power-user feature. To the extent that it's possible, Commune will treat federation as something to gradually opt into, in order of:

1. Accounts only
2. DMs only
3. webring only (trusted neighbors)
4. extended network (trusted peers of neighbors)
5. general (only practical for well resourced centralizers like matrix.org)

Incremental UI

WIP