SI just isn’t, or at least hasn’t been, set up to do this kind of step-change development. It’s been streamlined essentially since the split from the Championship Manager series to operate on an iterate-on-what-we-have basis with overlapping one-, two-, and three-year dev cycles geared toward developing annual refreshes of essentially the same game.
Everything from the dev cycle through AA, marketing, publishing, and even licensing is based on that fundamental structure. But that’s a model with an expiry date, and the kind of complete refresh they are currently attempting has been sorely needed for years already.
But they should have just announced a hiatus year at the start to get this done. They were never going to be able to do this within their regular annual cycle.
I feel like probably the biggest UX improvement Lemmy, and the fediverse more widely, could do is to make user migration more seamless. I’m thinking federated SSO, basically, where once you have an account anywhere on the fediverse you should a) be able to use that account anywhere else in the fediverse and b) move where that account is hoeted to anywhere else in the fediverse.
I believe this is related to whatever the hell ActivityPod is doing? Feel free to correct me on that. Regardless, get something like this in place as well as better instance and services discovery (and maybe the ability to find your other connected services from you ‘account’ pages on whatever service you’re on) and I think people might start to think of fediverse as less ‘an alternative’ and more ‘the better one’.
Basically, we need standard protocols for user data management, transfer, credentials management, and service and instance discovery. I’m sure some of that exists, the important thing will be to streamline and standardise the actual UX.