It would be very cool imo to have similar aesthetic guidelines for all these fronts. Material design is the stardard in this era but Fediverse has the occasion to be more attractive with something new and more organized.
You must log in or register to comment.
A community dedicated to fediverse news and discussion.
Fediverse is a portmanteau of āfederationā and āuniverseā. It is a common, informal name for a federation of social network servers whose main purpose is microblogging, the sharing of short, public messages.
Getting started on Fediverse;
- What is the fediverse?
- Fediverse Platforms
- Mass-follow People by Interest
- How to run your own community
For devs;
- 0 users online
- 19 users / day
- 35 users / week
- 107 users / month
- 315 users / 6 months
- 11 subscribers
- 589 Posts
- 3.3K Comments
- Modlog
It would be boring
I think thatād be boring
Also just like, they are decentralized. You canāt tell dozens upon dozens of different people to āhey, make ur instanceās design follow these arbitrary rules thanksā
Without a āmain/leadingā instance, no federated app will gain mainstream attention. Most people donāt really care about the federation part, and will only visit the most popular instance, which is the one moderated by the developers.
So I would support OPās suggestion in the āmainā instances. Other instances are free to change whatever they like, but the default look should be similar (same fonts/colors).
This was my point, thank you.
But this isnāt the case with āusualā social media stuff either, why should it be the case with the fediverse?
Because unlike the fediverse, normal social media websites donāt try to present themselves as a āpackageā. With many fediverse projects aiming to connect, it would be more suitable imo for them to have similar designs.
This is my just humble opinion, yours is just as valid.
Ah, I see your point now. I still think itād sell the wrong idea since it just causes centralization, which is a problem that platforms already deal with, but now I see its potential usefulness as well
This is a bit misguided; standard protocols help with interoperability (ActivityPub, etc) however people would be free to use any view (UX/UI) they prefered and people should be encouraged to experiment and attempt bettere UXs.
For example, Tusky is an ActivityPub client that can open Mastodon, Pleroma, etc. and there are other clients with slightly different UX/UI. I use Fractal (GNOME/Gtk4) for Matrix connections regardless of the backend someone uses.
I think that there is some potential in this idea.
Not sure about ādefaultā, but as far as I know, most of the Fediverse platforms can be themed, so it would probably be a good start to design an uniform look for those that have that option already.
This kind of thing can be most easily achieved through bottom-up grasroots movement.
Try making some drafts of how you think the āsimilar aesthetic guidelinesā would look like, gather people who are interested in this idea, and start working on your vision.
In the sense of recommended guidelines, obviously no obligation to follow them from individual instances. I will not underestimate the power of a design, it has zero costs and a great impact.
I donāt understand what the benefit of that is supposed to be. You could argue that it might make it easier for users to navigate the platforms. But if a user is getting confused that seems more of an UI than design issue and different platforms will naturally have different needs in that regard anyways.
Other than that, I think the strength of federated services lies in their diversity and due to the open source, federated nature of most services, anyone is free to create their own apps/instances with unique designs anyways, so that seems like a losing battle from the get go.
The benefit would be that if someone knows how to use Fediverse-Thing āXā theyād have a headstart in learning how to use āYā and āZā as well, because they would all look/behave similarly. Itās a fairly standard UI/UX idea. See, for example, some āusability rulesā at http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/taouu/html/ch01s03.html (esp. Rule of Bliss and Rule of Least Surprise).
I would suggest not having the same design but having some sort of āthis site is ActivityPub enabledā logo somewhere on the first screen.
That is a great idea. Maybe a āfederatedā badge that you can add e.g. in the app footer may be better, with a hover text of āThis application is part of the Fediverseā, or something.
Your idea is appealing, but a successful approach imho would be by perhaps making either the 1st or 3rd party apps themeable. This way an end-user could configure their apps/interfaces of choice to look how they want.
As others are saying, you canāt prescribe the UI, plus it might be boring. But I get your point. The communication protocol - via the ActivityStreams / ActivityPub open standards - allows apps to deeply integrate with other appsā¦ in theory. We havenāt really scratched the surface yet on what is possible here. The protocols are very extensible and can be used for many different types of applications (see the AP Watchlist).
What I would like to see are way more ActivityPub servers whose services I can tie together to compose my own UIās on top of. Instead of building apps, developers would build services that can be combined in a variety of ways. I wrote a bit about it in From silo-first to task-oriented app design on the SocialHub community. We are far from this vision to become reality, atm. For this more mature fediverse to arise a strong community of builders is needed, who evolve standards, standardize on protocol enhancements and design extensions.
I really like this idea. Just a guideline for every thing to be uniform and intuitive across different platforms
Iām not a fan of the idea but Iād love a Mastodon-like theme for Lemmy, not gonna lie
Iām not actually clear on how Lemmy fits into the Fediverse, to be honest. (This may be a problem in documentation.)