Musk was going to push eyestrain-inducing "dark mode" on everyone, then reversed -
First he said he was going to force everyone to use dark mode on #Twitter, which can be unreadable by people with astigmatism and others. I find it almost entirely unreadable. Then after an outcry he reversed and said it would be the default. Such an ass.
@blogdiva@lauren same. It took some time before I realised that it was dark background that triggered it. No one told me it was bad.
A lot of programming related sites have all code samples with dark background these days even when the site itself is set to white background and it's horrible.
@loke@blogdiva@lauren Right?! It's SO BAD. I can manage say, Mastodon dark mode, but lots of other contexts, completely unusable, especially the low contrast stuff that's all in vogue right now
@lauren@aredridel@blogdiva there used to be a fantastic Firefox extension that fixed the colours of a site to make sure it used a light background. It was actually designed to do the opposite (making everything dark) and was ironically called "care for your eyes" or something like that. It had an option that allowed you to flip everything light.
Then one day they released an update and the support for light mode disappeared. I never found a good replacement.
There is a plugin called 'dark background and light text' that is completely configurable -- you can set to light background with dark text. I use it to browse the web generally. Doesn't work everywhere, but there are several modes you can try (CSS, adaptive, etc.)
I'm the opposite, I literally feel this enormous pressure that leads to headaches, eyestrain, etc. if I see all that white light. But, I also loathe the low-contrast BS 'designers' like to foist.
I read Mastodon in dark mode but using sans serifs. The main reason is I am light hypersensitive. Light causes me pain. But Twitter on a desktop I always did read not only on white but with CSS overriding the sans fonts with Storm Type Regent. (The running text typeface that Mother Jones has seemed to abuse horribly as a display typeface.) And for coding I always use a white background, and believe I still use a Manfred Klein freeware font I modified for it.
I have astigmatism but light sensitivity overrules. It triggers migraine but also hurts in its own right. Plus my migraine is chronic, anyway: it never fully goes away.
@aredridel@loke@blogdiva@lauren IMO There are a lot of really poor fonts out there. (The first requirement of someone to be good at fonts is a proper appreciation of the baroque period, which Storm has.)
I mean really poor fonts regarded by people not me as good fonts. That my opinion is people are wrong.
@chemoelectric@aredridel@loke@lauren ROBOTO is the best for me. it just has every style you need to make visual sense of the outline or sections of a page.
the guy who came up with the "dark mode is good for the eyes" had photosensitivity; but people glossed over that and start parroting it for ALL visual disabilities. because !LAZY.
darkmode for dysgraphia/dyslexia is the worse.
IMHO all apps should have customizable themes. separate the front-end from the back-edn. and the rendered web pages should be readable without javascript.
My Emacs is white and my Konsole is white and my default desktop browser is white.
(I've made fonts and they are made to be black on white. How does one print white on black? AFAIK there isn't even a history of how to design type to show properly in that situation.)
the ALT of this image took me longer to write than this toot, LMAO.
this is what my deck looks like. if i have the time, i'll go after their main site.
it bothers me though that mastodon doesn't have a theme engine. i can't come in and design skins for the app that they could just merge into a "themes" folder.
@blogdiva@loke@lauren Yup. There's "flavors" in the glitch-soc fork, and there's a kind-of stab at theming in Mastodon, but it's so vastly incomplete as to be useless.
@aredridel@loke@lauren how to you even fix that? you can't just build a front-end layer without having control of the codebase --given how everything is baked in. so it comes back to having to fork it. am so disappointed, LOL
@blogdiva@loke@lauren Yeah. Honestly, forking is what's needed for community structure too. Someone needs to wrest it away and iterate. I've made a couple attempts at running it without the backend but it's so railsy in a not good way.
@aredridel@loke@lauren waaaaay beyond my skill set; but i'd work with whomever has them skills to make it happen with one caveat: the project has to be incorporated and structured as a coop. am not doing sharecropping for rich people's socialism ever again.
@aredridel@loke@lauren but someone has to pay the server bills. that's a fact. cooperative non-profit should be the defacto structure for FLOSS, not rich people's charity kink.
Actually here's where I am on that: for actual infrastructure I agree, but so much stuff would better be served without legal entities involved — let people spin things up and try stuff without ever having to give back. Keep corporate interests out by making things they're uninterested in—accountability and non-manipulative UX, etc.
There's so much overhead to setting up a non-profit, and it's a capitulation to our existing systems that are really dysfunctional.
That said, any community needs to absolutely not be a personal fiefdom, it needs accountability process and democratic input and accountability for how it's run. But to conflate that with the infrastructure (which can, to varying degrees depending on the technology being used), be relatively agnostic. I think that's the fundamental tension that the web3 folks were always badly poking at. but of course they threw the concept of community and accountability out, when in fact they often need to be decoupled from the infrastructure interests at times.
"There's so much overhead to setting up a non-profit "
as a charity, yeah; but the Associated Press is the model i keep bringing up.
charity benefits only the rich. and that's the people cashing the checks for the FLOSS project while the volunteers are taken for sharecropping rubes.
the way to avoid FLOSS fiefdoms is to pay your workers. FLOSS as a charity is the most settler colonial shit ever to come out of Silicon Valley. it needs to die in a fire.
@blogdiva Aye, I see it very differently — I do not consider community work charity, and find making things into "workers" (with the attendant concept of bosses) makes things nasty. Coops at least put everyone on the same side but I can't get behind the idea of making the very loving idea of creating community into "work" in that sense.
Like, it's effortful, but it's so far from a thing I want to be paid for. Being paid for it takes every last bit of enjoyment out of it for me.
But so too I can't think of it as the power relation of charity — the paternal benevolence, so far from it. I want a model of co-creation. The other way to avoid fiefdom is a commons instead. Where one can experiment and try things at small scale, but at any larger scale, one becomes responsible to the community.
@loke@lauren they wanna look so edgy and i fucking detest it. NEGL when i see a tech site like that? unless i absolutely need to deal with the code, i keep on moving. fuck darkmode.
The mode should reduce eyestrain by leveling out the contrast between what you're focusing on and ambient light. Dark mode became all the rage among the hacker culture because of how many of us like to do our thing in a dark box, but the real right answer is "whatever the ambient conditions are." Putting all the code in a black box framed by a white border makes things worse than light mode or dark mode alone.
@blogdiva@lauren interesting. I have astigmatism (as well as being near-sighted) and I've always found dark mode easier on my eyes because the glare from a white background screen makes it harder for me.
Yet another example of one-size definitely does not fit all. Glad you figured out what works best for you.
@ThomM@blogdiva There's no mystery around this area, the ophthalmological issues are well studied and reported. Overall, dark mode is a disaster for most people with astigmatism.
@lauren@blogdiva Good to know. Hadn't thought about it much beyond testing what worked best for me as an end-user who spends a lot of hours in front of screens. Today's monitors are so much better than they used to be.
@lauren I’m old enough to have been using “dark mode” before anything else was possible. Being able to leave that behind meant a huge step forward in ergonomics. I don’t get what’s the attraction with “dark mode”, perhaps Hollywood movies with green on black somehow makes it feel cool, but to me it’s but a step back to the green and amber on black terminals. 🤷🏼♂️
@lauren Huh, despite astigmatism, I find dark mode preferable ever since I developed persistent floaters. The floaters are really annoying on a light background, and I hate them. Anyway, choice is good.
@lauren I find this difficult to believe. The whole world was dark mode for decades before designers decided to try to imitate paper and it felt then and now like designers putting form over function. White backgrounds feel like trying to read a book with a bright backlight behind the book shining through. All this "dark mode is everywhere" feels counter factually, literally everything defaults to light mode because it looks pretty but users are always trying to change it to be dark
@stark Teleprinters (e.g. TTYs) were always black ink on white paper. Early CRT terminals had to use dark backgrounds because they couldn't get sharp images with the reverse using their normal tech. ADDS terminals (which we used extensively at the UCLA ARPA lab, managed to reverse this and do black on white which was much sharper. White on black almost always flared, and green on black was worse. Amber was intermediate. Other issues related to phosphor persistence, which is too complicated to get into right now.
@lauren but there's a huge difference between white paper with ambient light reflecting off it and having a light source shining in your eyes. I don't understand how anyone is comfortable staring into a light source. It feels like looking into a projector trying to read the text being projected.
@lauren Most of the modern browsers can detect, and advise the incomming page if the OS is in light or dark mode and load the appropriate CSS, if it exists.
I want that as the default for every web page!
I personally love dark mode, but switching between the two unexpectedly makes them both suck!
Add comment