Some people say they don't want to join the Fediverse or Mastodon, because they think the UI sucks. As a front end developer, a designer-kind of a person who creates user interfaces, I agree. Most of the web clients on the Fedi are horrendous, even Mastodon by default. There's lots of room for improvement.
We should really focus on how to make it more pleasing to the eye, more modern and more pleasant. This should not be a nerd network, just for geeks to geek out. This is not IRC or BBS.
As long as Mastodon for instance looks like it's designed by a back end engineer, contains font-awesome icons, looks like 2010, and stuff like that, being open and free is not good reason enough for many. I'm not bashing it, Mastodon is not the worst out there, in fact in my honest opinion Mastodon user experience is far better than Akkoma or Calckey for example. It's also more accessible than many modern UIs, for example my visual impaired wife prefers the Vanilla Mastodon UI over my #BirdUI modifications, she has some small tiny improvements of her own like distinguishing the colors in the action buttons as they have no proper contrast in any of the default themes. But that's it. She likes it as it is. So it cannot be that bad. However, it could be better overall.
#OpenSource doesn't mean the product should look like it's created in a basement by a math teacher. For some people Mastodon UX is sufficient (it even is for me, I like it enough and it doesn't prevent me from using it), but it should be WORLD CLASS. I don't say the answer is #MastodonBirdUI but it should be something much more modern and minimal than the current default UI. Pixelfed's developer is a designer oriented, Pixelfed is indeed an example of an awesome Fediverse app experience throughout the web and apps. That is how it should be.
Been trying this out secretly for the past few weeks — a "catch-up" timeline page. Did whole bunch of iterations, where I myself is the guinea pig, but this time reaching a point where I just got to share it out in the public.
NOT final design, still very experimental, only on my local machine
Instead of algo timeline, this is focused on data-grid-like UI for configuring exactly what I want to see.
This honestly could be another full-fledged app/client by itself 🫠
#Mastodon bringt "Quote Posts" ab Version 4.4 (aktuell ist 4.3). Wir dürfen gespannt sein, ob dieses zum teil umstrittene Feature irgendwas an der Kultur hier ändert. Vermutlich hängt das maßgeblich davon ab, wie es im Detail implementiert ist.
Musk is indeed a dictator of one. And as much as I love Mastodon, the train left the station & it missed it. And without the equity of a mover like the EU or the US govt, it's sadly never going to pull in users to attain critical mass.
Feeding #Threads trash into #Mastodon is the functional equivalent of when Tom Sawyer got the other kids to whitewash the fence for him for free. Only in this case Tom is Zuckerberg and his cohorts, laughing at the "Fediverse" rubes.
Hello #Mastodon, I am seeking comments from the community to include in my next newsletter about #Google's change in their privacy policy. (They now say that anything you post online will be used to train their AI models.)
I am especially interested of thoughts from #writers and #artists.
How do you feel about this move? What do you think about placing your content behind a wall to protect it? And will this change how you post online in the future?
New #Mastodon merch just dropped! Responsibly sourced cotton t-shirts, enamel pins, mugs, and vinyl stickers with cute, exclusive designs! Get them while they're hot and support the development of Mastodon!
Hey everyone, super excited to be exploring the fediverse both here on kbin and elsewhere. Looking for a Mastodon client primarily for iOS, great to see the main app is open-source, but there seems to be quite a few options out there. Feel free to share non-iOS clients for others' benefit as well....
I'm trying to convince the last friends I have left on Facebook, X, Threads, or BlueSky to join the Fediverse. Some have tried but felt a sense of loneliness. Nowadays, many people are so used to doing what algorithms suggest that they can no longer make independent choices.
My timeline here, on the other hand, is beautiful.
I see what I want, I follow people who post what I like, and no one tells me what I should do. Freedom may come with a "cost," but whatever it is, it's worth the effort. Always. #Fediverse#Mastodon#SocialNetworks
As an effect of the recent Reddit blackout, the company is now surrounded by disappointed investors and community. I predict that Reddit may end up facing the same fate as Tumblr: being sold to another company. Only time will tell what the future holds for Reddit, but one thing is for sure - the protest will leave a lasting...
It's absolutely insane how #Mastodon DDoS'es sites when a link is mentioned. Every time I mention one of my blog links in a post, thousands of sites seem to hit the server, knocking out email for the duration, and there's absolutely NOTHING on those pages for them to fetch. No images, nothing. What an awful design.
#Mastodon 4.2 is rolling out across the social web! On our quest to make Mastodon more delightful and easy to use, we've overhauled search, sign-ups, cross-server interactions and a whole lot more:
It’s approximately one year since the peak of the enshittification of Twitter and the big Mastodon influx. Let’s ask again: What is your main microblogging platform? Boosts welcome.
Before the whole Reddit migration I was passively aware of the Fediverse, I thought I somewhat grasped the concept, and had created a Mastodon account, but never really used it....
As Big Tech smells blood in the water and starts circling around #Twitter’s floating corpse, I’m perplexed and angry that #Mastodon still gets dismissed as something that is ‘too complicated’ or ‘doesn’t work’ - seen this recently from tech savvy friends and in a Guardian article. Why?? It obviously DOES work, and doesn’t feel very complicated to me. But people are going to be pushed towards #Threads & #BlueSky, perpetuating the problem.
Feedback is extremely welcome. This is a loving document, it can only be honed and get better with loving input from other users. What are your best tips for #creators?
Mastodon has the responsibility to promote diversity in the Fediverse
I love the Threadiverse. Compared to the microblogging Fediverse’s sea of random thoughts, Lemmy and kbin are so much easier to navigate with the options to sort posts by subscribed, from local instances or everything federated. You can also sort by individual community, and then there are the countless ways to order the posts and comments (which are stored neatly under the main post, by the way). That people can more easily find the right discussions and see where they can contribute also means that the discussions tend to be more focused and productive than elsewhere. Decentralisation also makes a lot of sense, since it is built around different communities. All that’s needed is users.
Things were going quite well for a while when Reddit killed third-party apps, prompting many to leave and find the Threadiverse. However, it is quite difficult to entertain a crowd that has grown accustomed to a constant bombardment of dopamine-inducing or interesting content by tens of millions of users, if you only have a couple hundred thousand people. This is causing some to leave, which of course increases this effect. The active users have more than halved since July, according to FediDB. The mood is also becoming more tense. Maybe the lack of engagement drives some to cause it through hostility, I’m not quite sure. Either way, the Threadiverse becoming a less enjoyable place to be, which is quite sad considering how promising it is.
But what is really frustrating is that we could easily have that userbase. The entire Fediverse has over ten million users, and many Mastodonians clearly want to engage in group-based discussion, looking at Guppe groups. The focused discussions should also be quite attractive. Technically we are federated, so why do Mastodonians interact so little with the Threadiverse? The main reason is that Mastodon simply doesn’t federate post content. I really can’t see why the platform that federates entire Wordpress blogs refuses to federate thread content just because it has a title, and instead just replaces the body with a link to the post. Very unhelpful.
The same goes with PeerTube. There are plenty of videos on there that I am quite sure a lot of Mastodonians would appreciate, yet both views and likes there stay consistently in the tens. Yes, Mastodon’s web interface has a local video player, but in most clients it is the same link shenanigans, may may partly explain the small amount of engagement. This is also quite sad, because Google’s YouTube is one of the worst social network monopolies out there, if not the worst.
And I know some might say that Mastodon is a microblogging platform and that it makes sense only to have microblogging content, but the problem is that Mastodon is the dominant platform on the Fediverse, its users making up close to 80% of all Fedizens. It has gone so far that several Friendica and Hubzilla users have been complaining about complaints from Mastodonians that their posts do not live up to Mastodon customs, and of course, that people frequently use “Mastodon” to refer to the entire Fediverse. This, of course, goes entirely against the idea of the Fediverse, that many diverse platforms live in harmony with and awareness of each other.
The very least that Mastodon could do is to support the content of other platforms. Then I’d wish that they’d improve discoverability, by for instance adding a videos tab in the explore section, improving federation of favourites since it is the dominant sorting mechanism on many other platforms, and making a clear distinction between people (@person) and groups (!group), but I know that that is quite much to ask.
P.S. @feditips , @FediFollows , I know that you are reluctant to promote Lemmy and its communities because of the ideology of its founders, but the fact is firstly that it’s open source and there aren't any individual people who control the entire project, and that the software itself is very apolitical. In fact, most Lemmy users both oppose and are on instances that have rules against such beliefs, so I highly encourage you to at least help raise awareness on the communities. Then, of course, there’s kbin, which isn’t associated with any extremism at all. As a bonus, it has much better integration with the microblogging Fediverse, but it is a lot smaller and younger, and still very much under development.
Anyways, that was a ramble. Thanks for hearing me out.
What is your favorite Mastodon client?
Hey everyone, super excited to be exploring the fediverse both here on kbin and elsewhere. Looking for a Mastodon client primarily for iOS, great to see the main app is open-source, but there seems to be quite a few options out there. Feel free to share non-iOS clients for others' benefit as well....
The Future of Reddit after the Blackout
As an effect of the recent Reddit blackout, the company is now surrounded by disappointed investors and community. I predict that Reddit may end up facing the same fate as Tumblr: being sold to another company. Only time will tell what the future holds for Reddit, but one thing is for sure - the protest will leave a lasting...
How familiar were you with the Fediverse before coming here?
Before the whole Reddit migration I was passively aware of the Fediverse, I thought I somewhat grasped the concept, and had created a Mastodon account, but never really used it....