Do you like the Mastodon approach of consistent branding for different instances?

Comments

• plcplc@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  It took me embarrasingly long to get a feeling for how Mastodon was supposed to work across instances, and what it means that lemmy, madtodon etc are part of the Fediverse.

  I think the “join mastodon” or “join lemmy” rhetoric just obscures how things work. IMO it would be better to describe Lemmy and Mastodon as ActivityPub readers, similar to how there used to be RSS readers.

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• lambalicious@lemmy.sdf.org ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  My kneejerk reaction coming from the '90s is that if I wanted the same branding for everything, I’d just use Apple or Gnome. At the same time, constructing brand image on top of a third-party base that is in development and can change over time can be difficult, or just “not worth the $RESOURCE”. So I’m currently in the position that something like “universal Mastodon view with brand accents” would be the most fitting thing for the Fediverse.

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• Kichae@lemmy.ca ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  No. I think it works to hide the distributed nature of the fediverse, and works to make things that are inherent to a distributed model seem uncanney and broken.

  It also strips some value out of the ‘local’ experience, communicating that each Mastodon-based website is the same as any other, and presenting something that looks like a dumb terminal, rather than a stand-alone website.

  Ultimately, I think it’s bad for the fediverse.

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  • roguetrick@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    Actually one of the reasons I like misskey derivatives and their diversity.

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• hendrik@palaver.p3x.de ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  I think the sane approach is: the developers offer one good theme and branding that is the default setting and works well out of the box. And instance administrators can then either be lazy and leave that in place, or (better) go ahead and tweak their place to their liking. Decorate it, make it unique if they like. I think it shows how much effort someone put into something. But on the other hand, you often can't mess with 20 different free software projects and change the CSS code just for the sake of it. I think it's also fine to just leave some things on a good default setting.

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  • 3dmvr@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    They specifically make it harder to change that logo tho, its on purpose, its not in the ui settings by design, wouldn’t be hard to implement (every other image can be changed from admin settings)

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• tired_n_bored@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  I like consistent branding because non-technical people get confused when they have one billion different names for everything when you could just say “join a Mastodon instance”

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  • mat@zelk.space ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    @tired_n_bored they don’t need to know it’s a mastodon instance tbh

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    • tired_n_bored@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      But people are used to one and only Twitter. If we create one billion different brands for the same Mastodon instances nobody is gonna hop on them cause they will understand even less than what they understand now about Mastodon and the fediverse

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• noodlejetski@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  the “consistent branding” is only really there on major instances. you can use custom themes (like Tangerine) or front-ends (like Mangan) as the default experience on your instance

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  • 3dmvr@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    tangerine link doesn’t work but thats cool haven’t heard of mangan

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    • noodlejetski@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      fixed.

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• commander@lemmings.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  Absolutely. I think there should be sane defaults, and whoever deviates from them should know why they’re doing it.

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• Fizz@lemmy.nz ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  I like the different instances having their own branding but i like the option to switch back to the normal theme. I also like when users put their own spin on the services logo instead of using something unrelated.

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  • commander@lemmings.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    Yes. Having the OPTION is great.

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    • Fizz@lemmy.nz ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      I like what we have here on Lemmy with the multiple different frontends.

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• singletona@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  I do think there does need to be an amount of consistancy in branding so it’s more apparent that these things can talk to eachother.

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  • KoboldCoterie@pawb.social ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    Something like many Reddit subs do with the snoo, where they took a common, recognizable icon and customized it for their instance would have worked well if there was a similar icon for instances to latch onto, but we’re past that point now.

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    • 3dmvr@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      Some sort of icon/logo representing the fediverse on every site could be useful, or maybe different symbols for microblogging, threadiverse, etc. and the site includes what it has at the top or bottom somewhere, prob too late for that

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    • Cris_Color@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      I mean there’s the Lemmy mouse mascot guy, but yeah instances are already pretty established

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