It makes it easier to understand what this is and that they are interconnected, but I think I enjoy unique branding/themes more in practice now that I am actually using the fediverse.
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.
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.
Actually one of the reasons I like misskey derivatives and their diversity.
tangerine link doesn’t work but thats cool haven’t heard of mangan
fixed.
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.
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.
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”
Absolutely. I think there should be sane defaults, and whoever deviates from them should know why they’re doing it.
On theming, akin to Linux, I don’t think there’s much room for breakthroughs, or at least they’d be harder to achieve, being more a case of picking the “flavor” you want instead. Furthermore, I think this applies to UI as a whole in social medias, federated ones included.
Now, one thing that annoys me and I think that falls on branding is how most of the federated platforms don’t have proper names. As I follow communities and people primarily by RSS, I like things to be organized, and having to figure out how to fit “names” like
kbin.social(RIP),lemm.ee,feddit.ukand the sort is a bit of a migraine. "<.<
