They perfectly illustrate the Corporate Mindset. I like to imagine they were designed by a conclave of neurotypical and painfully unfunny and uncreative MBAs who got together in a coworking space and brainstormed the most consensual and least offensive avatar tech they could fathom. Likely none of them ever had a passing thought about what makes for compelling character design. Certainly none of them can stomach the idea of emergent phenomenon in communication. And above all nothing must stick out; to them the idea that users would want to make a non-human, cyborg, furry, green-skinned, or whatever avatar is abhorrent. Jane’s quirky facial expression is the full extent of allowable creativity (and even then you know they had a 30 minute debate about including it).
These avatars do a better job of inspiring dread in me than half the shit in Severance.
Tangentially, it reminds me of when we went from Geocities/MySpace/custom reddit CSS/custom youtube pages to “you can change your PP and banner”. … okay? Was a unified design language really worth crushing all visual creativity?
… and now I think it’s a shame that Lemmy and Mastodon’s default clients don’t support (AFAIK) custom CSS for communities/user pages. I think that would be very iconic for the Free Web. Is someone working on this? I feel like someone should be working on this.
Lemmy does come with a standard web interface that you could apply custom css to. If that custom css then federates, other instances could show it on their end.
Might clutter the Lemmy API with stuff that less than half of users actually wants to use though. Maybe it’s better to make a separate system of fediverse user styles with a browser plugin. Then someone on Mastodon could also see it without having to extend the entire ActivityPub standard.
If it’s a browser plugin it won’t receive widespread adoption. I don’t know what the actual numbers are but I’m willing to bet well over 95 % of desktop lemmy users are using the default frontend despite the many alternatives.
Old Reddit+RES did it right IMO: custom CSS but an easy-to-use toggle on a per-community basis, plus (IIRC) a global toggle in case one doesn’t want custom CSS at all.
Custom CSS wouldn’t even necessarily have to federate, though it would be better if it did (but there are probably security concerns to address). It’s CSS, it’s supposed to gracefully degrade; if CSS federation isn’t supported, it doesn’t break the user experience. That doesn’t have to change anything in ActivityPub either, you can just add a custom field for the styling and let clients figure out what to do with it.
Kind of the whole spirit is to give users a tool and no worry so much about the rough edges. Custom CSS doesn’t have to work perfectly, it just has to work for most users.
They perfectly illustrate the Corporate Mindset. I like to imagine they were designed by a conclave of neurotypical and painfully unfunny and uncreative MBAs who got together in a coworking space and brainstormed the most consensual and least offensive avatar tech they could fathom. Likely none of them ever had a passing thought about what makes for compelling character design. Certainly none of them can stomach the idea of emergent phenomenon in communication. And above all nothing must stick out; to them the idea that users would want to make a non-human, cyborg, furry, green-skinned, or whatever avatar is abhorrent. Jane’s quirky facial expression is the full extent of allowable creativity (and even then you know they had a 30 minute debate about including it).
These avatars do a better job of inspiring dread in me than half the shit in Severance.
Tangentially, it reminds me of when we went from Geocities/MySpace/custom reddit CSS/custom youtube pages to “you can change your PP and banner”. … okay? Was a unified design language really worth crushing all visual creativity?
… and now I think it’s a shame that Lemmy and Mastodon’s default clients don’t support (AFAIK) custom CSS for communities/user pages. I think that would be very iconic for the Free Web. Is someone working on this? I feel like someone should be working on this.
It’s like the Corporate Memphis of emojis.
I’m really glad that I discovered the phrase Corporate Memphis, because it works really well as an out of context pejorative. E.g.
That could refer to something that isn’t at all like the corporate Memphis art style in a literal sense, but has all of the vibes.
Instance admins can add whatever css they want. I’ve seen since cool ones
Sure, but community moderators can’t. Spinning up my own instance shouldn’t be a requirement to use custom CSS.
Damn that was on point. Thank you for reminding me what I miss about the old web.
This seems significantly harder to achieve here. I believe Lemmy doesn’t have a unified frontend across instances, or does it?
Lemmy does come with a standard web interface that you could apply custom css to. If that custom css then federates, other instances could show it on their end.
Might clutter the Lemmy API with stuff that less than half of users actually wants to use though. Maybe it’s better to make a separate system of fediverse user styles with a browser plugin. Then someone on Mastodon could also see it without having to extend the entire ActivityPub standard.
If it’s a browser plugin it won’t receive widespread adoption. I don’t know what the actual numbers are but I’m willing to bet well over 95 % of desktop lemmy users are using the default frontend despite the many alternatives.
Old Reddit+RES did it right IMO: custom CSS but an easy-to-use toggle on a per-community basis, plus (IIRC) a global toggle in case one doesn’t want custom CSS at all.
Custom CSS wouldn’t even necessarily have to federate, though it would be better if it did (but there are probably security concerns to address). It’s CSS, it’s supposed to gracefully degrade; if CSS federation isn’t supported, it doesn’t break the user experience. That doesn’t have to change anything in ActivityPub either, you can just add a custom field for the styling and let clients figure out what to do with it.
Kind of the whole spirit is to give users a tool and no worry so much about the rough edges. Custom CSS doesn’t have to work perfectly, it just has to work for most users.