It would be very cool imo to have similar aesthetic guidelines for all these fronts. Material design is the stardard in this era but Fediverse have the occasion to be more attractive with something new and more organized.
It would be boring
This is a bit misguided; standard protocols help with interoperability (ActivityPub, etc) however people would be free to use any view (UX/UI) they prefered and people should be encouraged to experiment and attempt bettere UXs.
For example, Tusky is an ActivityPub client that can open Mastodon, Pleroma, etc. and there are other clients with slightly different UX/UI. I use Fractal for Matrix connections regardless of the backend someone uses.
I think that’d be boring
Also just like, they are decentralized. You can’t tell dozens upon dozens of different people to “hey, make ur instance’s design follow these arbitrary rules thanks”
Without a “main/leading” instance, no federated app will gain mainstream attention. Most people don’t really care about the federation part, and will only visit the most popular instance, which is the one moderated by the developers.
So I would support OP’s suggestion in the “main” instances. Other instances are free to change whatever they like, but the default look should be similar (same fonts/colors).
This was my point, thank you.
But this isn’t the case with “usual” social media stuff either, why should it be the case with the fediverse?
Because unlike the fediverse, normal social media websites don’t try to present themselves as a “package”. With many fediverse projects aiming to connect, it would be more suitable imo for them to have similar designs.
This is my just humble opinion, yours is just as valid.
Ah, I see your point now. I still think it’d sell the wrong idea since it just causes centralization, which is a problem that platforms already deal with, but now I see its potential usefulness as well
I think that there is some potential in this idea.
Not sure about “default”, but as far as I know, most of the Fediverse platforms can be themed, so it would probably be a good start to design an uniform look for those that have that option already.
This kind of thing can be most easily achieved through bottom-up grasroots movement.
Try making some drafts of how you think the “similar aesthetic guidelines” would look like, gather people who are interested in this idea, and start working on your vision.
In the sense of recommended guidelines, obviously no obligation to follow them from individual instances. I will not underestimate the power of design, it has zero costs and a great impact.
I don’t understand what the benefit of that is supposed to be. You could argue that it might make it easier for users to navigate the platforms. But if a user is getting confused that seems more of an UI than design issue and different platforms will naturally have different needs in that regard anyways.
Other than that, I think the strength of federated services lies in their diversity and due to the open source, federated nature of most services, anyone is free to create their own apps/instances with unique designs anyways, so that seems like a losing battle from the get go.
The benefit would be that if someone knows how to use Fediverse-Thing “X” they’d have a headstart in learning how to use “Y” and “Z” as well, because they would all look/behave similarly. It’s a fairly standard UI/UX idea. See, for example, some “usability rules” at http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/taouu/html/ch01s03.html (esp. Rule of Bliss and Rule of Least Surprise).
Your idea is appealing, but a successful approach imho would be by perhaps making either the 1st or 3rd party apps themeable. This way an end-user could configure their apps/interfaces of choice to look how they want. [edit: @testman points out this is possible. Apologies for redundancy]
I would suggest not having the same design but having some sort of “this site is ActivityPub enabled” logo somewhere on the first screen.
That is a great idea. Maybe a “federated” badge that you can add e.g. in the app footer may be better, with a hover text of “This application is part of the Fediverse”, or something.
I’m not a fan of the idea but I’d love a Mastodon-like theme for Lemmy, not gonna lie
I’m not actually clear on how Lemmy fits into the Fediverse, to be honest. (This may be a problem in documentation.)
As others are saying, you can’t prescribe the UI, plus it might be boring. But I get your point. The communication protocol - via the ActivityStreams / ActivityPub open standards - allows apps to deeply integrate with other apps… in theory. We haven’t really scratched the surface yet on what is possible here. The protocols are very extensible and can be used for many different types of applications (see the AP Watchlist).
What I would like to see are way more ActivityPub servers whose services I can tie together to compose my own UI’s on top of. Instead of building apps, developers would build services that can be combined in a variety of ways. I wrote a bit about it in From silo-first to task-oriented app design on the SocialHub community. We are far from this vision to become reality, atm. For this more mature fediverse to arise a strong community of builders is needed, who evolve standards, standardize on protocol enhancements and design extensions.
I really like this idea. Just a guideline for every thing to be uniform and intuitive across different platforms
