Don't. Ever. Publish. Stuff. That. ONLY. Supports. Dark. Mode.

I mean, I know a LOT of people love dark mode, and given the benefits that darkening interfaces provides... I get it.

But there are some people (like me) who may be visually impaired. Astigmatism, for example, can make reading text that is white on dark a real PITA. An effect known as "halation" occurs, where each letter behaves as if it were a flashlight, gaining its own halo of light and making all text read more blurry than normal.

No matter how good your glasses are, astigmatism still causes you to see a little blurry—it's something you get used to. But this damn effect makes all the text read as if you don't have your glasses on, or even worse, leading to much more tired eyes or even pain.

For everyone's sake, if you really care about accessibility, respect user preferences. If you want a dark interface by default, offer a light version if the user specifies it (in web design, this would be
prefers-color-scheme: light). The same goes for light interfaces.

@naipotato also desperately pleading for anyone who does bother doing a light theme to check the contrast ratios against basic accessibility guidelines because holy fuck so many of them have terrible contrast that its makes it somehow more difficult to read because its light grey against a white/light background

discord is especially bad for this but also mastodon honestly aint too hot on it either aaaaa i hate it

@avie what bothers me about Mastodon is that they literally did not support prefers-color-scheme until their 5.0 version.

sure, you could always select the theme you liked best from the preferences once logged in, but if you don't have an account there and they share you a link, you're stuck with the theme the instance admin imposed, which is almost always the dark theme.