Well, Mastodon 4.3 landed on my instance and suddenly I am Old Man Yells at Stupid New CSS. It's not as if Mastodon's web interface has ever been well, comprehensible, but they've really doubled down on poor legibility and inelegance, and solved zero problems that I can detect.
And, of course, none of the most problematic new things are tweakable.
@geoffduncan I’ve been tempted many times to just hire somebody to create a minimalist custom theme for Mindly.Social but the extra work it takes to maintain extra themes is kind of shocking to me because every update requires me to manually edit core files. I would have expected a built in feature to apply new themes easily by now, but I know there are bigger concerns for the devs to work on.
Have you tried the Bird-UI theme? I prefer it over the stock theme.
@KuJoe
I tried Bird UI for a bit over the summer, and didn't see what problems it solved. I gather "Bird" refers to "the bird site," but I was never very active there so nothing feels familiar. I considered its presentation poor, then made-poorer under new management.
I haven't looked into what's required on the back end to maintain/upgrade/modify an Mastodon instance. You're making it sound like I don't want to know. :)
@geoffduncan there are other options like https://elk.zone/ that I can implement to essentially detach the UI from Mastodon since it’s not a theme but a full on replacement for the front end.
Does something like that look like a better UI to use? I’ve been avoiding it because it’s still in beta, but I can easily deploy it on a subdomain like elk.mindly.social as an alternative.
@KuJoe
I know nothing about elk.zone. At a glance it seems promising, but I certainly am not asking you to go to any effort. (You put quite a lot of effort into mindly.social as it is!)
I share your opinion that holding off while it's in beta is probably a wise move. Sure, it might be easy to deploy…but if you need to deploy it several times a week to get around showstoppers, etc., is it really easy to deploy? ;)
@ElectricDoorknob
Sigh. That reads like every interaction I've ever had with an open source project, which can basically be summarized as
Me: "Here's a thought!"
Project maintainer(s): "Fork off."
I feel like in addition to Doctorow's "ensh*ttification" process, there might be a need for a term like "audacification" for the way open source projects tend to go from a sleek gourd with a clear purpose to a giant warty Halloween pumpkin.
Geoff Duncan
KuJoe 💞
Nik