Following on from yesterday's blog post about the new design for profiles coming in Mastodon 4.6... here is the video of @imanijoy recent talk at @fossdesign where they discuss the challenges and detailed thought that goes into the design of new features (and the redesign of existing ones). 🖌️

#FOSSBack #Mastodon #OpenSourceDesign #UX

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oNxpTvbTy54

Imani Joy – A Solo Designer’s Survival Guide to the Fediverse #FOSSDesign

YouTube

@Mastodon @imanijoy @fossdesign As a translator, I'm all too familiar with the limited space problem. It took me some iterations and terminology changes to get the new privacy button's text fitted into the posting box for my language.

At least, Mastodon being open source allows me to test and change things around and fix bugs until my translations works.

@Mastodon @imanijoy @fossdesign Speaking of terminology, Pixelfed has had a "Collections" feature for quite a while that is not Starter Packs, and also a starter pack feature called "Starter Packs". Do we really want to call starter packs "Collections" on Mastodon?

It might confuse people that the same thing is not called the same thing and the same term can mean different things depending on where you are in the Fediverse.

@imanijoy As an admin catering to a small community, it would be great if I could pick a starter pack in admin/settings/discovery to replace or in addition to the "Always recommend these accounts to new users" setting to help the community find each other across the Fediverse. Maybe for a later design round?
@gunchleoc this is already planned: Not for 4.6, but once the feature has had some time to simmer and there's a healthy number of collections to choose from. Thank you! 😎

@imanijoy Excellent!

I'll port my fedidevs collection to the new format as soon as I upgrade my server.

One problem this will definitely solve is that some people consented to be in the starter pack (I manually asked for consent first) but had their discoverability set in such a way that I couldn't add them there. So, it will be good to have separate controls for that. I expect that the controls workflow will be similar to mentions & quotes and that the devil will be in the details as always.