Hello, lovely people! As an #introduction, I'm a historian (of the Soviet Union) working as an editor and project manager for transcript academic publishing.

I was born&raised in Berlin (east if that matters), spent some time in the UK and live in Bielefeld, Germany now. (yesyes, the one that doesn't exist).

Feel free to get in touch about academic publishing esp. in history or heritage studies!

Great points here…from @manton:

“The current Fediverse is impressive. It’s further along than most people would’ve guessed possible a few years ago, largely thanks to Mastodon’s polish and Twitter’s implosion. The next step should be getting to the point where the answer to my question above can be ‘yes’…”

https://www.manton.org/2023/07/25/next-step-for.html

I have this in my mentions before my second coffee this morning (*please* don’t go bother this person). This POV shows up in every masto/fedi usability conversation I’m in.

I have two compound questions for the people who believe product-design barriers correctly keep out undesirables. One now and the second in a few hours.

Which people and groups of people do you want to exclude from fedi, and which other groups are you fine with losing as collateral damage to keep out the first group?

Some people say they don't want to join the Fediverse or Mastodon, because they think the UI sucks. As a front end developer, a designer-kind of a person who creates user interfaces, I agree. Most of the web clients on the Fedi are horrendous, even Mastodon by default. There's lots of room for improvement.

We should really focus on how to make it more pleasing to the eye, more modern and more pleasant. This should not be a nerd network, just for geeks to geek out. This is not IRC or BBS.

As long as Mastodon for instance looks like it's designed by a back end engineer, contains font-awesome icons, looks like 2010, and stuff like that, being open and free is not good reason enough for many. I'm not bashing it, Mastodon is not the worst out there, in fact in my honest opinion Mastodon user experience is far better than Akkoma or Calckey for example. It's also more accessible than many modern UIs, for example my visual impaired wife prefers the Vanilla Mastodon UI over my #BirdUI modifications, she has some small tiny improvements of her own like distinguishing the colors in the action buttons as they have no proper contrast in any of the default themes. But that's it. She likes it as it is. So it cannot be that bad. However, it could be better overall.

#OpenSource doesn't mean the product should look like it's created in a basement by a math teacher. For some people Mastodon UX is sufficient (it even is for me, I like it enough and it doesn't prevent me from using it), but it should be WORLD CLASS. I don't say the answer is #MastodonBirdUI but it should be something much more modern and minimal than the current default UI. Pixelfed's developer is a designer oriented, Pixelfed is indeed an example of an awesome Fediverse app experience throughout the web and apps. That is how it should be.

Just my 2 cents.

#UI #UX #UserInterface #Design #Mastodon #Fediverse #Pixelfed #WebDev #FrontEnd #CSS

Look at this ridiculous sweetheart.

#birds #birdphotography #birdwatching