okay I've got The New Mastodon and … I guess overall I actually like it? I still kinda hate the way that we collectively roll out UI and app updates where it's Just Different Now, but this is actually addressing some of my complaints and the big squishy rounded corners everywhere don't bother me all that much
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@glyph I'm going to have to actually look at the Mastodon site directly. I have tried a couple things, but I keep going back to PhanPy
@glyph Yeah, I think it's mostly fine. I preferred the color scheme of the previous "dark" mode, though. I think it had better contrast.
@jwz My feelings about contrast oscillate wildly depending on the ambient lighting conditions wherever I happen to be, so I've become a bit inured to the designer's choices in the software. As long as it's a legit dark mode I'm fine.
@glyph Out of curiosity, are you a light mode or a dark mode Mastodon person? (Or someone who doesn't have strong opinions™ either way and goes back and forth¹.)
¹ our Grafana dashboards are all in dark mode because that's the default when I set it up years ago and now it's too late to change. It's perfectly okay and maybe better for graphs with tons of lines on them.
@cks Dark mode. I have floaters which make light-mode UIs very distressing to use.
@glyph I have the worst of both worlds, floaters plus haloing (although quite possibly less floaters and more haloing than you). Light mode is more readable once the dust (floaters) settle.
(I've had to sort of get resigned to floaters, because in bicycling and etc I get to Just Deal.)
@cks I also get astigmatic halos and occasional diplopia but I find that I can manage those more easily with regular breaks to ease eye strain. We all have to pick our poison though :-|
@glyph Oddly it doesn't use the horizontal space, so I have narrow columns, but a big blank space. Also in the left sidebar I have a blank space where the new post box used to be! Eh, it's free.
@davebauerart I'm trying this out for the first time on a small laptop display, and it seems to have given me better control over column pinning so I'm making more effective use of the available horizontal space in this specific environment. and I could criticize this all day but the old UI was far from perfect to
@glyph Yeah I have trained myself to only use this when I am on my 24" desktop so my first impression was different, I need to think more holistically.
@glyph it is my thought that just giving people an opt in for design overhauls would significantly reduce the negative feedback that is received
@760ceb3b9c0ba4872cadf3ce35a7a4 there's a massive logistical problem with maintaining long-lived forks of different frontends and supporting old "bad" designs forever if people seem to like them. but maybe yeah we should just do that anyway? I don't know. Certainly more agency for users would be a good thing all other things being equal.
@glyph its definitely tough and there is a line to be drawn between zero agency and forking your code like a fractal. but insofar as there already has to be an onramp period where you maintain both before you go live with the new one (in our world thats them testing internally and then on mastodon.online) , that, to me, is valuable time to give users the option to try something new and maximize their agency before you decide that developer ease should override their agency.
@glyph and because "we have to spend double the engineer hours maintaining two things" is easy for an entity to understand and act on and "users dont have agency in choosing how the code they run on their computer works" is this fuzzy externality , i think we probably tend to act in favor of the former more often than we should. that probably can't mean maintaining parallel designs in perpetuity after a redesign is considered necessary, but maybe it means that users get, idk, months rather than days to "onboard" themselves.
@glyph and because "we have to spend double the engineer hours maintaining two things" is easy for an entity to understand and act on and "users dont have agency in choosing how the code they run on their computer works" is this fuzzy externality , i think we probably tend to act in favor of the former more often than we should. that probably can't mean maintaining parallel designs in perpetuity after a redesign is considered necessary, but maybe it means that users get, idk, months rather than days to "onboard" themselves.
