It makes it easier to understand what this is and that they are interconnected, but I think I enjoy unique branding/themes more in practice now that I am actually using the fediverse.
It took me embarrasingly long to get a feeling for how Mastodon was supposed to work across instances, and what it means that lemmy, madtodon etc are part of the Fediverse.
I think the “join mastodon” or “join lemmy” rhetoric just obscures how things work. IMO it would be better to describe Lemmy and Mastodon as ActivityPub readers, similar to how there used to be RSS readers.
My kneejerk reaction coming from the '90s is that if I wanted the same branding for everything, I’d just use Apple or Gnome. At the same time, constructing brand image on top of a third-party base that is in development and can change over time can be difficult, or just “not worth the $RESOURCE”. So I’m currently in the position that something like “universal Mastodon view with brand accents” would be the most fitting thing for the Fediverse.
I do think there does need to be an amount of consistancy in branding so it’s more apparent that these things can talk to eachother.
Something like many Reddit subs do with the snoo, where they took a common, recognizable icon and customized it for their instance would have worked well if there was a similar icon for instances to latch onto, but we’re past that point now.
I mean there’s the Lemmy mouse mascot guy, but yeah instances are already pretty established
Is it not a lemming?
It is, and somehow that escaped me… 😅
No. I think it works to hide the distributed nature of the fediverse, and works to make things that are inherent to a distributed model seem uncanney and broken.
It also strips some value out of the ‘local’ experience, communicating that each Mastodon-based website is the same as any other, and presenting something that looks like a dumb terminal, rather than a stand-alone website.
Ultimately, I think it’s bad for the fediverse.
