Sintamo

joined 1 year ago
[–] Sintamo@beehaw.org 2 points 1 year ago

Appreciate it! I think a stretch-goal for the future could be a "muted colors" toggle, to tone things down a little while keeping the rest of the changes

[–] Sintamo@beehaw.org 3 points 1 year ago
 

Not sure if it's more relavant to Creative or Technology, so cross-posting here from: https://beehaw.org/post/743965

Exactly a week later, hello again!

I was so flattered by people's reaction to my last post - thank you for making me feel so welcomed by this community! I'm still toying with icon redesigns, but I noticed that people were equally (if not more) interested in the theme ideas I posted - so I've spent the last week trying to make them a reality! I call them Hive Light and Hive Dark, and I think they're ready to share with you all.

I was able to incorporate lots of tweaks to Beehaw's UI, including:

  • Customisable levels of minimalisation
  • Consistent padding and spacing site-wide, increasing legibility and cleanliness without sacrificing too much information density
  • Repositioned various UI/UX elements to make Beehaw easier and more intuitive to navigate
  • Consistent bee-themed colors! Lots of yellows, browns, and blues that play nice with each other and pass accessibility standards
  • Hover effects to reduce unnecessary line breaks with long hyperlinks
  • And more! But not that much more, it's just some CSS after all ;)

Hive Light:

Hive Dark:

There are more screenshots on the GitHub!

Installation is pretty simple as well:

  • Install Stylebot - this was the only CSS extension I found that worked reliably across browsers and consistently applied settings. YMMV with other extensions - Stylus just didn't work well for me :(
  • Check your Beehaw settings and select "darkly" if you want to use Hive Dark, and "litely" if you want to use Hive Light
  • Copy and paste the contents of either Hive_Light_Theme.css or Hive_Dark_Theme.css from the GitHub page into the "code" section of Stylebot
  • Et Violà!

This isn't my first time designing a UI, but it is my first time doing it with CSS edits, so I fully expect there to bugs and inefficient code. I would love to hear your feedback and incorporate new ideas into future versions. And feel free to copy my homework! If I can figure out this CSS stuff in a week, so can you, and I'd love to see what other people create.

One caveat: the Lemmy v0.18.0 release includes lots of (really awesome) updates to Lemmy-UI that will break this theme. I don't know when Beehaw will update, but I imagine it's imminent, so there will be more work to be done soon I'm afraid.

Thanks for reading, and take care!

 

Edit: I posted the first release of my theme based on the ideas in this post here!

Hi everyone!

I'm an Industrial/Product Designer in my professional life, and I was so inspired by @UrLogicFails's fantastic new community icons that I wanted to try out some of my own design ideas for Beehaw.

First, I tried my hand at an icon for Beehaw. I'm endeared to the little pixelated bee-cowboy we have now, but my background is in cleaner, more minimal designs that are easy to deploy to lots of different devices. A good logo sets a good first impression, and I want new users to see Beehaw as a real, legitimate alternative vision for social media. I've tried to recreate the back of a bee, and used the wings to form a subtle letter "B." My personal favorite is the ~~hexagon~~ bestagon, but I have both iOS and Android variations. Icon design is always really contentious, but it's also really fun - I'd love to see other people's ideas!

Second, I took a stab at tweaking the design of Beehaw, with the goals improving the layout and padding, introducing a more consistent color scheme, increasing legibility, and (of course) incorporating more bee elements. I'm working on a CSS theme that incorporates some of these changes, but others are beyond the scope of CSS injections and will require actual work on Lemmy-UI.

Light Theme:

Dark Theme:

I'd love to hear your thoughts, and I'm happy to share more if people are interested :)

Thanks for viewing, take care!

[–] Sintamo@beehaw.org 8 points 1 year ago

Oh wow, /r/AskBibleScholars (and /r/AcademicBiblical) were instrumental to me years ago when I began to lose my faith, and helped me arrive to the much healthier place I am now. I had no idea the same person was, in part, responsible for Beehaw. Hopefully we can bring some of those communities here in due time - they do too much good to be lost.

Thank you, Chris. I am so thankful that you're here right now, and it's a pleasure to be here with you.

[–] Sintamo@beehaw.org 5 points 1 year ago

I at least succeeded with my partner, so the most private conversations I have are safe in Signal. But unfortunately Meta knows just about every party, dinner, or event I've been too for the last ~8 years from having planned it in either Messenger or Instagram. It's shame we have to choose connection over privacy, and I hope someday someone hits on the magical combination of privacy, UX, and blind luck and makes a service we can use without feeling like a product.

[–] Sintamo@beehaw.org 5 points 1 year ago (1 children)

There's definitely a trust issue. ActivityHub doesn't fundamentally change that unfortunately - Meta would still see everything I post or say, and can still build a profile on me if my posts are visible in their app. You bring up an interesting thought though - my understanding is that ActivityHub would make migration to other platforms easier... even migrations off first party apps, if a Digg/Reddit/Twitter-style event occurred? Might help prevent some of the tomfoolery we're seeing now.

Or I'm also naive, I guess we'll find out.

[–] Sintamo@beehaw.org 24 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (15 children)

I genuinely believe this could be successful.

Mastodon STILL has UX issues, and the rest of ActivityHub and the Fediverse are impenetrable to the average person. That will change over time, but in the meantime, I can't even get people to use Signal for god's sake, let alone explain which Lemmy instance is best for them.

I still have an Instagram because my friends do. Without Instagram DMs and iMessage, I lose real life connections. If they fold in a Twitter-esque client to Instagram, that I can interact with from Mastodon if I want? That sounds like a really strong value proposition to me, and is the only way your non-techy friends are joining this parade any time soon.

But also, we've got to make sure these massive companies don't snuff out what Lemmy and Mastodon are building. There's a group of suits somewhere right now thinking of how to monetise this platform, and we need to be prepared for that.

[–] Sintamo@beehaw.org 19 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I went LiveJournal > Digg > Reddit, and there's definitely a similar energy to the Digg days - but the level of organization we're seeing here feels totally new. The other difference though, is that the Digg migration had direction. It felt like within a month we had all moved to Reddit. I don't see that happening here, so really this is uncharted territory. It'll be fun to watch, that's for sure.

[–] Sintamo@beehaw.org 16 points 1 year ago (4 children)

There's something so therapeutic about having Reddark open in a tab in the background - every time I hear the ding, a little voice in my head cheers. Interesting times, folks.

[–] Sintamo@beehaw.org 21 points 1 year ago

The whole blackout thing is super interesting, and to my knowledge it's the biggest protest of it's kind since Reddit hit the mainstream. I can't imagine it kills Reddit soon though. It's just the start of a brain-drain that will make Reddit lose relevancy over the next 5 to 10 years, and they'll wonder where they went wrong. Even I'll probably keep my alt account there, but the days of actually contributing will end for many.

But also fuck spez ;)

[–] Sintamo@beehaw.org 134 points 1 year ago (51 children)

It's one thing to test a new idea or a UX tweak or similar on a small portion of users - but just turning off a key way to access your service is so just so weird to me. How many of Reddit's decisions at this point are some version of, "hey, how angry do they get? What can we get away with?"