Am thinking we need less BRANDING in #fedivers apps and more community look and feel in the #UX would be nice to have “wizard” to run to set this up and try and standardize all the fealds and images sizes, so it can be similar for each application.
And yes, we need to talk about the #geekproblem to make this happen.
• The “wizards” is what I currently do with redaktor.
In general I am transferring the server to https://fresh.deno.dev and then everybody can also create themes and clients. Can demo.
Also all GitHub - redaktor/widgets-preview for all ActivityPub types are included.
Anybody who could do TypeScript, JS, Spanish or French can currently help much 
• The fields (in real use and proposals) were standardized in the meetings, see the pages for
• The image sizes problem:
As a photographer letting any software dev. do my composition hurts. Very much.
See my reply to you here
The set of “well known” aspect ratios is standard and we could adapt to that:
“portraitVideo”: “9/16”,
“portraitPhoto”: “2/3”, “3/4”, “4/5”, “6/7”,
“square”: “1/1”, “7/6”,
“photo”: “3/2”, “16/10”,
“video”: “16/9”,
“cinema”: “37/20”, “16/7”,
“cinemaWide”: “21/9”, “8/3”, “2/3”
“apsP”: “3/1”, “16/5”, “10/3”,
“pano3”: “9/2”,
“pano4”: “12/2”
Sound like a good step, How to get the wider devs to think about instances being comunnertys ie. look and feel are important and codebase BRANDS being the opersit of this, it’s a kinda #geekproblem imperialism, yes totally unthinking and pushed by #NGO and funders, but is this a problem or not? What do we think?
Branding isn’t very important, and neither is conformity. Not looking bland and corporate can be a differentiator between the #OpenWeb and closed corporate stuff which tries to be All Things to All Cats. Personalization rather than depersonalized uniformity.
There could be some sort of fediverse badge (like the web 1.0 “works on netscrape” gifs) if you want people to be able to recognize that some app uses the fediverse, but I don’t think I’d go beyond that.
I agree to @bashrc -
give the user all the means of expressions, not limit.
But need to explain now
redaktor can adapt to any image size and even encourages to build your own theme.
If themes have baseline perfection (that is: E.g. in a masonry layout with 3 card-columns, each and every typographic line or any element will match the baseline which looks super tidy.)
In such special cases, we stick to the well known ratios.
Cause then, we can, without JS (!) make the element baseline perfect.
Historically the photography evolved from the canvas sizes looking happy (need to beat the devil out of the brush).
CSS aspect-ratio and object-fit is cool.
We can calc the diagonals of the well-known and of the image and find the nearest.
If we get an image 1024x768, we can do 1024/768 = 1,333333333333333 …
And 4 / 3 also = 1,333333333333333 …
This naming might make clearer how they come from
square: "1 / 1",
video: "16 / 9",
laptop: "16 / 10",
videoPortrait: "9 / 16",
cinema: "37 / 20",
cinemascope: "21 / 9",
tarantino: "8.28 / 3",
photo: "3 / 2",
photoMF: "7 / 6", // medium format camera
photoLF: "5 / 4", // large format camera
photoXL: "9 / 7", // superlarge format camera (with the big curtains)
photo43: "4 / 3", // micro four thirds
portrait: "2 / 3",
portraitMF: "6 / 7",
portraitLF: "4 / 5",
portraitXL: "9 / 7",
portrait43: "3 / 4",
profilePano: "16 / 7",
pano1: "9 / 2",
pano2: "12 / 2",
apsPano1: "3 / 1", // the aps fail
apsPano2: "16 / 5",
apsPano3: "10 / 3",
The #4opens has bandages for #openweb use Home - 4opens - Open Media Network need a sexy website for this and a new draft of the text.
Think its surprisingly hard for people to understand that the #fediversity:fediverse-futures and #activitypub are the contempery #openweb we need to talk and focus on this.
I’ve abolished branding and let people decide for themselves how to best present their photos to their friends. I guess you’ll just have to kick us out of the fediverse.
I think giving the “branding” to the communertys who run the instances is the right aproch. CURRENTLY, most of the codebase have strong, dominant project branding all over them. Yes you can mediate this by putting a lot of work into theming and the are ways to customize this to an extent, that each project douse in their own complex ways.
BUT up front project BRANDING is dominant in the codebase themselves and all our conversations around people using these codebases… this is obviously VERY crap from a user/group/community prospective.
This is pushed in a number of ways:
On the fediverse the is no coding for building communitys of people hosting and admining the instances. As these communities of use ARE the fediverse, this is bad, and it is stunting #openweb growth.
This obverse insight is actively #BLOCKED by the #geekproblem that dominates most #openweb tech development.
Ideas please to mediate this issue.
The #OGB is a tech project to mediate this bad outcome and shift some control into producer communertys.
As far as standardizing fields and image sizes go, I think that might be a good step towards interoperability, but at the same time, we probably should also embrace the concepts of being responsive.
For example, an image size that works well on a phone in portrait mode won’t work well in a web browser displayed on a monitor in landscape mode. So the challenge is that we can’t assume that one size fits all, because we won’t know in advance how users are consuming the images.
Projects such as Bootstrap have a worked to address this by making the display of images responsive regardless of the original size of the image. Images on phones are scaled down, whereas someone with a large monitor might see the higher resolution version.
Standardizing fields across platforms would also help with interoperability, but we have to be careful not to stifle new ideas or different use cases.
For example, a platform that has a Twitter-like experience that has no concept of groups is going to be missing fields when it tries to exchange messages with a platform that organizes content by group or forum area. This can be a nightmare to develop for when you try to make the two platforms exchange messages.
So standardization would be good; but we have to make sure we don’t over-standardize it.
The problem with branding is never the brand itself because a brand is just a reputation tied to a name or set of words. Or, another way of putting it, how they are perceived by others. For people, it is called a reputation. For companies, it is called a brand. Same concept.
If you do good works, your reputation or brand improves. If you do things people do not like, your reputation or brand suffers.
The problem is when people or companies focus more on how they are perceived by others than on improving themselves. Or they are projecting that they are better than everyone else. And I think this is what is being referred to here.
We need less “we are the best solution and you should chose us” and more “we are a family of solutions and we can work together through interoperability.”
I don’t think any of the comments address what am talking about, this is normal #geekproblem
My point is, “common sense” use of #NGO branding in our #openweb codebases is doing more harm than good, this is a simple statement, would be good to talk about this.
Some points:
With this in mind, think about our BRANDING What Is Branding? | The Branding Journal
“A brand is a name, term, design, symbol, or any other feature that identifies one seller’s good or service as distinct from those of other sellers” (American Marketing Association).
Is this what the #openweb is for? If it is not (AND IT IS NOT) why do all #fediversity projects have strong “individualistic” BRANDING.
Is this helping or hindering
Today I’m posting from phlegm. Yesterday I spent my time working on radish and I’ve been known to work on blurglefroosh on occasion. These cannot be found in any fediverse software database today and will be gone tomorrow.
This was flagged for being inappropriate, but it is completely factual (those are real fediverse software names at this precise moment in time) and relevant to the conversation and was not meant as a dis-courtesy to anybody. It is an honest expression of my current software development efforts and point of view; which are opposed to giving any significance to branding and marketing.
If you are wondering, the is a hashtag for this #stupidindividualism this has the same thinking as #geekproblem
That is the two words CAN be separated, thus we are not calling individualism stupid, and we are not calling geeks a problem.
The social project is to look at how to separate the 2 words, while talking about and addressing real, urgent social issues.
PS. don’t be a PRAT
A brand is not always about power. There are literally millions of small and micro companies and organizations that have a brand that no one has heard of and carry no market power at all. But it certainly is true that a larger entity can wield it’s brand in a powerful way. But the power comes from the entity itself, not the brand.
Typically the name of the project becomes its brand name, so you automatically get a brand name by naming your project.
You keep mentioning “branding” as the issue. What do you mean exactly by that? What behaviors are we talking about?
OK, let’s talk with some numbers:
peertube look for self branding and then look for fediverse or even #openweb branding, look at out of box expirence of branding.
do the same for mastodon
Can you add up who clams the brand in each case, then look at who creates THE content and who runs THE infrastructure?
What you are seeing is #dotcons and #NGO thinking of where value belongs, and deep-rooted #deathcult worship brought over from copying existing #mainstreaming models like twitter and youtube.
We need to talk about how this is stunting growth and change/challenge.
And yes, there is balance, best not to be a prat on talking about balance.
The problem is that branding is a double edged sword. On one hand, you need to get the word out so that people know that there are alternatives to Facebook and Twitter. On the other hand, a big brand drowns out all of the small players.
And some of the big players in the fediverse are promoting their platform instead of promoting federation with other platforms. And I think that is what you are trying to point out.
But a brand can be a good thing for the fediverse if it is used the right way. Let me give you an example.
Have you ever heard of the brand “Wi-Fi?” It is a registered trademark and certainly a brand most people have heard of. But how is that different from “Linksys” or “Apple” or “Comcast” or another brand that offers wireless networking products and services?
The difference is that “Wi-Fi” is a brand that is not owned by the manufacturers, and is instead owned by the Wi-Fi Alliance. Gear branded with “Wi-Fi” indicates that it can work with other gear branded with “Wi-Fi.”
So, back to Mastadon and PeerTube. They are federated, but they mostly promote federation between instances of itself, instead of promoting federation with competing platforms. Smaller platforms can’t “hitch their caboose” onto the larger platforms because those platforms only promote themselves instead of the larger fediverse.
Instead of knocking “branding” in general, perhaps what we need is a brand that is not owned by the platforms that indicates which platforms can work together. ActivityPub is one such brand, but that is just one protocol of many.
yes I clearly say the same here
I give one social tech path out of this mess, as you say we need more.
And a clear give a path here:
This one sums up my thinking BRANDING on the fediverse - #9 by hamishcampbell
I would like it if we talked about #openweb more, as #activitypub clearly comes from a long history here. And the #4opens are building from this HISTORY.
We can’t keep adding #techshit to the mess, it’s a basic #KISS comment.
As you might have noticed, this is exactly what am talking about #KISS
I assume #KISS stand for “Keep It Simple, Stupid” as I see no other reference to #KISS in this thread. If that is not what you are talking about, let me know.
While it is true that we should “keep it simple,” you still have to somehow communicate that A can talk to B, and unfortunately that means you have to specify which protocols we are talking about.
For example, there are different types of communications apps, but ones that speak “email” can talk to other systems that can speak “email” and ones that speak “XMPP” (a chat protocol) can only speak to other systems that use “XMPP.” Similarly, devices that speak “Wi-Fi” can only speak to other devices that speak “Wi-Fi” and can’t talk to ones that speak “AppleTalk.”
So, yes, we want to keep things simple, but you also have to be specific enough where the information is useful.
