This kind of analysis misses the point.
Nothing against you in particular, @individual8. Rather, I’d like to use this opportunity to respectfully highlight why we - the very Community that Mastodon developers are building Mastodon for - are sick and tired of these arguments.
1. They’re deeply patronising and disparage our experiences and agency
Anyone bringing them up is essentially saying “I know better what’s good for you, dear”. This kind of treatment is a big reason why we’re leaving mainstream services and software, and looking for alternatives that respect us. It’s one of the reasons we flocked to Mastodon in the first place - no algorithmic bubbles, no spoonfed content specially selected for maximum engagement bait, etc.
2. You misunderstand their purpose
People began studying and linking together these minutiae of human psychology, because corporations with evil incentives needed a way to maximise screen time and engagement in their apps. They use every possible “calming” and “seamless” facade trick as cover for the dark patterns they subject their users to for control and profit.
This stuff was never intended as guidelines for how to make your user experience more pleasant and user-focused. In fact, it’s always been about the opposite - making the experience anti-user and actively hostile, but packaging it in a way that makes fewer people notice.
That’s not what Mastodon has been to us so far, but now we’re getting the feeling that that can no longer be taken for granted. This UI design itself is a message to that effect.
3. They disregard the social context
Mastodon has an identity of its own. We, the tens, maybe hundreds of thousands of people who use it regularly, hopped on board because we liked it.
Mastodon (and similar) instances are the social websites where all the relevant information has been laid out clearly with dividers and a variety of easily recognisable shapes, where our profile pictures are square like they ought to be, where there are no floating pills and piles of crap trying to yank our attention, where things work a certain way we’re mostly comfortable with and have grown accustomed to.
Mastodon is NOT a throwaway corporate product whose only utility is making the line go up, and all whose features that don’t align with that goal should be thrown away.
Making controversial changes in the name of chasing some arbitrary metric designed for goals diametrically opposite to those of the Mastodon community damages this social context, and turns a place we genuinely felt comfortable in into another cold business front.
4. Nobody asked for them
And just like I’ve never heard anyone say “I wish the corners were more rounded in Windows 7”, I’ve never seen any social media user complain that Mastodon’s user interface as a whole was unwelcoming, tiresome, didn’t look “native enough”, or indeed that the corners were not circle enough.
I couldn’t find any posts on this forum that would bring up such feedback either.
Plenty of accessibility requests have been made over the years, yet none of them have been “please turn all the corners into circles”.
Appendix: a look at the greater fediverse and web
You can’t tell me these applications/websites are “clinical”, “like an administrative console”, “cold” or “exclusionary”. Yet I don’t see “pills” and circles dominating their UIs.
The first screenshot is Discord, for crying out loud. If they thought their users would like circles everywhere, they’d have done it a long time ago. (They still follow the frustrating trend of circle profile pictures, regrettably.)
If anything, Mastodon’s sidebar list of buttons feels more “administrative console” than basically anything else in social software. But somehow that’s not part of what this “new design philosophy” about “not feeling clinical” addresses.