Reduce rounded corners

[ihadtomakethisacct]

rounding everything makes it look like it’s trying to fit in with the bulk of the bland, corporatized internet (obviously as stated in the blogpost; ‘fits w/ modern browsers’).

rounding everything to the point of avatars being circles? ugh. why. literally, why? it takes up the exact same amount of space & shows less. it makes no sense.

it looks like the rest of the internet. looking at replies now…it looks like Reddit.

Mastodon is not Reddit. i don’t want it to look like Reddit, or Facebook, or Insta, or any of the dozens of other corpo-sites we’re buried in. trying to chase that shit is going to end up dragging it all down; Mastodon is not & never will be Reddit or the rest. be different, it’s okay. don’t be worse for the sake of being different, by god no, but just be a site that’s unique & focused on the users, the artists, the nerds, & yes, the new users too. i guarantee, they can all deal with a site that looks slightly different than Facebook, even a new user. if new user feedback states they don’t understand the site, it ain’t 'cause the buttons weren’t round enough, i assure you.

to echo the original post; i’m tired of everything becoming rounder, and blander. there’s more than a few of us, obviously. the time spent on making a few different colors for the feed (which is cool don’t get me wrong. lots of good work went into this re-design, i do not doubt that, & i could list a dozen good choices that were made), but why not put that time into customization options for the feel, for the larger things that effect the actual content being shared & represented? i don’t understand & don’t expect any explanation would be satisfactory tbh. i’ve gone on too long already, that’s enough for now. i hope y’all re-assess the philosophy behind these choices.

i’m not disgusted by the redesign, but i’m disgusted by what it represents: a playing into the larger blanding & corporatization we’re seeing around us every day. just be like everything else! that’s what people expect, so give that to them.

i’ve been a contributor for years but honestly the choices of the last year or so are making me question the path ahead for the Mastodon team. i hope i’m wrong.

[machinelordzero]

The first article uses AI genned imagery, lowering trust.

The second one points out that the study a lot of the corner rounding is based on found the differences to be statistically insignificant, and allowed me to toggle between rounded corners and straight corners.
I strongly preferred the straight corners, despite the site asking “Cold, isn’t it?”

The third and fourth, after the second, if anything helped to show why the rounding isn’t needed as much as it’s used.

[Mitnelori]

After immersed myself some more in the new design, I would like to share some more thoughts about the roundness. But they are just my personal feelings, no way near scientific.

I’m okay with rounded edges, there doesn’t need to be completely sharp squareness. The old design with slightly rounded edges felt fine to me. With the new design, it gives me a feeling of slight unstableness, a feeling that small components can’t dock to the bigger ones, that they might rolling off the screen.

Rounding off too much of a picture’s corners makes it feel incomplete… With glitch’s settings and in Pixelfed, pictures are shown complete, or at least a complete picture within a round cornered window. I personally prefer no cutting corners or chopping for ratios for pictures, or at least makes it an option. So I don’t have to guess what’s not in the picture.

The same with circular user icon. But I guess it’s part of the new aesthetics, it’s hard to make it square with rounded edges, when so many other components has such a high roundness.

But after all it’s just my personal feelings and preferences. I’m okay with Mastodon going full roundness. It just feels less stable as before.

Edit: Am I just resist to changes? There are some changes happening in the Fediverse that I like, like PieFed added mute instances instead of defederating, and it can group cross-posting, an improvement to Lemmy. Fetch replies, collections, and lists are all great features recently added to Mastodon. There are positive changes in real life like increased green spaces. I might not be here if I’m that resist to change…

[smyzz]

Design is always a very subjective thing, I think. I personally celbrate, that the platform got design relaunch.

Mastodon already brings massive hurdles anyway because of its interior complexity compared to other platforms. So I consider a design that looks like it comes from a bygone era, for an additional onboarding hurdle. That’s a psychologic aspect.

I think it would be a good compromise to give users a choice option in the settings between a modern and a legacy UI.
In this way, everyone is given the freedom to actively choose one of the two themselves.

As for the rounding radius of feed images, I also consider them are far too strong. But it’s just my personal impression.

[Narked]

Ah, I find the new UI a lot more intimidating.

As a minor example which I will post as a separate topic the UI elements that I used a lot that have been moved to the bottom of the screen tend to get blocked by physical items placed on the table in front of the screen.

When these items were at the top of the UI then this was never a problem.

[Narked]

No-one has ever consulted me about such things.

How can the researchers be sure that people like me (whatever that is) are represented in their research?

I like my icons to be shaped in such a way that I can differentiate between them not just on the colour and the elements inside the icon but also by their shape.

My email client has an opened envelope to identify it on my XFCE launcher. I cannot mistake it for the SeaMonkey and Vivaldi icons on either side of it. Only the SeaMonkey icon is circular.

You could apply similar logic to avatars such that the shape of the avatar is determined by the image inside it. Then you could identify the avatar not just by some indistinct colours seen on a big TV screen 2 m away but also by the shape of the avatar.

My steering wheel is round and I will never mistake it for the gear lever next to my right hand which is not.

[esm]

Personally, I’m fine with rounded corners in most cases (the theme we use on our fork has quite a lot of them), but fully rounded profile pictures in particular are something I’m not big on. I’ll probably be applying a squircle shape to PFPs on the skin we’re adding on top of this redesign; if upstream could consider something similar (maybe a toggle for this), I’d be glad.

[poyribn]

Circular Profile Pictures in particular are a really bad Change.

Mastodon Users have designed their Profile Pictures with the Square Shape in Mind, assuming that they will stay Square. So many Profile Pictures have important Details in the Corners, which are now cut off after switching to Circles.

This needs to be reverted.

[cvh]

I don’t mind rounded corners - I even am fine with what Firefox has done - but excessively rounded corners, especially on a scrolling element where it has an odd parallax when the corners don’t move, and circular avatars is just too much. And yes makes it look bland given it’s what vibed websites do.

Just keep at 8 px or less - to me, even 4 px still make things feel ‘squishy’ with feeling like having half the content area for e.g. images cut off.

[poyribn]

I don’t get how the rounded Corners are better in Firefox 157 than in Mastodon 5.0

It gives about the same Level of Confusion.
Most Buttons have been angular for my whole Life — physical and digital — so adjusting to rounded Buttons is difficult.

This Level of Roundness acts like a visual Lubricant:
While sharp (or minimally rounded) Corners catch my Attention and make it easy to differentiate Elements,
full Roundness deflects my Attention and makes it harder to tell where the Element begins.

A good UX Designer understands this Difference and doesn’t muddy the Design with Circles everywhere.

[GunChleoc]

I actually like the rounded tabs in Firefox, because it makes it easier to spot which tab is the active one. Horses for courses?

As to Mastodon, I have the impression that labels on top of images are now taking a bit more space. Maybe the padding can be reduced there? This is especially problematic when the edges of images contain text that is being overlapped by the controls. Returning the show/hide control to using symbols might also be a good idea here.

[Mitnelori]

I’d like to agree with GunChleoc… Below is how it look like after I copy and pasted the old gallery design, at least the old labels are transparent (you can edit them to be even more transparent), and less rounded corners cover less of the images.

[outfrost]

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.

[machinelordzero]

Thankyou. You’ve said a lot of what I’ve wanted to say, but haven’t known how to.

[GunChleoc]

To illustrate the image text overlap issue, this is what the German language UI looks like - a lot of space lost, because not every language has that short a word for “Hide” or “ALT”. I already gave them a hint to shorten the translation of “ALT” to gain some space and they did. There is no way to shorten the translation of “Ausblenden”.

[Dion]

@GunChleoc

I already gave them a hint to shorten the translation of “ALT” to gain some space and they did.

We already made the ALT string untranslatable again due to this issue (see PR).