In comment sections or in community pages, it’s mostly an ocean of default avatars.
As a UI developer, that’s always been a gripe because I put a lot of effort into making them look good and scale properly, etc. When I see 60-70% or more accounts sporting the default avatar, it makes me wonder why I even bother.
So, since this bugs me so much, figured I’d just ask.
Lemm.ee users I can understand because of the waiting period for uploads, but AFAIK, most instances don’t have that restriction. Even then, there are plenty of .ee accounts that never bother to go back and set one.
I think many use apps that don’t show avatars. I usually browse lemmy with Eternity and sometimes forget they even exist.
None of my reddit accounts had avatars either. I would get banned so quickly it didn’t make sense.
If it seems like Lemmy is a more welcoming place, I might make the effort. Not sure yet.
On Voyager I can’t even see avatars or custom usernames
Wow, I cannot even find a setting to enable it. I used to have a very high opinion of Voyager, but I am finding recently that it is missing a lot of features.
It’s a free app, so they have to prioritize on what they work on. It’s amazing we have what we have.
Sure, it’s just that in the early days when we started getting more Lemmy apps than just Jerboa/Lemmur, Voyager tended to be on the forefront of adding new features not found in other apps. But nowadays, as the landscape of Lemmy apps has matured, Voyager has fallen behind as its philosophy seems to be stuck at “be a clone of Apollo”. It is by no means a bad Lemmy app; it is just no longer at the same relative level compared to other competing Lemmy apps.
Jeroba has them visible. I switched from Voyager a while back.
It’s built on the ethos of Apollo. Apollo’s dev had no interest in supporting avatars because they make for a shitty, cluttered experience and I FULLY stand by that decision.
Yeah I put avatars on my early Lemmy accounts, but then switched to Voyager. Now I don’t care because you don’t see avatars on Voyager anyway. Plus I kind of like the old school pre-social media feel.
I think it’d be nice if apps could let choose show or hide avatars in the settings.
I’m still on Sync for now and same. But I don’t think I saw them even on desktop…?
I’m on Sync and I see avatars. Think it’s a setting somewhere.
EDIT - sorry, I see someone else has already said much the same :-)
It’s okay, you’re just being referee! 😉
I’m on Sync as well, and I can see some avatars but not others
Yeah, now that I check, I do see some of them.
I prefer no avatars, cleaner reading experience.
I have everyone else’s avatars hidden anyway so wouldn’t make much sense to set one for myself. I just don’t see the appeal.
In voyager your can’t see avatars. A lot of people use voyager.
Because I dont care.
Anyone know if there’s a way to see avatar’s through Voyager?
I would first need a personality to express.
I hid them to keep the comment section clean looking
spoiler
askldjfals;jflsad;
which is so dumb by the way.
I think I read a few months ago in their repo that it’s being worked on, but does not seem so.
spoiler
askldjfals;jflsad;
Because it’s an anonymous website?
I thought that they were dumb on Reddit and I think they’re even dumber here.
Pseudo-anonymous, but from the toxicity on display here, you’d be forgiven for thinking it was 4chan.
I don’t care enough
I think this platform is less about people and more about commenting. That’s also why we can’t even subscribe to people on Lemmy, just communities. So naturally, your profile ends up being less important. And I have close to no incentive to care about avatars. This place is more or less just about the text content and the links. And I don’t even want my real face to show up next to my stupid comments.
I mean developers add avatar to all kinds of things, whether that’s useful or not. I myself don’t need one in Spotify or the fitness tracker app or my computer user account. They’re there nonetheless, and once you implement them, you have to deal with the UX representation. I think some users like to customize stuff so it get’s implemented. But it might be meaningless to most of us.
I think this platform is less about people and more about commenting.
I kind of don’t like that attitude, but looking at the state of things here, I can’t say it’s wrong.
Not that everyone who has set a profile image is an angel, but at least it helps things not be a stream of faceless opinions. Just my thoughts, so take that with a grain of salt.
Sure. And since Lemmy is part of the Fediverse, it is embedded into some context… I mean we also connect to services like Mastodon with a very different approach. And we have things like Mbin with a hybrid approach. And as mesa said, Piefed tries to do some additional things as well. But the way Piefed currently handles missing avatars is to just not show any, it’ll just be the username as text aligned to the left.
(And I think the stream of faceless opinions is part of the idea behind Lemmy… Whether that’s a good or bad thing, or could be improved.)
And I think the stream of faceless opinions is part of the idea behind Lemmy
Definitely think “bad thing” considering the trolls and shills we’ve had to deal with here, but that topic is far outside the scope of this “Ask” post lol.
Yes, that’s likely a longer argument. I think I’m not completely considering it a bad thing… I think the old time forums had some charm to them, where you’d just contribute something to a discussion, no matter what and who you are… It’d be just about a certain topic. But that’s not really what we do here. So it’s a bit out of scope. I feel we could do that, though. The technology and set up of the platform itself should allow for those kinds of conversations… Bus yeah, it’s complicated. And this might be more social media than internet forum.
Piefed is so nice. It’s like Lemmy but you can subscribe to anything activityhub. Including user accounts.
I have avatars disabled
I’ve put in as much effort to my profile as I wanted to. Sounds like a lot of others did the same.
