Mastodon 5.0: A closer look
18 points by dgv
18 points by dgv
Why is everything so round?
We’re headed towards more roundness to invite a friendlier brand tone, and to make Mastodon feel more native within modern browsers (most of which have adopted a rounded aesthetic).
*moan* I get that things have to keep up with the zeitgeist, but I really wish the zeitgeist wasn't shunning rectangular borders.
The rest looks nice, though I feel like the right side of the screen is yawning emptily and the center column feels a little disjointed from the rest of the page due to its different background color. I'm glad they are willing to make big changes though, as a whole the redesign does feel a lot more "casual" (in a good way) and welcoming.
the pastels definitely feel softer, but yeah not a fan of the rounded corners. feels overdone. personally i think rounded corners help conceal poorer UX, which may be the case here (solid rectangle looks bad, rounded solid rectangle is "contemporary design")
Deleting the window chrome makes it feel like the application is only supposed to be used once it's already open and positioned correctly and that moving it around or minimizing it or tabbing out to other programs was forgotten, like it feels like the applications is forgetting that people, like, use their computers, and not just the application.
There are some program types where this is expected these days like game launchers, but for the overwhelming majority of programs it is counterproductive. At least google chrome and other browsers have the decency to emulate the native window chrome. Discord has emulated native window chrome and it's one of the glitchiest parts of the interface; the only reason I tolerate it is that discord has a generally low-empty-space design and used the combined emulated chrome to save vertical space for chats. In these Mastodon images I do not even see emulated native window chrome.
Please tell me I'm wrong and they have window chrome.
Everything having a border radius of 40px also doesn't look good either. I know it's "modern" but I really don't think it's going to last.
I might be misunderstanding your post here, and if so I apologize in advance, but this isn't an application. It's a web UI. The window chrome is your browser.
The second image has the text "The desktop 5.0 web interface ..." -- I'm interpreting that as "the desktop application that is a web interface". Is it instead the web interface that you get when visiting the website on desktop?
Yea, desktop web UI vs the mobile web UI. As far as I'm aware (and don't hold me to this), there's no official Mastodon desktop application. There's a mobile app, but nothing official on the desktop.
Thanks for clearing that up for me! I rescind most of my criticism. I have a few other things I'd complain about the screenshots but they wouldn't be productive.