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.
Avatars are a psychological trick useful for building up sunk cost fallacy and making a user more likely to personally identify with a product. I don’t have social media avatars for the same reason I don’t have “nabisco” tattooed on my asscheek.
I don’t see avatars in my app and I don’t really care to. Never had them in early reddit and that’s what I’m trying to replicate.
But… you have one.
Maybe I uploaded it when I made the account? I haven’t thought about it since. Honestly didn’t remember that Lemmy used them.
I think many use apps that don’t show avatars. I usually browse lemmy with Eternity and sometimes forget they even exist.
On Voyager I can’t even see avatars or custom usernames
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.
I prefer no avatars, cleaner reading experience.
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.
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.
I’m still on Sync for now and same. But I don’t think I saw them even on desktop…?
I’m on Sync as well, and I can see some avatars but not others
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! 😉
because it doesn’t matter at all
Why the fuck would I ever want to do that? I don’t even want people I know knowing who I am.
Keep my name out ya goddamn mouth — Will Smith probably
Wonder the same thing a lot. I change mine up semi-regularly, same with my profile banner, but that’s just me being bored.
The thing that drives me insane is when a community doesn’t use the icon. The FUCK ARE YOU DOING.
I’ve had the same one since I started, though I did change it when someone customized it for me - it was too good not to use.
That’s valid lol closest I have is the one I’m using at the moment. I’ve made a couple ones for myself but that’s about it. I’ve had more than enough memes made about me (which is surreal enough as it is), so I’m good lol
they couldve made it on ee during the waiting period lol
I didn’t even know there were user avatars. Most common apps don’t show them.
Even though I tend to comment somewhat frequently, I prefer to be just “another voice in the crowd” I don’t really want to be more easily recognized lol
OMG it’s Asafum everyone! Here he is! Wow!
That’s fair.
I mean, the reason I have a picture should be obvious, I’m literally going for visibility with a name like this…
But 9/10 times it’s a generic name with a default or no picture.
With the low adoption rate of avatars they realy stand out compared to places with default avatars where they all blend together.
Nailed it
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.
Piefed is so nice. It’s like Lemmy but you can subscribe to anything activityhub. Including user accounts.
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.
There are avatars?
Yep. Check your profile settings. Apparently it varies by app, but Lemmy-UI, Photon, Tesseract, and a few others have full support.
I use Voyager
That being said, I agree with most others and don’t like them anyway; I just had no idea they were a thing.
I also use voyager; never seen avatars, didn’t know they existed.
Boost doesnt have avatars either
You sunuvabitch, I’m in!
Gonna chime in here and agree that its because its because I never see anyone else’s or mine, even on the website
If you’re using the Lemmy Web UI, go to your account settings. “Show Avatars” is a checkbox on the lower, left-hand panel. You might have unchecked it inadvertently.
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.
You could just do those autogenerated things instead of a static image if they haven’t set one. Like, hash their username and use the bits of the hash as an input to some function that procedurally-generates an image. Makes it easy to visually-identify users without needing them to go out and manually create an avatar.
I don’t really care much about the visual appearance myself, but I did want something unique to make it easier to visually-identify my posts for other users. Humans can identify color in their visual field in constant time, so having different colors for different users is helpful. I plonked “wave swirl”—the first thing that came to mind—or something like that into Stable Diffusion 1.5, got a picture of a wave, haven’t touched it since.
EDIT: For a good example, I always easily identify @Kolanaki@yiffit.net comments, as he’s got custom colored Unicode in a display name and a custom avatar and custom background. I don’t care enough to go do that myself, but it does highlight the fact that it can be useful for rapidly-identifying people in a conversation.
I’m just gonna reply to your edit separately lol
I’ll add that I don’t personally really like the display name functionality, because I need to refer to people in text using “@” syntax
Haven’t used Lemmy-UI in forever, but the user search does work on display names, though the one you mentioned with the custom Unicode characters definitely wouldn’t (well, not typing the letters they represent anyway).
You could just do those autogenerated things instead of a static image if they haven’t set one.
Yeah, it already does that. I’m using the Dicebear adventurer pack for users and the initials pack for communities. Each user gets the same pseudo-random one generated every time.
I’m the opposite of another commenter (the one who said they find profiles with avatars sus). I find the ones who don’t bother to set anything a bit sus myself. Like, it’s as if they don’t care to be here, they don’t plan on sticking around, just here to hit it and quit it, etc. Taking the effort to put something there at least shows they’re trying to be part of something (well, in addition to other factors).
Would block avatars if I could, don’t want to see people’s vanity, just the words.
Hadn’t really thought about it until you asked. Don’t see why it’s worth the bother.
