One of the most surprising reasons that people have told me that they dropped off the Fediverse is that they simply forget which server they signed up for.

[evan@cosocial.ca]

@quaff @general @scottjenson drip emails are pretty much the standard in commercial social networks, though. "Now that you're on Mastodon, follow these great hashtags..."

[julian@activitypub.space]

evan@cosocial.ca daily digests!

[evan@cosocial.ca]

@julian does NodeBB do any retention emails?

[julian@activitypub.space]

evan@cosocial.ca we do, yes. The default settings are to not spam the user, because I personally dislike getting emails I didn't explicitly sign up for.

Those defaults can be updated by the site admin for all users, or changed by the local user on a profile-by-profile basis.

NodeBB has daily/weekly/monthly digests, and can send emails for all of these events:

[eblu@activitypub.space]

scottjenson@social.coop It might be a good idea to make the site that you're on a lot more clearly visible at all times instead of just dropping you to a very agnostic Mastodon interface. I've noticed that people get confused because "Mastodon" can refer to too many things (the software, as an alternate term for the fediverse, the site itself) so they just sort of fall off. I think some level of persistent site-wide branding (not just a banner on the side of the screen!) will go a long way. Maybe even make it easier for sysops to theme their instance and encourage it? Just spitballing here

[evan@cosocial.ca]

@julian Wow, that's great!

[julian@activitypub.space]

Theming is huge... it was one of our priorities after (or around the same time as) building out a plugin system.

The ability for admins to easily drop in CSS to differentiate their sites without having to spin up an IDE is quite important.

scottjenson@social.coop

[scottjenson@social.coop]

@julian These are all great ideas, thanks. I've noticed several instances do significant theme adjustments (looking at Hachyderm.io as an an example) That doesn't mean it's EASY, just that it's proof that people want it.

Making something themeable in an easy way is not a simple engineering task however as you never offer exactly what someone wants. However, I do think a few simple things like colors and banners would go a long way.

[julian@activitypub.space]

scottjenson@social.coop true, although I will say from experience that there are levels to how much people are willing to customize their instance.

Speaking from 10+ years of NodeBB (which didn't federate for nearly all of it, so keep that in mind), admins are able to, in order of difficulty:

• pick a bootswatch skin (this instance I am on uses the "Brite" bootswatch skin)
• drop in any amount of CSS to override anything
• drop in any amount of SCSS if that's your jam
• drop in any amount of javascript that is run after everything else is done
• change/override bootstrap's variables.scss (this instance I am on overrides the primary colour from a bright green to the ActivityPub pink)
• create your own customized theme to change absolutely everything about the site including templates, js, css)

Those first two are the biggest ones due to their ease of adoption, and overlaying additional CSS doesn't require too much engineering effort, although I am speaking in hindsight.

Also, you'd be surprised what people can do if given a textbox and told to write their own CSS. ha!

[scottjenson@social.coop]

@julian My understanding is that most of the things you list from CSS onwards is already possible with Mastodon (It's how Hachyderm.io does it's custom CSS)

I do think "adding a theme" is a reasonable request

[julian@fietkau.social]

@scottjenson @julian@activitypub.space Apparently the process of adding a custom theme to the current Mastodon theme selector isn't *too* much of a coding effort: https://github.com/ronilaukkarinen/mastodon-bird-ui?tab=readme-ov-file#make-mastodon-bird-ui-as-optional-by-integrating-it-as-site-theme-in-settings-for-all-users

Bird UI and Tangerine UI are the two well-maintained Mastodon themes I know of, although I assume they're mostly (all?) just CSS without touching any templates. Letting server admins install themes of this kind by drag & dropping a zip file could be a nice dev target.

[julian@activitypub.space]

julian@fietkau.social exactly. As you progress from simple CSS overrides and onwards, it gets exponentially more difficult.

CSS overrides fix one or a few elements, SCSS fixes a bunch of elements, neither touches the actual structure of the page, but opening up layout and template editing raises the bar considerably.

scottjenson@social.coop