A symbol for the Fediverse
symbol.fediverse.infoThis doesn't really scream 'Fediverse' for me. My first thought was some sort of rank, like in certain video games and military organisations (like how Mario Kart Wii uses it for 3 stars in Grand Prix mode).
The previous icon (the pentagram) was better because the things were actually connected. The new one has 3 disconnected stars.
Does also feel weird to optimize around a text symbol over a logo that can have deliberate design or iteration.
The fediverse is also very disconnected.
Oh ok
FTA
> The need for a symbol
>
> Thanks to the interconnected nature of the fediverse...
I don’t hate it, but I also like the ActivityPub logo.
> However, its design is a little too complex to be used at small sizes, as you would in text or in a button.
I somewhat disagree and would say this applies equally to the asterism logo.
> It’s also only available in image form, not as a typographical character.
That’s typical for logos and usually indicates that they’re unique.
That’s the point. ⁂ is not a logo because the fediverse is neither a brand nor a product.
It is grounds for unification.
Listen to you discontents squabble. The stakeholders are happy to agreeably own your infrastructure.
⁂ looks like something that can propagate competitively in minds amid the established social norms.
Are you trying to argue that this logo feels too corporate, like Meta’s logo?
I'm trying to argue
BEHOLD!
<<ICONIC>>
Not sure why Fediverse needs a symbol but it looks great.
I'm struggling to identify with a "Starfish Triforce".
Perhaps the idea is more like "anal cluster"?
I don't get the need for this.
What is the use for a 'logo' that can be copy-pasted into text? If you write text you can just use the name - fediverse. Its like they get the worst of both worlds; a bad logo that is not even theirs but is an unicode character. And a shitty way of writing their name that makes it incomprehensible to outsiders.
Setting aside the logo itself, where I'm not sure how I feel about it yet or whether there's a need for it, you're losing me with this point about Unicode.
The rationale for having symbols I feel is so self-evident it shouldn't need any explanation. You know the save icon, you know the power button, you know the Twitter, well, X logo. You probably know the 'share' icon. I don't know if anyone's going to buy that it's bad to have a simple universal icon closely associated with a specific thing that we want widely known. And Unicode has an advantage over images of being, in a sense, more universal and more accessible.
You know all those icons because someone, some industry or some culture imposed it to you. Nothing is self-evident. We are constantly learning new symbols to be able to share graphic languages with other persons or interfaces.
Regardless of the unicode issue (some trademark lawyers are going to make a lot of money from this one day), its not more accessible at all. It hides any information behind prior knowledge about the fedi-use of the symbol. It's even very hard to look it up, if you see in print or on a device you are not controlling so you can't copy-paste the symbol for lookup.
You don't even need to write out fediverse, "fedi" is broadly recognized as an abbreviation.
What? Not at all.
Let me rephrase, it's about as broadly understood as the term "fediverse" itself, when used in-context.
Fediverse is essentially like the old Microsoft organization chart. So the symbol needs either guns or at least division lines.
Where's the hierarchy?
Unfortunately true.
I like it. I hope we can soon use it on HN, too. ⁂
Edit: seems to work alread, nice
It's Unicode... Of course it works.
Hacker News filters out Unicode emoji characters from comments (example: ), so it’s not “of course”. I assume the developers think emoji are too distracting.
...and system font HN uses (Verdana) have glyph design for it, so it works.
I'd use of of these dodecahedron projections to represent a network of equal nodes on the planetary sphere: https://images.fineartamerica.com/images/artworkimages/mediu...
I hate to say this but it looks like a group of snowflakes.
But those asterisks are (at least in my font) all identical?
I'd argue that a better representation (unfortunately it's not in unicode [yet?]) of independent servers would be Figure 3.8 "Atoms of different species in a single box": https://archive.org/details/kittel-thermal-physics.-80/page/...
That just makes it funnier.
yes, per NOAA: https://www.wpc.ncep.noaa.gov/html/stationplot.shtml
ahah, i didn't saw it before, but now i cannot unseen. also, very very fitting.
I see three cannabis leaves.
Haha, very funny, but in all seriousness, "⁂" is actually a rare dinkus.
Arguably @ is a Fedi symbol already. Adding the domain is generally all it takes.
The one bummer I have about Mastodon is that it takes what used to be a kind of sort of meaningfully understood usage of @ and turns it into scrambled eggs with @user@instance.social for it's usage in use names. It's the one place where I would begrudgingly acknowledge that blue sky has a compelling rationale.
And yes I'm aware that Mastodon omits the second @ for users on the same server, it's a imperfect compromise that sometimes helps but largely leaves the problem unresolved.
Arguably, the fediverse got it from Twitter, and Twitter got it from the syntax of email addresses, which came from Unix user@domain account signifiers
Previously: the pentagram and a meta logo...
Really good choices guys. This is lame BTW. I feel this was kicked off by someone that made a bad arm tattoo choice and needs it to happen to justify it
The pentagram is fine enough to not be replaced by... this.
Reminds me of Splinter Cell. I do like it though.
𒀯
Nah, that's the sarcasterisk and should replace /s in modern communication.
It also means three pointer dereferences in C++.
Looking forward to write such code:
⁂data = 42;(⁂^3)data = 42;: droooop droop droop ;
Or the PostScript equivalent:
Inspired by graaand tradition of Lisp: http://clhs.lisp.se/Body/f_car_c.htm/poop { pop pop } def % number two /pooop { poop pop } def % number three /poooop { poop poop } def % number four
Please submit a proposal for this.
Once Bjarne Stroustrup's "Generalizing Overloading for C++2000" proposal is accepted, they won't be able to say no to moving beyond the PDP-11 instruction set and directly supporting tri-dereferences.
https://www.stroustrup.com/whitespace98.pdf
>Instead, it was decided to by default limit identifiers to a single character:
>This may seems Draconian at first. However, since we now have the full Unicode character set available, we don't actually need hard-to-read long names. Such long names only make code obscure by causing unpleasantly long lines and unnatural line breaks. Multi-character names are a relic of languages that relied heavily on global name and encouraged overly-large scopes.int xy; // error: two-character identifierOnly acceptable if you can also spell it "cdddar".
Honestly explicit sarcasm indication should just die out entirely. Might as well be writing it longhand as "Just in case you missed it, this is a joke haha." every time you tell a joke.
I’m not sure if you’re being serious or not. I’ve never met you and tone isn’t conveyed over text.
I’m assuming you’re joking, but maybe that’s exactly why we need explicit sarcasm demarcation.
Exactly right, and what I would add is that this is a Poe's Law thing.
I might even offer a corollary to that law, which is that the more unclear a statement is, the more inscrutable a it's intent, the more likely the original author will insist that it was 'obvious' sarcasm.
This reasoning is nonsensical.
There is nothing to refute in it, but, just to prove it wrong: sarcasm is commonly denoted in spoken English by intonation.
And as we all know, it is impossible to imply tone in written text.
Exactly, it is the illusion of transparency. Have someone read something you've written out loud, you'd be surprised how often they use a different tone than you had in mind. Add to that a variety of cultures and backgrounds.
The comment you're replying to was being sarcastic. (I'm not sure about you!)
Ironically, proving the (wrong) point
Yes, I read it that way too. Which meant that they were under the impression that it is easy to infer tone, so I replied with a serious explanation why it may not be.
It is possible to do that, but sarcasm in written text uses a different notation: /s, which you just proposed to abolish above.
I don't like your replies, so I stop this conversation with you.
So is the proposal to write handles as username⁂hostname ? Or ⁂username⁂hostname ?
Nobody will ever use this unless it miraculously becomes a standard symbol on keyboards.
Or if editors swap ***, :fediverse:, etc. for it automatically. There's no* emoji keyboards, but people use emoji all the time.
* Well, there is, but there isn't a widely available consumer product https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3AtBE9BOvvk
I think this proposal is silly but come on, no keyboard has a twitter icon either.
X?
No, blackboard bold X [1]. Unfortunately HN doesn't allow it...
yeah and that's why you wrote out "twitter" instead of using some creative sequence of unicode characters to describe a blue bird visually in your post implying that people tend to do so.
A symbol for Asana
How very web 1.9
Who is the "we" behind this fediverse.info? They seem to be missing a couple of server flavours in the post. I can't tell if it's serious or sarcasm.
Elon Musk: "For maximum confusion, I'm renaming Twitter to X."
Fediverse: "Hold my beer."
Every time I try to suggest someone use the Fediverse, I have to say about 2 sentences just to name the thing I'm talking about, which they're more likely to know as "Mastodon". I don't see how pulling a "the artist formerly known as Prince" will help this branding problem, rather than hurt further.
Advocating this logo-in-text for branding is as confusing to me as the people who keep self-destructively saying "free software", to mean a very important and huge distinction from what every reasonable person assumes that "free software" means.
It seems less like evangelism, and more like exclusionary -- a small in-group shibboleth, or secret handshake.
"Simplification" via centralization and convenience is how we ended up with Facebook and similar basically owning the Internet. People no longer using email or hosting or using webpages "because it's too confusing" and instead using Facebook or Twitter for everything. Everything accessed via "apps" on closed platforms. Gov't agencies and news orgs without their own online presence, just broadcasting via Musknet or YouTube. Schools or daycares sharing critical information over closed Facebook groups. Mass privacy violation & data collection. Mass disinformation campaigns over the same centralized mediums. Unmoderated hate speech or climate denial given giant-sized megaphones to hit naive audiences of grandparents and others unable to separate information wheat from chaff, because they're naively trusting the "simple" service they're endlessly scrolling through.
Usenet, e-mail, IRC, MUDs, MOOs, Gopher (and before that BBS) etc all required multiple sentences to explain, but they are the literal roots of the Internet, and how many of us got our start. The effort to "web-scale" and "simplify" is directly implicated in monopolization and shitification.
I'd rather have complexity than garbage.
I'm with you in principle.
But isn't sloppiness of naming how you end up with people knowing only "Mastodon", not the Fediverse?
All those technologies you mentioned had names so you could start to talk about them, and could keep them straight. (Otherwise, we might all be using "IE" now instead of the Web, which by now would be some thoroughly proprietary nth generation evolution of ActiveX.)
When I want to explain the Fediverse to someone, I sometimes need multiple sentences to just give it a name, so people can start anchoring concepts, before I can start saying what it is. (Otherwise, a few minutes later, "Wait, have you been talking about Mastodon?")
This is almost as frustrating as people who insist on still saying "free software", long after the confusion has already been pointed out, sometimes seemingly whenever saying "free software" would be most counterproductive to their goals.
Sometimes there's a reasonable explanation, like a particular person has trouble forming a mental model of someone else, or a particular person just thinks substantially differently than most people. Both of which are absolutely true of a lot of early true-believers in these circles. Or it's an isolated incident, when a person who would normally realize that, merely missed it.
Embracing whimsy and differences, and understanding that mistakes happen, are all good. But let's not elevate that, over the goals of those same people, to the point of sabotaging their goals.
(Now, if the goals of certain Fediverse three-stars-pyramid hieroglyph secret-society people are actually to make it a closed in-group, you could make a strong argument for that school of thought. But Fediverse people who want to bring more people into the fold, or who want it not to lose even some of the popularity it already has, need to be very different about evangelizing.)
It's not a company, nobody leads it
This is sort of like meeting one vegan protester and deciding you won't eat any vegetable because you didn't like them
> This is sort of like meeting one vegan protester and deciding you won't eat any vegetable because you didn't like them
So I'm saying "Don't listen to that one vegan protestor who is kicking that puppy, because the effect will be that even fewer people will eat their vegetables."
In any case, everyone in the nebulous Fediverse who doesn't want to remain only a fringe-iverse, would do well to collectively decide upon and use a viable name that outsiders will see.
I think this symbol is kind of pointless and I doubt anyone is going to use it "like the Prince symbol," so I don't think this is really even an issue. That said, there's nothing wrong with being fringe, or preferring slow growth. After all, Hacker News' entire design ethos and cultural imperative is keeping Eternal September at bay by aggressively gatekeeping against the unwashed hordes of normies and Redditors and moderating against anything "true hackers" shouldn't find interesting.
I don't want the masses to ruin the Fediverse the way they ruined everything else. I don't want influencers, marketers, grifters, shills, stooges, incels, nazis, predators and bots proliferating into every online space like cockroaches. I don't want the Fediverse to be captured and transformed into a Skinner box of endorphine-dripping two minutes hate struggle sessions, misinformation, propaganda, viral marketing and vapid memes. Most people coming to the Fediverse are explicitly doing so to escape all of that.