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.
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
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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. 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 prefer no avatars, cleaner reading experience.
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.
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.
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!
With the low adoption rate of avatars they realy stand out compared to places with default avatars where they all blend together.
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.
Nailed it
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.
Debatable lol
I wanted to say the same, but then I saw the avatar next to your name and realized that I do in fact see avatars. I just never noticed and still don’t care.
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
My reader doesn’t even show avatars
Almost every app for Lemmy I have tried does not even have them visible by default and require you to manually turn them on. If their only experience is using an app, they might not even know you can have an avatar.
What? I use voyager, and had no idea. Not that I want to turn it on, I’m just surprised it’s an option (haven’t checked though).
It does explain why nobody has called out my avatar being AI generated when I talk shit about how shitty AI is (I generated it back when this shit was new and didn’t know how crap it actually was yet).
I will now judge you harshly for your transgression. Simply unforgivable. Smh
Wait, your profile says you’ve only been around for 8 months. I swear I’ve been seeing you around for at least a couple years now…
I was originally on an instance that has since shut down so I had to move to another one.
My avatar is also partially AI generated. I GIMPed the Zizek face from one of his movie posters though.
I’m used to people calling me out for the Zizek part and that hasn’t happened on Lemmy ever lol.
I don’t remember what I used for mine, but I remember the prompt was just “a husky dog anthro but the fur that is normally black is green” it gave me 50 different things and this one was the only decent looking image in the whole batch.
Your avatar doesn’t look ai generated actually.
KOLANAKI
Lemmy is a place I prefer to be as anonymous as I can while still participating so I don’t set one for myself and I use voyager the vast majority of the time so I don’t see anyone else’s. I personally don’t find profile pictures/avatars add anything to the experience for me.
In voyager your can’t see avatars. A lot of people use voyager.
I think many use apps that don’t show avatars. I usually browse lemmy with Eternity and sometimes forget they even exist.
I don’t care about mine or anybody elses avatar, also profiles with avatar usually are: selling something (OF) or company profiles or bot accounts, so any account with an avatar is kinda sus to me.
So I should start an OnlyFans? You could watch me garden, read, and yell at the TV during hockey games. And occasionally fix stuff.
brb gonna post space pics to onlyfans now
Onlyfans wasn’t originally made for porn.
Oh.
Why do you bother with an avatar for your Lemmy account?
because i need everyone to know i am a lion
Why can’t you just tell the truth for once? You don’t always have to be lion.
i have to be true to who i am, after all, I have my pride
If that’s your mane point, then I guess it’s acceptable.
Because it reminds me of forums to have one. No other reason
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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.
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One of the harsh lessons in software is learning that users sometimes have different wants and expectations than the developer. Gold-plating is a constant temptation, and it usually leads to frustration and resentment.
At the end of the day, if 60-70% of people don’t care, either do it for the 30-40%, or do it for your own enjoyment, or put your efforts elsewhere. In any case, don’t fall into a pit of resentment just because lots of users are approaching a platform differently than you.
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.
