Do you like the Mastodon approach of consistent branding for different instances?

[commander@lemmings.world]

Yes. Having the OPTION is great.

[noodlejetski@lemm.ee]

the "consistent branding" is only really there on major instances. you can use custom themes (like Tangerine) or front-ends (like Mangan) as the default experience on your instance

[tired_n_bored@lemmy.world]

I like consistent branding because non-technical people get confused when they have one billion different names for everything when you could just say "join a Mastodon instance"

[smeg@feddit.uk]

Is it not a lemming?

[cris_color@lemmy.world]

It is, and somehow that escaped me...

[cris_color@lemmy.world]

Oh neat, I'd never seen that before

[hendrik@palaver.p3x.de]

I think the sane approach is: the developers offer one good theme and branding that is the default setting and works well out of the box. And instance administrators can then either be lazy and leave that in place, or (better) go ahead and tweak their place to their liking. Decorate it, make it unique if they like. I think it shows how much effort someone put into something. But on the other hand, you often can't mess with 20 different free software projects and change the CSS code just for the sake of it. I think it's also fine to just leave some things on a good default setting.

[mat@zelk.space]

@tired_n_bored they don’t need to know it’s a mastodon instance tbh

[kichae@lemmy.ca]

No. I think it works to hide the distributed nature of the fediverse, and works to make things that are inherent to a distributed model seem uncanney and broken.

It also strips some value out of the 'local' experience, communicating that each Mastodon-based website is the same as any other, and presenting something that looks like a dumb terminal, rather than a stand-alone website.

Ultimately, I think it's bad for the fediverse.

[roguetrick@lemmy.world]

Actually one of the reasons I like misskey derivatives and their diversity.