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.
deleted by creator
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.
I’ve put in as much effort to my profile as I wanted to. Sounds like a lot of others did the same.
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
Hey just wanted to let you know that I fired up Lemmy on the PC today and added an avatar to my profile just for you
Would block avatars if I could, don’t want to see people’s vanity, just the words.
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.
For those who can’t see avatars, he looks like this in the Lemmy Web UI:
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—as I did above—by their real username and it makes it slightly more obnoxious to get that, but I do have to say that it does help make users visually unique.
I think that my ideal for user identification would be maybe some sort of procedurally-generated flag as the default. Those are designed to be readily-identifiable at a distance already. Like, use the hash bits to choose one of several different groups of flags (triband, etc) and bits to choose the color of various elements in the flag. If one flag isn’t enough to consume all the bits in the hash, maybe do two side-by-side, etc.
EDIT2: Hmm. Now I kind of wonder if that should be done client-side, because it could let the viewing user theme what they’re seeing. Like, dark-mode people don’t have to have bright flags, if someone wants a specific theme they could use that (a string of different colored cats in different poses), etc.
EDIT3: And I loathe the fact that the Lemmy Web UI by default permits animated avatars. I think I disabled animations somewhere in Firefox specifically because of the people on here using animated avatars. I think that not putting the kibosh on that was a huge mistake.
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).
You sunuvabitch, I’m in!
Hadn’t really thought about it until you asked. Don’t see why it’s worth the bother.
I’m lazy.
You actually have an avatar, lol, so you must not be that lazy haha.
Are you referring to people’s profile pictures as avatars? Otherwise I have no idea what you mean.
They are oftentimes refered to as the same thing. Avatar came around first IIRC (it was generally an avatar of who you are, not what you actually look like) and slowly morphed into profile picture as social media took over and people forgot about the whole “don’t give strangers your personal information” thing.
I still use avatar personally. Older term for same thing
I’ve always considered an avatar to be a sort of pseudo persona rather than just the thumbnail attached to an account.
Yeah, profile pictures. In the API data, they’re called
avatarso that’s the term I tend to use.
😉
With 21x21 avatars, the question is why even have this functionality in the first place. That size is too small to matter.
They show up in other places. And 21x21 is still enough to visually distinguish based on them in the comments. Depending on app/UI, they’re often larger in the feed and significantly larger in profiles.
Didn’t you want to know why people don’t set avatars? I answered your question. There is no need to argue back and try to convince me that 21x21 avatars are amazing. They aren’t.
Didn’t know they were a thing and Voyager doesn’t support them.
As a software developer I’ve come to realise that most of the stuff I put extra attention to, actual users don’t care and now in just do what people ask for and nothing more.
Voyager doesn’t support them.
That is one reason I never used voyager much.
I tried, there was an issue uploading the picture and I just couldn’t be bothered to look deeper into it.
You guys have avatars?!?
None of my reddit accounts had avatars either. I would get banned so quickly it didn’t make sense.
If it seems like Lemmy is a more welcoming place, I might make the effort. Not sure yet.
Because I dont care.
Why would you add one? Who even sees it? This reddit/lemmy style of posting and commenting has always worked with just a username and a comment and I like it that way. If my app started showing them I’d either turn them off or find a new app.
