I’m fine with most of the items. But I’m not sure about “Homepage Feature” and “Custom badges”. They feel a bit marketing-y (is that a word?). Like something a commercial site would use to get engagement. And the homepage feature would maybe make more clutter in the UI? I’m not saying that those should be ditched, but maybe make sure we want it before doing it?
And perhaps use a Fediverse icon for the followers link, rather than a Mastodon icon.
Our homepage is a wall of text. Nothing wrong but… is it so bad to have a couple of images always related to topics being discussed?
This component brings images at the top of an otherwise text-only homepage. 3 images for desktop, 1 for mobile. The images come from topics that have an image in the top post and have been tagged featured by the moderators.
I already installed the component during the bootstrapping week, but I disabled it after realizing that it works only in Latest, not in Hot (our default). What about we enable it for Latest, which I believe just a few of us is using so far, and this way we can make a more informed decision about its future (or not) here?
Custom Badges
There is indeed a component of engagement. Is that bad, if it engages people lightly? As in not pervasively or obsessively.
But the custom badges I have in mind are also informative, about the person earning them. Imagine we could give badges for different professional roles, or different community roles, or different musical skills. I want to explain this in more details in its own topic and with time, but imagine a badge for professional musicians, or people running a label, or a studio, or musicians who have published vynils… It’s not just about the badges in your profile, it’s also that those badges are clickable and allw you to discover other “singers”, “bass players”, video DJs", etc. (((Please don’t discuss here these examples or the feasibility of all this; let me explain it in its own topic first))).
I have cleaned the list of candidates, pushing all to them to become part of the beta except the notifications to Matrix etc. As opposed to the other topics, this one isn’t seeing much traction or demand so far. It also makes sense to polish our website/community before intensifying our outreach to other communities.
In the end, I have moved the Homepage Features to Later, and then we’ll see. Maybe we don’t need images in the main page and in any case I don’t see anyone upstream excited about writing the patch to make it appear in Hot.
Yeah, the problem is that this component uses FontAwesome to render the icons, Mastodon has one, but the asterism has none. No problem, it is possible to use custom SVG, but it needs some editing that I haven’t done before and I just learned about yesterday.
Right now the component is enabled but invisible. Hover with your mouse to the left of the search icon (top right corner). You will see it and you can even click it.
I have moved Custom Badges to Later. I still think it’s a good idea but we can wait until there is a bigger community, if and when there is appetite to try them.
I have contacted a good candidate and they were thankful for the invitation, but declined to avoid over-committing to multiple projects and causes, which I fully understand and agreed with.
We are two moderators now, and it seems to be more than enough for the volume of activity, the quality of the contributions, and the overall friendliness in this space. We keep the call open, and I’m hopeful that we will find more moderators as we grow.
Other than this, the discussions about fixing / improving the website have diminished radically, which is a good symptom that the beta period is completed. Let’s leave this topic open for as long as people want, but if there isn’t anything else related to thelaunch of the website, let’s call this beta completed.
Betatesting starts. Here we track and discuss the tasks to focus on.
