 Just found A LOT of screenshots of the old VK design. There's an abandoned official group where people were suggesting ideas and reporting bugs, and there are many photo albums of this stuff. Now I have as much reference for #Smithereen UI design as I could've ever asked for 👍 I've also found some tutorial kind of screenshots dating as far back as 2006 (attached) — that's before I signed up! And groups apparently were there from the beginning, in about the same form I'm making them. 4 comments
The newer (2007?) design of groups and events. Events are a special kind of group internally, with additional fields. Interesting to look back at how it was all about people connecting with other people, but eventually shifted to people consuming content from faceless commercial communities and celebrities. As did all other mainstream social media. I'm making #Smithereen to address this exact issue — give people a cozy place to connect with each other. Fun fact: the "old" newsfeed in VK still lives on after all these years in the "updates" tab and in the API, but no one's using it any more.  @grishka Agree. That was partially the reason I quit VK, together with insanely annoying algorithmic timelines and all that "clips" nonsense, I just jumped over to Mastodon where I really like the community. And Smithereen looks like a great project to move over people who like VK's method of interaction. Thanks for your work on this! |
Gregory's Server
Uh, and I've only now noticed that on the 2006 screenshots, THERE IS NO NEWSFEED in the left menu!
Anyway, here's what newsfeed looked like in 2009-10, pre-microblog.