So I tried making a Fediverse logo! :gutkato_kontenta:

Most people seem to be using the rainbow-coloured pentagram (by Eukombos & al.), which I like well enough myself, but since I read somewhere that it looked a bit busy, I tried making something simpler yet familiar. Instead of different nodes, I put the colours in different spaces/communities formed between the interacting nodes; sorta inspired by the origami boat logo (by DSFGS).

I don’t think the result is particularly striking or much improved, but since I already made it, here it is anyway! Hereby dedicated to the public domain using CC0. I’ve put together a comparison with some pre-existing logos, too; which ones do you like the best? :gutkato_flucerba:

#lang_en #art #CC0 #decentralisation #design #FediArt #FediDesign #FediLogo #Fediverse #FreeCulture #FreeSoftware #LibreCulture #LibreSoftware #logo

So apparently server administrators on the #Fediverse won’t be able to name custom emoji in their native languages and expect them to work in Mastodon, because according to @Gargron non-ASCII signs are hard to input and diacritics shouldn’t change the meaning of words:

https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/pull/28572#issuecomment-1878952504

No, in my view emoji identifiers shouldn’t be ‘straightforward to input for everyone’. Custom emoji are local to a server; they should be straightforward to input for the users of that server. People from other servers don’t ever have to type their names (unless their administrators choose to add them to their own server), so their ability to type them is completely irrelevant.

Why should a server made specifically for people speaking Russian or Japanese have to use ASCII for their emoji identifiers? Their users have no trouble typing Cyrillic or Kanji signs; it’s what they already do when they make a post; it’s how they normally talk. Why force them to use a different language/alphabet when typing emoji identifiers?

Moreover, linking the username issue makes no sense whatsoever. Usernames are typed across servers and it makes sense to impose stricter technical limitations so more people can read, write and recognise them. This is not the case for emoji; you rarely ever need to type other servers’ emoji identifiers. Normally you don’t even get to see them; you only get to see the picture they represent! Assuming server admins do their job responsibly, there is zero added confusion for anyone involved.

I understand that Unicode is complex, language support is challenging and compromises might be necessary at times. But can we please accept the existence of different languages and writing systems as a reality that we should try to accommodate for, rather than change or circumvent? Yes, a and á are different signs. Yes, they might radically change the meaning of a word. That’s not a proposition for us to accept or reject; that’s the reality of our multilingual world, and should be the basis of our discussion.

#lang_en #accessibility #a11y #custom_emoji #development #emoji #emojos #free_software #internationalisation #internationalization #i18n #languages #localisation #localization #l10n #Mastodon #multilingual #programming #software #Unicode