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.

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.

On theming, akin to Linux, I don’t think there’s much room for breakthroughs, or at least they’d be harder to achieve, being more a case of picking the “flavor” you want instead. Furthermore, I think this applies to UI as a whole in social medias, federated ones included.

Now, one thing that annoys me and I think that falls on branding is how most of the federated platforms don’t have proper names. As I follow communities and people primarily by RSS, I like things to be organized, and having to figure out how to fit “names” like kbin.social (RIP), lemm.ee, feddit.uk and the sort is a bit of a migraine. "<.<

Absolutely. I think there should be sane defaults, and whoever deviates from them should know why they’re doing it.

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”

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

I like the different instances having their own branding but i like the option to switch back to the normal theme. I also like when users put their own spin on the services logo instead of using something unrelated.

I do think there does need to be an amount of consistancy in branding so it’s more apparent that these things can talk to eachother.