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Who recognizes who around here? (reddthat.com)
submitted 6 months ago by to c/asklemmy@lemmy.world
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The threadiverse is small (compared to other major platforms) and I often see usernames that I recognize. How well do we notice each other around here?

I'll start... my name's "MrShankles" and I do be commenting/posting from time to time

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[–] 13 points 6 months ago* (9 children)

This is gonna sound really terrible, but... I generally don't recognize people by name so much... maybe something dyslexia related? I think there are a couple of rare exceptions, like the user with two letters and then four numbers in their name.

I recognize lots of avatars, as I scroll around, but I don't generally register the names or even descriptions of the images, just kind of like... my brain just remembers purplish-blob shape, red glowy circle, monochromatic goblet.

Oh, and dancing banana, and blue name furry. I actually remember his, it's Kolanki I think

All of you users with no avatar, go get one so I remember you all please! It's an accessability aid in a way :p

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  • [–] 12 points 6 months ago (2 children)

    Wait, Lemmy has avatars? I use an app 99% of the time, and the app doesn’t have them so I never realized that was a thing, lol. Whoops.

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  • [–] 5 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago)
    • Avatars (image which shows in full size on user page and thumbnail form by their name in the Lemmy Web UI)
    • Display names (a user can have a different name appear in place of their username, which is how some users stick Unicode in their name. I don't like this feature, because you need the "real" username, not the displayname, to reference users in such a way that Lemmy will generate a hyperlink to them, and I think that referencing users is complicated enough to create a usability barrier for people without the extra complexity).
    • A banner (which displays on the user page and is larger than the avatar image)
    • Bio text.

    @Sxan@piefed.zip, which was mentioned in another comment in this thread, is a good example of someone who makes use of all four.

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  • [–] 6 points 6 months ago* (2 children)

    All of you users with no avatar, go get one so I remember you all please! It’s an accessability aid in a way :p

    Frankly, this could be implemented client-side. If there's no avatar set by the remote user, then have the client or Web UI or whatever hash the username/home instance pair and then use the bits of that hash as inputs to procedurally-generate an image. There are a number of forum systems that do this.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Identicon

    An Identicon is a visual representation of a hash value, usually of an IP address, that serves to identify a user of a computer system as an effectively random form of avatar while protecting the user's privacy. The original Identicon was a 9-block graphic, and the representation has been extended to other graphic forms by third parties.

    (Note that using an IP as an input to the hash, as is mentioned here, is not really a good idea, since the IPv4 address space is small enough that one can reverse the hash by brute-forcing it to obtain the user's IP address, and the IPv6 address space is only sparsely-used, so I bet that one could do the same there with a bit more work.)

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  • [–] 2 points 6 months ago

    As someone who thinks almost entirely in words it's never something I would have considered as an accessibility feature. I'll try to think up an avatar though, unfortunately that aforementioned thinking in words always makes it hard for me

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