[redmaniack]

The thumbs down was meant to be for the use of an icon font nowadays, in this case, FontAwesome. Don't get me wrong, I'm still using FontAwesome for many projects.

The thing is there are so many good reasons to use an SVG icon font system nowadays: pure vector, control over the individual shape symbols, positioning is easier thanks to knowing its exact size etc.

[mrisoli]

I just tried out Mastodon quickly after reading this, and what a disaster.

Icons are overused, there's no onboarding of the UI and it just throws you in with a bunch of icons, I wasn't sure what most of them did.

I started at mastodon.technology and it immediately follows the instance creator which confused me, when I checked his profile there was an icon with which I could unfollow(an X on top of a person icon), which I didn't know if it meant blocking or unfollowing.

No icon has helper text on hover or anything, you're just thrown in and there's already messages popping in your timeline and I didn't really know that I already followed these people, and I could click Local/Federated timeline and there wasn't much info on what those were.

[r3bl]

Those UX issues would be far more useful being reported on GitHub than they are on HN.

[newsbinator]

That assumes GP's primary motivation is to support/improve the particular project, rather than discuss UX and kvetch with fellow hackers and designers.

[k_]

I understand and agree with you. It's just that this is exactly what is possible with newer versions of FontAwesome. So it has in a way replaced itself by the tools you were looking for :)

It's just nitpicking; with the example it's pretty clear that it's the icon font that is bugging you.