I’d love to hear everyone’s ideas for how we can improve the way pronouns are shown in PieFed. Please let me know if this is the wrong place for this question and send people here if you think they’d like to contribute.
Currently, you can put pronouns in your display name, and in the extra fields on your profile. Display name federates fine to everywhere while extra fields only with Mastodon and friends. Like this:
Can we do better, though? How would you like it?
e.g. when showing a popup card, the pronouns in the extra fields could be more prominent, up near the name near the top?
Or maybe when someone is replying to you, the placeholder text inside the text entry field (before they start typing) could say what your pronouns are? Like this:
Those are just ideas to start a discussion, not options to choose from - maybe you have something completely different in mind?
I really like the placeholder idea. That’s an elegant approach that gives people information when and where they need it. But that would only be between piefed instances, is that correct?
It would also be nice if piefed had the option to pull pronoun information from folks profile metadata, and display them inline alongside their username automatically. That would “lead the way” of utilising the existing field in a meaningful way
In my experience people on Lemmy don’t really go to a user’s profile before replying to them so hiding pronouns in bio is kinda inefficient. Placeholder text is a neat idea but I presume most people won’t read it since they’re conditioned to ignore this normally useless text.
Flair is nice actually, I’d argue it’s the way to go once Lemmy gets support for this feature. Until then my preference goes to the universal solution - display names.
most people won’t read it since they’re conditioned to ignore this normally useless text.
They might actually very well read it, because they’ll eventually notice the information might be there and would know to look for it.
But the chosen solution with flairs will work very well, probably a bit better even :)
Or is the existing user flair feature enough? I’ll set mine in this community to he/him so you can see what I mean.
Ah! I can’t see your pronouns on my local instance (presumably because we’re still on 1.4.6), but they look great on piefed.social.
Thank you for your ideas and feedback, everyone!
I’m going to make it so that when someone adds pronouns to their Extra Fields it will also be shown as a flair beside their name, like this:
That flair will be used wherever you haven’t set a community-level flair. If you’ve set a flair within a community that’ll be used on posts in that community instead.
If the same pronouns are in the display name then the flair isn’t shown, to avoid showing it twice.
Because the pronoun flair comes from the Extra Fields, it’s already public information so there’s no possibility of unexpectedly disclosing it in places where you’d rather not (it’ll always be public everywhere, this change just boosts it’s visibility). I love the idea of having proper controls over who sees it and when but ActivityPub doesn’t have fine-grained access control built in to the protocol so I’d rather not go there and become responsible for sensitive data.
@ada@piefed.blahaj.zone @catfeeder@piefed.blahaj.zone @hildegarde@lemmy.blahaj.zone
I like the placeholder text in the screenshot, but it will disappear during typing. So the pronouns should be displayed elsewhere, which is my issue with how its displayed in the image. If I need to refer to you by pronouns in paragraph 2, the placeholder is no longer there to refer back to. Perhaps a heading for replies or replacing the reply button with, “reply to [display name](p/n),” could be worth considering. But showing the pronouns integrated into the interface, and at the time users will use them is a great idea.
However its handled, I think interoperability with other fediverse platforms is very important. I know of many times that some platforms or apps didn’t display pronouns to some users, which lead to misgendering and other issues. If it’s feasible, an implementation that reduces that possibility would be good.
Another possibility I would like to bring to the discussion, if possible, would be an ability to choose who the pronouns are shown to. There are people out there that I would prefer not be informed of my pronouns. An option to only show pronouns to only users of the local instance, or only other users who have themselves set pronouns, would be appreciated.
I use some websites where pronouns are handled by a third party browser add-on. Because it’s opt in, I can be reasonably assured that anyone with listed pronouns will be an ally, and those who are not will lack the means to use that information against me. If feasible, the ability to replicate that functionality would be nice.
Thank you for reaching out and asking for our input. Probably going to migrate my account to piefed soon!
Another possibility I would like to bring to the discussion, if possible, would be an ability to choose who the pronouns are shown to.
It could be made so your pronouns would only show up to users who also chose their pronouns. Most transphobes won’t bother with setting it up anyway.
edit: poor wording
Is that in its current implementation? Apologies I have not yet switched over, and don’t know piefed specifics.
No, I just worded that comment incorrectly :)
It COULD be made so.
Thx for the clarification! Only showing pronouns to others with pronouns, and users of the same instance were the two specific cases I mentioned later in the initial comment. I feel certain that users with pronouns and users on blahaj are not transphobes!
I however am unfamiliar with any of the technical specifics behind the fediverse. Could be impossible, infeasible, or easy. We’ll see!
Only showing pronouns to others with pronouns, and users of the same instance were the two specific cases I mentioned later in the initial comment.
Oh, you’re right, that part somehow escaped my attention 😅
I however am unfamiliar with any of the technical specifics behind the fediverse. Could be impossible, infeasible, or easy. We’ll see!
I suspect the hardest part is to make it work with Lemmy too as well as all the mobile apps.
I might be in the minority here, but I like the options we have today.
Individuals can choose to include their pronouns in their display name if they like. This info is highly visible, being present on all posts and comments a person leaves. If users want to broadcast their pronouns this way, they’re welcome to do so.
But I also appreciate the flexibility for people who want to make their pronouns available to anyone interested, but not necessarily make it a part of their display name. I’m in that camp. For people like me, keeping a slot for pronouns in the user’s profile / bio page is perfect.
Being able to do both, either or neither is great!
I absolutely love the creativity of using auto-clearing placeholder text in a reply’s text body to remind folks of pronouns. That’s really cool! But as a practical matter, when I write a reply to someone I’m always using English second-person pronouns (you/your/yours), so I generally don’t need to know the gender/pronouns of the person I’m replying to. What you’d need are the pronouns of the person you’re writing about, not to. It’s still a slick idea, though!
What you’d need are the pronouns of the person you’re writing about, not to
Oh yeah! That does take the shine off it somewhat.
Somewhat. But when writing in Spanish, Portuguese, French, Italian, Polish, Croatian, Ukrainian, Czech, Slovak, Slovene, Serbian, Russian, Madeonian, Bulgarian, Latvian or Lithuanian (and maybe Greek? And how about the Gaelic languages?), you do need the information about genders when writing an adjective about the person you are talking to. So in Spanish “you are lovely” is “eres encantador” or “eres encantadora” depending of whether you’re talking to a man or a woman.
Additionally, in most Slavic languages, whenever you talk about anything that has happened in the past, you must always tell the gender of the subject.
So, “Anna, you flew!” and “Michał, you flew!”
are in Polish “Anna, ty poleciałaś!” and “Michał, ty poleciałeś!”.oh, vocative?
Polish has the vocative case, so maybe I should have put the names in vocative case in this example? But because that only affects how the names are written, not the word for “flew”, I didn’t spend the time to go learn that part of the Polish grammar right now :)
You almost always need to know the gender of the person when talking to them in a Slavic language, and you often need to know it when talking to them in a Romanic language. So, good info to have!
(…and of for me, as a Finn… In my mother tongue there is never any need to know the other person’s gender when talking to or about them. Except if you want to explicitly use the words “man”, “woman”, “boy” or “girl”. But even then you can just say “adult” or “child”, so whatever.
Every Finn lives their first 7 years without caring a damn about their conversation partners’ genders. They are all just people, and that’s enough for almost any situation.
It’s interesting how often you see children in English classes get angry at the teacher for having to differentiate between “he” and “she”. An argument I’ve often heard is “It is such a hassle for no reason!”
In my eyes, all these very visible gender declarations are programming my brain towards thinking more about people’s genders, while I would prefer just ignoring the whole concept of genders in my thinking.)
