Main menu adjustment suggestion regarding Home/Network

Hello Friendica,

I have been considering making a change to Friendica in the next release where the current "Home" is replaced by the "Network" page, taking over the "Home" icon.

Going from this:

To this:

The current "Home" points to one's own "Conversations", which I think isn't that important of a page, and it's still easily accessible from the user menu here:

It also aligns with what most other social media platforms use as "Home".
Fx. Mastodon, Facebook, where I think a lot of new users come from.

It also simplifies the menu, and people have been reporting that the menu structure was confusing to them. Another issue is the lack of text in the main menu, but I'm planning to suggest a change for that afterwards.

We've been running with that on friendica.dk for half a year now, and people seem happy about the change.

What do you think?

+1 for this change. Simplifying the top menu icons is welcome and the structure seems more intuitive and meet what users expect which spares confusion and frustration.

Comparing the icons with other social networks shows they look a bit dated, partly due to using too much detail. But that is for another day and unrelated to your question and the PR.

@wilhelm The duality of these two icons (Network and Home) is currently necessary to allow you to go back to your own Friendica node when you're browsing another Friendica node in remote authenticated state.

@hypolite @wilhelm Tobias also mentioned that. I haven't figured out how to test that functionality yet. Are both Network and Conversations needed for that purpose or just one?

I was considering adding a dedicated button to return to one's instance instead if it's possible to detect. Maybe the Conversations button could get the icon it has in the user menu and then it's only shown to remotely authenticated users?

With this change and another change that's currently in review, we could get a menu in Frio that looks something like this:

@marcusxms @wilhelm To get this display, you would click/tap on a Friendica display name on a node that isn’t configured as “Local-only”. Then there’s a handshake back and forth and you end up being authenticated on the remote node.

@marcusxms Are there labels for the other three icons too that just aren't shown?

You had mentioned something about adding labels so they get translated and Bookface wouldn't need to use CSS variables for the labels anymore. It would just be the variable for displaying the labels or not.

I saw that you were also working on a change to where "Home" goes, I assume that is in the Friendica core and would apply to all themes not just Frio?

@randompenguin The above is just a screenshot of my local dev environment, but in a recently merged PR I did add labels to Network, Conversations, Community and Calendar, that are hidden via CSS, thinking Bookface can just show them and change how they look yes?

Haven't added text to Contacts, Messages and Notifications yet, but I could?
Messages and Notifications are identical on e.g. FB so I kinda thought perhaps labels weren't as needed there. But Contacts is unique.
Those three were just moved to the right in Frio, matching FB and somewhat Bookface.

In the PR that replaces Home, which has not been merged, it's also done for Vier, yes, though fairly often I only modify Frio partially because it's less work.
But that hasn't been approved or merged yet.

The next release is planned for august so it'll be a while.

@hypolite @wilhelm Thanks! That's a pretty impressive feature!
I just tested it and saw that I could get back to my own instance via Network, Messages, Calendar and Contacts, but the Friendica icon stays on the visited instance. That's with javascript disabled. With javascript enabled, the personal user menu has a lot of links back to my instance as well.

And also "stay local" became default not that long ago, so I wonder if the Home link would be that missed, and a new dedicated link should take its place? What do you think?

@randompenguin With Booklook released I'd start to prioritize Vier a lot higher, and maybe even shift around so Frio's the low priority.

@marcusxms I still don't know if/when Booklook will be released. I was developing it under 2024.12 and just moved it to the current stable and it's badly broken because a LOT changed in the Friendica core. I need to fix a bunch of stuff just to get it to a functional state again to continue working on it.

Unlike Bookface (which is a scheme for Frio) this Booklook is not a Vier "style" it is a stand-alone theme. I started by copying Vier but have heavily modified it and integrated a lot of features and code from Frio, but without any of the libraries or frameworks. So Booklook is also not a Bootstrap theme.

It's little wonder nobody is making themes for Friendica. It's kind of a nightmare due to outdated or non-existent documentation and Friendica has a thousand "moving parts" so every time I turn around there's another thing that needs to be addressed, which often means picking through the core code trying to figure out how it works, and then that core code is in flux with the refactor too. And because there are so many addons and configurations people might have it's impossible to anticipate all of them.

To say it is frustrating would be an understatement.

I would like to finish it and release it but I'm not all that interested in maintaining it because my enthusiasm for this platform is waning.