I inspected the mastodon.social website

This is cool. I wish this sort of analysis existed for many major websites! The reason I think this would be useful is the accessibility of the results - we'd be able to consider the various analytics within the context of something highly familiar (the mention of Slack still using "text/..." is one such example).

Although... hmm, maybe I don't want all websites scored. Arc (ie, HN) would probably rank 0.5/10 in terms of technical design (I begrudgingly admit the Spartan UI could be worse). Upvoting is done by creating an empty image then loading it - but the "hide" link uses XHR, so that's a bit inconsistent; the layout is based on tables... and still uses the old 1x1px spacer image trick for padding!!1; there's absolutely no ARIA to be found anywhere, so I wonder what screen-readers think of it (a valid consideration, I've read comments by blind users here); and the Firebase API is read-only and doesn't permit posting/interaction, so if I want to make a 3rd-party app, I'd have to ask users for their passwords. That works for app storage but localStorage is neither encrypted or "reasonably resilient", so that won't work in a Web framework demo context. I have a lot of reluctance to give out my HN password in a world of OAuth2, all the more when I consider that HN is regarded more highly than other communities such as reddit, twitter, etc. I think this could explain why most 3rd-party HN demo apps don't allow posting, and it's sad.

Incentive to make own, better website intensifies

And I'll make a note of this person, and ask them what they think of it when it's live.

> Not a big fan of the FontAwesome icon font as a solution for icons, not anymore. But I guess an SVG icon system will replace those very soon. SVG icon fonts are so much easier to work with.

FontAwesome 5 is based on SVG. I love that I can import only the handful of tiny SVG icons I need in my projects.

Yeah, the thumbs down on FontAwesome is a little harsh imo. Maybe there should be a thumbs down on FontAwesome using the CSS classes flavor, but I don't see the new version as being a bad thing at all.

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.

I love Mastadon. Apart from the points OP mentioned, I would love to see the UI & UX being upgraded to something that feels cleaner and less cluttered.