Over the past year, we've been looking at how to solve a really specific niche problem. We've been building dedicated news hubs on our site for various platforms, and thought it would be nice to store icons for all sorts of different platforms, apps, and protocols. That way, when you look at any given article,...

As we’ve been building out our site, we’ve wanted to showcase the icons of various projects and protocols. However, there’s been a real lack of any kind of icon font for that purpose…Mastodon is pretty much the only Fediverse project to be featured in FontAwesome, and the ForkAwesome project has been dormant for a long time.

So, we’ve been building our own.

  • Sean TilleyOPEnglish
    4•1 month ago

    Interesting insights!

    The original reason we started this was actually for our own development. Our site includes project icons and colors in dedicated tags, which link to dedicated topic hubs. As we started working on this, we realized that there wasn’t a really good resource, and that we would have to build something from scratch.

    Those symbols that you see are typically Unicode. Icon fonts are generally a CSS hack, in that a collection of SVGs have been converted into a font. The Unicode strings can be thought of as “letters” for that font. You’re absolutely right that there are accessibility limitations, but the tradeoff is that people get an easy way to use their favorite project icons to represent where they are on the Web.

    At the very least, you won’t have any uBO problems with our site, as the font is incorporated directly into the theme we’re using. We’ll likely explore making a WordPress plugin next, so people can add these to their profiles and menus and other places.

    • @[email protected]English
      2•29 days ago

      Thanks for the response! It makes sense that you’d have to build stuff from scratch if you could not reasonably find something somewhere else that “fits”. A good work on hosting that extra tidbit yourself, too.

      As we started working on this, we realized that there wasn’t a really good resource, and that we would have to build something from scratch.

      Has this impacted your decision process on how to iterate this over time? I assume at some point there will be more or different projects going around, some projects may die but their archives might still be around, who (if anyone) counts as the authoritative voice on how a given project’s icon should look, etc.

      • Sean TilleyOPEnglish
        1•29 days ago

        Good question. For now, we have a basic process for submitting icons, which requires adding details about the project repo, information on the icon, and Copyright attribution for whoever created / owns the brand.

        We recently incorporated a JS library that allows us to generate the font from the SVG files themselves, which also builds the preview pages that can be viewed at icons.wedistribute.org. With a bit of extra automation on Codeberg, we could basically update the preview page and generated set every time a new icon gets merged in to the main branch.

        Our goal is to get to a point where new releases automatically get created, and an archive of the assets gets attached as well. That way, once a milestone gets completed, a new release will get put out with minimal amounts of work.