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Chris Vreeland @Devils_Rancher

Maybe it’s just my brain, but I can’t stand animated avatars. Is it overly grouchy of me to reflexively mute anyone that shows up in my timeline with lots of flashing going on? I literally can’t read when something on my screen is wiggling or flashing. Maybe it’s some sort of cognitive disability.

· Tootle for Mastodon · 0 · 3

@intherain Precisely! Thank grid for reader view in Safari & Adblock Plus, or I wouldn’t be able to read the news.

@Devils_Rancher I get where you're coming from but I've just sort of leaned into it and now find the excessive garishness entertaining.

@suetanvil They’re cute for a second, in an old skool message board kind of way, but they seriously screw with my ability to focus on & comprehend text. Seems like it’s getting worse as I get older, but in the olden days, if you held down the scroll bar on a browser widow, the gifs would stop animating so I read a lot of websites with a finger mashed down on the mouse.

@Devils_Rancher
I believe you can disable them from the settings tab in Mastodon. I saw the checkbox but haven't tried it so YMMV.

@suetanvil you can in the browser interface, but Tootle doesn’t respect that setting, so maybe I should message the developer & see if that can go on the feature request list

@Devils_Rancher people complained about this a lot on my public websites so it's not just you. I would recommend telling the webmasters so they can easily just stop it.

@Devils_Rancher It's not just you, and it's not rude. Our instance should have a rule against animated avatars, and you can totally ask our instance admin to delete those users.

@SteveJohnson That’s a bit harsh - it’s not an abuse issue on their part. I’m using Tootle which doesn’t have the disable animation feature that the web interface does, so that falls on me. I dislike using the browser on my phone though so I’m caught between.

@Devils_Rancher

I've never seen it, but yeah.
I block so much of the internet I surprised I see anything at all.
Anything I can't see I figure it's just meant to be.

I still get caught off guard, like when today someone said something about ads on twitter.

"Twitter has ads?"

@bongo_x Tweetbot doesn’t have ads. 🙂 Neither does Mastodon. 👍🏼