Why on earth are most, if not all (?), basic and general app settings tied to the Lemmy account@instance?
It really doesn’t make sense to me that stuff like “base font size” and virtually all app usability and appearance settings are reset to their defaults every time I add or switch Lemmy accounts/instances.
Even if there are good arguments to be made that the app *should *look completely different for each account@instance and not share any settings between them (and I’m struggling to think of many), why would that be default behavior?
I’m pretty sure my app’s font size and media handling didn’t change every time when I switched accounts in Sync for Reddit.
Now do that for 10 different Lemmy instances every single time you choose to change a setting …
It definitely needs a way to sync some settings (most?) between accounts. There are some I would not want synced when performing a settings sync. For one, I really like how each account can have their own image download folder. That way my, uh… one account’s image downloads go to a hidden folder. I also have a different view mode set for that account.
What I did with Sync for Reddit was setup one account the way I wanted most to be, then saved a settings backup into a folder called “Default”. When I needed a new account for some reason, I would set that folder as that account’s backup folder and load the backup.
It worked “OK”. The problem is when you find a few other little settings to change on one account and have to remember to do another backup so you can load it in your other accounts at some point.
I feel like everyone’s going to have their own opinions on which settings should be the same on every account, and which should be separate. The sensible thing is to have them all be separate with a way to sync them between accounts, which is what we have now. A simpler “settings sync” feature would save about 6 taps after adding a new account. Six taps really isn’t a big deal, but it would be nice to have that feature.
Per account settings are a good thing, if not necessarily for everyone.
Sensible per account settings certainly are. But these almost exclusively aren’t, because they aren’t really account-related settings.
My eyesight certainly doesn’t change when I switch Lemmy accounts/instances, so why the heck should the font size?
Even if there were a genuine use-case for having different font sizes, themes, media-handling per account/instance, do you genuinely think that the vast majority of all users want entirely different app settings per Lemmy account and have them revert to their defaults each time they log into a new account, or would the majority just want to set these things up once and have them apply to all accounts automatically?
Per account settings, they way they are done here, would be a terrible default. As it stands, though, that’s not just the default, it appears to be the only option.
I understand your point for sure!
However, by making all of them account specific, but having import/export as an option that will let you set up each account exactly the same if you want, you can still have the ability to have multiple users on multiple accounts as well.
That may or may not be a feature that’s useful to you, and I’m certain it isn’t for everyone. But I can say that our “bathroom tablet” that we can all grab as needed that has the fonts for my account set bigger, my kid’s smaller, etc, it’s handy.
It actually is a feature many people liked on reddit. There were complaints as well, of course, but the import/export function really does make it trivial to fix up. It would be nice of there was also an option to set some settings as permanent, but I’m not sure how that would work.
Fwiw, my homie, spider, has another use case. He has his main account, and a porn account. The main account, he has link handling set up one way, with a dark them that’s subdued. His porn account opens links externally only, and has a brighter theme so that he doesn’t get crossed up when visitors are over. Now, the font stuff he sets the same of course.
But I can say that our “bathroom tablet” that we can all grab as needed that has the fonts for my account set bigger, my kid’s smaller, etc, it’s handy.
Ignoring the fact that the “communal poop tablet” is probably not all the terribly common, why on earth would you rely on In-App-User-Profiles for that instead of Android User Profiles?
but having import/export as an option that will let you set up each account exactly the same if you want,
That might have been fine with one or two Reddit alt-accounts, but Lemmy is an entirely different beast. I feel like I’m instance-hopping almost daily for one reason or another and I’m rapidly amassing new accounts. Given how aggressively some instances defederate (I’m looking at you, Beehaw), there’s little choice if you want to experience most of what Lemmy has to offer.
Suddenly, keeping all settings on these accounts in sync becomes a rather tedious and arduous task, which requires repetition every time one chooses to change their settings.
Compared to that, the edge cases where it may actually be useful behavior are ridiculously small. So, having this as the default and only behavior is simply bad design.
I agree, it should be global by default and changeable per account
That’s definitely how it worked on reddit. He’s using the original reddit app as the base. Cut him some slack right now, he’s still working on the lemmy specific features. Stuff like this is perfectly functional, so tweaking it is most likely a pretty low priority.
i think you can export the settings from one profile and import them into the other
