spacehey and mobile friendliness

Okay so potentially unpopular opinion? I was going to just make this a bulletin but if I'm gonna talk about it I actually want people to see it so it's a blog now :P

Basically if you have the knowledge and the time, please consider mobile users when designing your spacehey layouts and other code. I know a lot of people believe that because spacehey is meant to replicate a time when people didn't have phones like we have now, that the site should centre pc users, or if you're viewing on mobile you're not viewing the site "as intended" and therefore don't deserve ease of access.

Upfront I want to say I know a lot of people do not know how to make their code responsive, and that's fine. When I see a profile that's not mobile friendly I don't suddenly think they're an evil, malicious person hellbent on ruining the lives of mobile users. But I think the 'mobile users don't matter' mentality is just unhelpful.

You do not have to ruin the aesthetic of your profile to make it mobile friendly!!! Anything I can't work out how to incorporate into mobile view I just hide on my profile, and there are lots of other ways to deal with site responsiveness too. One day I wanna make a tutorial on it, but there are existing tutorials online (you want to look into "css media queries", "mobile responsiveness" and "display: none" as some examples). You're also welcome to have a peek at my own code if you wish (although it's quite a mess, sorry about that).

If your profile is mobile friendly everything should comfortably fit on the screen, viewers shouldn't have to side scroll to view things on your page, everything should be readable and all buttons and links should be clickable (or I suppose press-able). A common issue I see is the screen is so full of floating images and gifs covering the contents of the page making it impossible to navigate on a smaller screen. You can check your profile's responsiveness by shrinking your browser's window to replicate a phone's screen width.

Some reasons you should make your code responsive include greater accessibility of your profile: some people can't use a computer or don't have one. Quite obviously, you'll be able to reach more people with a mobile friendly profile. Reasons to not make your profile responsive? I can't think of any. "Spacehey is a retro social media so it should replicate the messy, inaccessible designs of the old web" just doesn't cut it for me. Your desktop viewing experience isn't affected by making your profile accessible for mobile users so how does it hurt you to consider other people?

There's a lot of other points to be made about users favouring the 'old web aesthetic' over accessibility (bright colours, flashing gifs just to name some obvious ones) but not something I want to get into right now. And again: I understand coding isn't easy for everyone. You're not a horrible person for not having a responsive profile, but please stop accepting inaccessible mobile pages as the norm.

Idk, as with all my other posts I'll probably come back to edit this since this is just a ton of thoughts I've thrown together hoping it's comprehensible. Stay safe and thank you for reading!!

Edit: added some styling :3