I always assumed this was just copied from Apollo and that Apollo had it this way because there was no Reddit API call to get user avatars or something (but I ever only dabbled in creating bots so I wasn’t very interested in those features). I found out now that it could be done so that means it’s likely that it was a conscious design choice not to include it. I enjoyed Apollo in a compact and text heavy way and I have Voyager set up that way as well. What I’m trying to say is that I like it the way it is but don’t mind introducing avatars in some subtle way.
Voyager
The official lemmy community for Voyager, an open source, mobile-first client for lemmy.
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Yeah, this pretty much.
I consider features like user profile/bio to be consider "user clout" or "influencer" features.
That is, on Twitter/Mastodon, who you are (and how many followers you have) constitutes how much your opinion matters. On reddit/lemmy that's much less true (no followers). In voyager it's practically none, since your user profile is essentially equivalent to the content you post and there is no profile pics/bio.
There's nothing really wrong with these 'user clout' features if you like them, but it is against Voyager/Apollo default UX. That being said, it will probably be a configurable option in the future just off by default.
Perhaps offer it as a setting, that users could potentially turn on/off?
It's just that, IMHO, there's no point in having Profile Images, if you're not allowed to zoom in /out, and see them up close.