One way to promote the #Fediverse is by making the different fediverse software support custom profile skins and themes. This can potentially create an ecosystem of skin and theme creators, which in turn will make more people talk about it.
I differentiate between a skin and a theme because:
A “skin” is like changing the CSS of the default layout. Adding an image here and there, new icons, and colours and gradients.
While a “theme” can change the layout itself. The widgets available, or shuffle them around. Possible even a way to add custom ones (careful with this though).
You can add, remove, and move widgets around. Use custom ones easily. Change colours easily. Change the widths, the columns, and so on. That is a “theme”. There were even third-party frontend packages a developer can use so they don't have to worry much about it.
Skinning is the simplest method; and this was what made #Plurk popular when it launched in May 2008 (yes, Plurk is as old as the Fediverse network). There was a Plurk skin ecosystem, which in turn increased the number of people talking about Plurk.
Apply the theming feature from the early CMS brands with Plurk's user-level skinning feature, and we create a playground for the users.
#Misskey and forks already had a good start with their user-level skinning feature (and user-level plugins at that). We just need to see it in the other popular fediverse software.
Make it easier to understand. Write guidelines in layman's terms, not dev terms, and maybe, just maybe, we can spark the interest of new users. Who doesn't want a customisable user profile?
@Yohan Yuki Xieㆍ사요한・謝雪矢 Friendica and its several descendants, including Hubzilla and (streams), have been fully themeable since their respective inceptions. It just takes someone to create and maintain themes.
Early Friendica didn't go that far with its themes, but I remember that it came with themes that mimicked Diaspora* or Facebook.
When Hubzilla was still fairly new, it came with a bunch of themes to choose from, too. Unfortunately, it was too much of an effort to keep all these themes up-to-date with the backend. Only Redbasic was maintained, and the other themes were marked as outdated and no longer fully compatible with then-current Hubzilla until they were thrown out entirely. In the meantime, Redbasic doesn't look any different today than it looked a dozen years ago when Hubzilla was still named Red.
Hubzilla's UI in particular can be redesigned in such ways that you won't even notice that you're on a federated social network instance anymore, much less that it's Hubzilla underneath. However, there is no documentation on how Hubzilla themes work, other than the source codes of Redbasic and the old themes if you can still find them.
@Scott M. Stolz is working on all-new themes for Hubzilla, and so is @𝓒𝓱𝓻𝓲𝓼 who is making specialised UIs for specific purposes, e.g. for Hubzilla channels that mostly serve as blogs. Both basically have to reverse-engineer Hubzilla's theming with a lot of trial and error. But Scott said he'll write a how-to once he's done with his themes.
@jupiter_rowland That's correct, however, I was talking about user-level skinning and theming, not ones that rely on the admin to install before a user can use it.
Unless of course Friendica and Hubzilla later added user-level skinning and theming after I shut down my respective instances; or I just didn't notice it since I'm an admin of my own instances (and have access to all the settings). 😅😅
Example, Mastodon. There is a skin feature for it, but it's admin-level. Users can't skin it themselves. Misskey and forks have user-level skinning, though not well-documented.