I have used Qwant myself at times.
Librerian
I agree to your points. Having every icon be the same colors (black and yellow) really makes it hard to distinguish the different communities at a glance. For instance, the Open Source Initiative keyhole logo/icon used as the logo for the Free and Open Source Software community is usually green, and having it be black on yellow background is actually in direct contradiction to the OSI Logo Usage Guidelines section 2.1 – "Never Stray from the Color Palette", where an example of a yellow/red icon is present. So there are also such considerations that has to be taken. Also
You may not remove or obfuscate either of the TM or ® symbols in the OSI Logo.
So either way that icon has to be changed to be in compliance with the usage guidelines (@alyaza, @Gaywallet and @UrLogicFails ), since I believe the Beehaw-community does not want to infringe on such a point. I am also then not sure if @UrLogicFails can release the icon under a license as is done here, since the keyhole logo is trademarked (see the OSI Trademark Guidelines). See for instance how [email protected] has solved this. They use the icon with the ® symbol as well as attributing the OSI in the sidebar:
Community icon from opensource.org, but we are not affiliated with them.
I think the color palette of the community icons shouldn't be restricted to only black and yellow, that makes everything "scream" as that is usually a color combination used to express a warning or announcement. I'm no graphic designer by trade, but I think colors should be used as a distinguishing feature between the instances commmunities, and less dramatic colors, so to speak. Having the icons have a hexagon shape should be enough to recognize them as Beehaw-communities, even if they have different color schemes.
Welcome, and thanks for taking on this task! And I suspect that you meant /c/gaming instead of /r/gaming? 😉
What about Qwant?
A dam can have floodgates to control the flow of water (and therefore the water level in the reservoir to a degree), not just a weir with a fixed elevation where water flows over the crest, so I suspect that you might confuse a dam with a weir. I read that a professor said this particular dam had 26 gates. If you expect a flood, you'd want to open the gates beforehand, as to make room in the reservoir, and to reduce the peak flow that an uncontrolled flood would give, for example.
A lot of lurkers are gonna flee the platform too though, but they might not join other sites/communities like Lemmy to replace it. So the loss for Reddit will be bigger than those who choose to migrate to Lemmy. And I expect a few lurkers from Reddit, like myself for the most part, are gonna be more active on Lemmy, since the community seems a lot less toxic. I didn't care too much about contributing on Reddit, since pretty much every discussion attracted trolls, spammers, or just hostile users, and the discussions, the exchange of ideas and experiences just vanished or drowned in a sea of noise.
And to add a little more: the icons contribute to making the Local timeline for Beehaw to become overly "busy", since every post has a very stand-out yellow icon under it, usually signifying something important (hence why it should stand out). The icons become to prominent, especially considering the websites dark background color. I can see the appeal of being able to easily identify Beehaw-communities in Subscribed or All timelines, but to be quite honest, I find that the overly attention-seeking color choice of the icons clutter up the Local timeline to a point where they are more of a nuisance rather than conveying any kind of distinguishing information about the community. My Local timeline now looks like this:
Don't get me wrong, I think they are beautifully designed, but the color choice is very much working against conveying any useful information at a glance (except what instance theyy belong to...). There is a reason that not all traffic signs have the same colors.