Continuing my thinking about a custom-built Micro.blog theme plugin, I wondered why most of Micro.blog themes design card-based? Here’s Claude AI’s answer:
Cards became the dominant Micro.blog theme style largely by following a broader web design trend from the mid-2010s, when Pinterest and Material Design made cards ubiquitous. Theme authors adopted them because they handle variable-length content safely and look great in screenshots. The fork-from-fork nature of many Micro.blog themes then perpetuated the pattern. The irony is that cards aren’t actually the best fit for Micro.blog’s typical stream of short title-less posts — making it a real opportunity for anyone wanting a distinctive, better-suited design.
Besides the fact that Micro.blog launched in 2018, the rest of Claude’s response makes me think that my design choice of a left sidebar, similar to Micro, is a good one.