Having been inspired by the comments on this thread I quickly sketched out some characters which might work. The idea is to have something recognizable like the Lemmy lemming or Mastodon elephant which symbolizes the project.
At the core these are Kbeans, with the possibility of dressing them up as Kbeanauts/Kbinauts with the appropriate costume. These can be also be used like Reddit Snoos with a character creator where users can select facial features, hats, bins (baskets or boxes to sit in), props, and so forth.
I also tried sketching out some Koala mascots but it’s hard to make them identifiable when scaled to profile pic size. Figure wise they also don’t really fit well into a square frame unlike the beans.
BTW these mascots are made for the community. Please feel free to modify them, polish them up, and make your own variants. Developing a mascot should be a community effort.
I’m not set up for Codeberg yet but I’ll tag @ernest to see if he’s interested in taking these further. Other users are free to modify these characters and submit variants as well - this is a collaborative effort!
I’ll also respond to the comment in Codeberg which mentions that this looks a bit like Kirby. There are only so many ways one can create a cartoon talking ball (basically it’s either a Kirby, Pac-Man, or an armless sphere with a face). The Kbeans are squashed on the y-axis so they aren’t a full sphere (see the angled one on the left) and their arms and legs are stubby appendages fixed on the sides and bottom.
Yep, I have marked it as high priority, and after consultation, I will indeed replace it with the kbin icon. Thanks.