There are quite a few communities that are entirely image posts so presenting them as a vertical list of thumbnails doesn’t really make the best of what is there.
To improve on that I’ve made use of the common web design pattern called ‘masonry’, where the images are arraigned like bricks in a wall. Check it out:
https://piefed.social/c/aww@lemmy.world
https://piefed.social/c/artporn@lemm.ee (wide tile - best on large monitors)
On each tile there is the title of the post at the bottom which can be clicked on to view the post and it’s comments. This footer could be improved with voting buttons and perhaps the number of comments, in future.
This doesn’t work as well for meme communities as memes often contain a lot of text, which gets squished. Perhaps there needs to be a 2 or 3 column version with larger thumbnails.
Personally, I’m not sure I like it that much. The place these kind of layouts are probably most often used are image searches or things where you browse through a lot of stuff to find something. But if you want to look at or scroll through each image individually, having the images next to each other in a non-uniform grid provides a lot of distruction and visual noise imo that makes it harder to focus on the individual image. For me, I think just being able to scroll through each image individually makes for a better experience.
Although, I guess it depends mostly on one’s browsing style. Whether it’s more “quickly skim the content and take a cloaer look at what seems interesting” or a more feed-style consumption.