As a strong supporter of open-source and community-funded projects like Lemmy, which prioritize serving users over investors, I believe Lemmy has significant potential, and that’s why I am here. However, it is clear that its growth is nearing a plateau in its current form. Despite the surge in users following Reddit’s API changes, Lemmy continues to primarily attract tech-savvy individuals, politically left-aligned users, and those accustomed to old Reddit. For Lemmy to reach the broader average general audience, meaningful changes are necessary.
The rise of Bluesky demonstrates the importance of ease of use and a user-friendly design. Its polished and familiar interface is a key reason for its growth and appeal as an alternative to platforms like X/Twitter. This same ease of use is what Mastodon lacked, leading to its initial hype fading quickly. The average user is unlikely to adapt to something that feels complicated or unfamiliar, and this challenge also applies to Lemmy.
As someone who started as an average Reddit user and became more tech-savvy over time, I can confidently say that first impressions matter. When users first visit lemmy.world, the default UI is often enough to discourage them from staying. Most will not explore the homepage sidebar to explore, figure out and switch to one of the alternative UIs available, which is unfortunate because a better UI could make a huge difference.
This is why I propose that large servers like lemmy.world adopt Photon UI as the default web interface. Photon is currently the best and most mature alternative UI, offering a visually appealing, modular design that feels familiar to users of new Reddit. It makes excellent use of screen space and provides customization options like compact and cozy views. Unlike some other alternative UIs, Photon is actively maintained and ready for widespread use, although in no way is it perfect, this can also help bring in more contributors to the project development.
While it is important to continue offering other UIs as options, I believe adopting Photon as the default UI could make Lemmy far more appealing to the average Reddit user. First impressions are crucial, and the current default UI has turned off many potential users. If we want Lemmy to succeed as a true Reddit alternative, we need to prioritize user experience and accessibility. Thankfully today, Lemmy still continues to be THE biggest Reddit alternative, while our userbase is still considerably smaller than Reddit, it’s the biggest of any alternatives, and Lemmy continues to somewhat be in the spotlight for those seeking alternatives, we can’t let growth stagnate, it’s high time we make the platform more welcoming and appealing for the average joe.
Nah, the current UI is fine. We don’t need fancy shit on a link aggregator. Reddit went to shit after “updating” the UI.
Your opinions of “good” or “best” aren’t the same for everyone.
You really trying to convince us with a screenshot of the ugliest ui i ever seen huh
Yeah I used old Reddit. I don’t want something that looks like new Reddit
You both aren’t wrong… But this isn’t about you.
.world in a nutshell
We tried at communick.news a while ago, it didn’t work so well. Perhaps the situation has improved, so it’s worth to take a look.
Hey, how are you doing?
https://phtn.app/ has the latest version, seems quite faster
- With what I think are near enough default settings, Voyager shows me about 9 stories. It doesn’t feel cramped and the layout is regular, everything lines up.
- With what I think are near enough default settings, my browser here shows me 14 stories, with a good accessible font size by default and me easily zooming out to 80%. It doesn’t feel cramped and the layout is regular, everything lines up.
- I can see 2 stories in that screenshot. Why would I want to have something that’s at least 5 times worse, it feels cramped and parts of it line up I guess?
I don’t think Reddit’s redesign is a good thing to aim for.
Lemmy will be getting a new, more modern UI sometime soon.
It is being actively developed and you can even try it out today: https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy-ui-leptos
Has anyone deployed it yet? Curious to see what it looks like, but too lazy to deploy it myself
Apparently lemm.ee has it deployed: https://next.lemm.ee/
edit: though I’ll keep using this UI or Photon if it stays like that. It is, at the moment, very ugly.
Wait, are you sure? I thought it was only a project by @sunaurus@lemm.ee : https://lemm.ee/post/27356044
That’s too much padding. It needs to be more like Hacker News.
Are you aware of https://old.lemmy.world/ ?
I literally hate the new reddit UI, as do most peeps I’ve spoken with…
The new reddit UI is designed to push ads, and push premium subs.
Nah that looks like convoluted shit. Simple is better. Like old Reddit. Your screenshot looks like new Reddit dogshit.
People have their preferences, and that’s fine. I certainly think we would benefit from different instances making use of different user interfaces by default, appealing in return to different kinds of people.
I’ve heard some people are not into Piefed because it’s too bare bones or something. For me, that’s exactly why I love it. Besides, they have even added (optional) support for decorative drop shadows - it’s futuristic as fuck, as far as I’m concerned.
That UI is dogshit. Lemmy is a link aggregator and you’re saying it should show 2 links on the screen at a time? New Reddit is shit for the same reason.
/me pines for the days of protocol over interface. NNTP + killfiles were the bees knees. Then we could just all pick our own interface to connect to any lemmy host.
Huh…?
But the Instances themselves can customize all they like…?
The Lemmy UI is easy enough to use IMO. Where the problems show up are:
-
Unreliable linking to other comments and posts. It is annoying to no end to receive a link to someone’s comment and be unceremoniously ripped out of your home server and put onto the federated one no longer logged in etc… This behaviour should somehow be prevented
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a quick reference to the text commands easily found somewhere (ie: sidebar)
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I’d prefer more theme and colour options
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Fix the text interface so it respects carriage return entries properly. If I want to start a new line directly under the current one (edit: AFI knew after 4+ months of use) there is
no way
to do
it.
Make it so a single carriage return is acknowledged and correctly starts a new line right underneath, or automatically forces a blank line between. This needing double entry is unintuitive and wrecks many new user’s first hundred post’s appearance.
Finally, the premise: Lemmy.world should be more welcoming is itself undesirable. That instance is already taking up an inordinate number of users so IMO every other instance (except the awful ones, we all know who they are) should be using a better UI, not L.W
no way
to do
it.
your can use
two space at the end of the line
to achieve thisFor the links, it’s being worked on, should be part of 0.20: https://lemmy.ml/post/23245384
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I personally really dislike new reddit and the Photon theme. I’d say no to any change to my main instance.
I love the Lemmy UI.
But I’m a gen Xer.
There’s some great analysis floating around of how different generations actually interpret UIs (and make decisions about how or whether to engage with them) very differently. So there is no “one size fits all” that will make everybody happy. Change the Lemmy UI to something like Photon and I’d be like… “this is dumb.” Making a bunch of very different options is a lot of work. If you want to do it… no one is stopping you. The Lemmy project is opensource and you could go start contributing and making pull requests today. You could go run your own instance and make it look like whatever you want and get the average redditors to join that. I run my own instance. We have a whole two users. It works exactly the way I want it to and federates with exactly who I want it to.
Frankly, I’m not sure Lemmy needs to go out of it’s way to appeal to the average redditor in order to have a thriving, healthy community. Sure, there are some things I miss about having a giant user base to engage with, but honestly, I’ll trade them for the MUCH MUCH lower toxicity. I don’t know that “growing Lemmy” should be our focus. It’s not like we’re getting paid.
I love the Lemmy UI, and am a Gen Z. There’s nothing worse than a UI that’s slow, takes more time than necessary to load and is overloaded. I would much rather have bare HTTP forms or just make curl calls than using (new) reddit or Photon.
Millenial here, Fuck Brutalist Modern and Responsive Web Design! If they ever dumb down the interface: I’m out of here.
This is a good take.
Speaking from the same neutral pragmatism, it makes sense to let the default Lemmy web UI be a lightweight, actually-mobile-friendly derivative of old.reddit, rather than a more committed default like Alexandrite or Photon.
Keeping things similar is a good jumping-off point, and if we do want to make some large change, different generations and cultures have heavily varying default preferences. Wouldn’t it be wiser to pick a common ground, something these differing peoples have grown used to, as opposed to some new style A or B or C likes?
(Fun fact: if you think that ppl sticking to old designs is silly, Panasonic has a whole $$ niche in Japan selling modern-internal, vintage-external laptops with DVD drives and old-style keyboards. https://old.reddit.com/r/thinkpad/v0t06p literally has both a VGA and a thunderbolt lol)
