I made the mistake of checking Reddit (using my last few days of Apollo) and came across a complaint about Lemmy that flabbergasted me
I made the mistake of checking Reddit (using my last few days of Apollo) and came across a complaint about Lemmy that flabbergasted me
Do people actually like all of the overdesigned clutter to the point where it makes them not want to switch sites?
To me, the stripped down clarity on Lemmy is a feature. I remember back in the day when people flocked to Facebook from MySpace, in large part because they were sick of eye gouging customized pages and just wanted a simple, consistent interface. The content, not the buttons to click on it are the draw right?
I think Lemmy could use some more ads. I feel like I don't have enough material things, and I don't know what to buy. /s
I also would like to have content that makes people angry shoved in my face to keep me engaged.
i dont have money, happy without constantly being reminded.
Some surveillance capitalism would be nice too. That way I know I'm wanted. /s
Spez, I mean, he gets us. /s
The reason I used Reddit is Fun WAS because of its stripped down, bare bones style. I only wanted to read thoughts and opinions, and choose to view images/video/ads when I wanted to. This is absolutely a feature of Jerboa (and Lemmy) for me
I don't know the background of OP so this is just an opinion: I feel that modern UX have become so ubiquitous and streamlined for content consumption that users who aren't used to old-styled UIs see the lack of "sleek" design as lesser. It works doubly so that users aren't willing to venture outside of their ecosystems and will put up with anything regardless if it's detrimental to their experience.
Compare users of new reddit and the official app vs. users of old reddit and 3PA. I used 3PA because there wasn't an official app and RiF matched what I was used to. It's a similar phenomena to Apple users vs Windows/Android. People are just used to a streamlined sleek experience (which to be fair has it's merits) but to say it's superior or that the alternative is lesser is a large misstep in thinking.
It takes effort to go out of your comfort zone but it's saddening to see users mindlessly, for lack of a better terms, consume
I'm here to read think and talk. I like it simple.
Yeah, for real. "But there's no fun awards and bubbly icons and bright colors."
Well then, go back to kindergarten.
Same, was using old.Reddit before and plan on figuring out how to use the tools I saw to redo lemmy to page layout on no stupid questions.
I like the deisgn and layout of Lemmy a lot. It reminds me a lot of old.reddit.com
Yeah, as a diehard old.reddit and non-app user, the design here has been very easy for me to adapt to
"The hosts are too lazy" says the person whining about it without doing anything.
Try switching to a platform you've never used before and making a community out of nothing, or host the Lemmy instance and be forced to deal with thousands of new users daily. Lazy my ass...
The basic platforms are more successful. They are faster and less user hostile.
old.reddit.com Hacker News Old Digg Old Fark
Was using Lemmy on my phone via browser, and I darn near swooned at how clean and tidy and useable it was.
Agreed! I was thinking initially that an app would be nice since most websites kind of suck, but this looked great on mobile and I doubt an app is necessary if the clean trend continues.
It's about personal preference. It's important to have a user interface that's modular and comfortable for the end user and manageable for the devs. Options are always the answer, the ability to enable or disable certain aspect or details is what drives me towards one app or the other. (This is coming from someone who used Infinity for Reddit for the past 4 years.)
It just seems incredibly nitpicky to call alternatives lazy for not having all of the modularity of a decade+ old platform.
”Reddit is imploding, and the CEO is being terrible to users, and the native app is super intrusive and inefficient but ugh the alternatives have square buttons.”
Just really weird that the lack of visual bells and whistles is something to even talk about at the moment. Just a little lower in the thread, the same person complained about lack of gilding. Just, really weird complaints.
I think the more they bitch about Reddit alternatives, the more people will be reminded that there are alternatives to Reddit.
If you don't like the UI, you can always download a browser extension that change the CSS of the website. However, if this is the main criticism people do to Lemmy, I would say that's not bad for a relatively new platform
I'm especially annoyed by the way videos are shown on every Lemmy UI, I can't be bothered to click on a link every time there's video content on my feed
This is a highly requested feature and in the process of being implemented. I believe it will be available next update.
One thing I do dislike, the post width on desktop is limited. Between the sidebar always being shown and the container being 1140 px wide, the comment section ends up only being 760 px wide; way too narrow for me.
I wrote a Stylus script for Firefox to make the posts full-width.
URL starts with: https://lemmy.world/post URL starts with: https://lemmy.world/comment
Script:
.container, .container-lg, .container-md, .container-sm, .container-xl { max-width: 100%; } .col-md-8 { flex: 0 0 80%; max-width: 80%; } .col-md-4 { flex: 0 0 20%; max-width: 20%; }Wouldn't put too much thought into it. Most of the shills are bots.
I still find it amusing I was banned from r/worldnews for a day for calling a russian shill a shill.
I'm pretty sure Reddit UI/UX isn't very well designed either lol. Especially new reddit.
New reddit tried to fix something nobody thought was broken. New reddit and its app was meanwhile annoying and broken as fuck.
Agreed. I clung to the old reddit and swore to quit Reddit once they took that away.
Turns out they managed to make me quit before that happened lol.
There's a lot of bullshit being posted about Lemmy over there, but lots of folks spreading the good word of the Fediverse as well. I'm doing my part until Bacon Reader stops working.
Dude what that's that's gotta be a reddit plant or something lmao, the main nsfw instance, lemmynsfw, two weeks in banned anything that depicts someone underage, even manga and other animated mediums, like people are self regulating these things to NOT have cp
I've noticed my friends my age (late teens/ early 20s) say that lemmy and kbin look old. They also are new reddit users so they are probably used to the social media, ads before content approach of modern websites compare to those who enjoyed more simple site designs that were functional
It does look old but old is talking about basic html and css with reasonable amounts of scripting. I like this over the over designed UI of Reddit, gmail, protonmail, etc.
Craigslist was the only other big place I go to a lot that has a slim interface, but recently they’ve started making a lot of changes to make it feel modern and it’s a good example of how even modern implementations can go wrong.
Reminds as well of the early iOS days when the UI was dead simple.
I think the nice part about Lemmy is that it has what it needs and nothing else. We’re going to get more and more features over time and not all of them will be popular or well liked. I’d rather people complain about what isn’t here than what is I guess.
I prefer clean interfaces and thus far haven't been disappointed. Just gimme a dark theme option and I'm (mostly) happy.
dark mode goes a long way making a site look good
life pro tip for every company on earth.
Dark grays, blues? Squared? Good. I love simplicity! Not to mention, Reddit started out like that too, and among the older wave of users old.reddit was still a favorite for that reason.
No kidding. The color scheme is easy on the eyes, and I can digest information easily here much like old reddit. What are they on?
It feels familiar to old.reddit so i like it. Squabbles has an interesting approach to displaying posts + comments tho
I tried Squabbles and got so confused. Took me forever to realize that the post was on the left column and the replies were on the right column. I stupidly thought Squabbles was combining Twitter and Reddit and thought the two columns were completely independent from one another. It makes sense to me now, but my simple brain likes this layout.
I was able to get over the majority of the style issues on Lemmy by adding the extension Stylus and installing this theme. https://userstyles.world/style/10440/rediggit-for-lemmy
Hopefully that helps some that want the old.reddit look.
Looks good, but there's no dark theme for it (yet?).
thanks!
Someone didn't grow up during the days of forums.
But as a designer, I understand where they're coming from. Especially if they were using the new reddit design on the web and Apollo on mobile. At the very least though, I think Lemmy's default UI looks much better than old.reddit (and I say that as someone who still uses old.reddit).
MOST current internet users didn't grow up in the days of forums.
Yea that’s true. Definitely not fair to single them out.
Yes people do like nice design and user interfaces. Apple managed to grab a large market share by understanding that.
It doesn't have to be cluttered but it doesn't have to be ... this.
If you want things to improve, you are going to have to accept criticism that your current crush isn’t perfect. There is already a lot of the toxic Reddit’ness that has come over, we don't need more.
I was just talking in another thread with a guy about how people will downvote a helpful comment just because they don't agree with the content. I was hoping Lemmy would be like old Reddit. Back when we encouraged thoughtful, helpful, discussion. But it looks like Lemmy is just gonna be people being snarky and upvote whoring. I assumed not having karma would have prevented that.
Karma or points system gives incentive to contribute. Best of both worlds is if ppl comment/post to engage in discussion and contribute and the points are an afterthought/added value rather than as a vehicle to gain more points clout or whatever but i think we need to accept there will always be some who value "the game" over everything else
I am on Lemmy, but I really like how Kbin has a lot of customization settings that are all pretty tasteful.
Simple and clean UIs are an improvement over what's now considered "modern web design" meant to manipulate your attention to particular things. It feels like the agency is taken away from the user. I am loving the fediverse for this reason and have been a fan and user of FOSS apps for over a decade because the design goals of the software match the actual use-case of the app without trying to tie you in to something else. No distractions, no advertisements, no walled gardens. Just, here's the app, here's the functionality, it's been delivered. Now use it as you see fit without an ulterior motive from the developer or their investors (or lack thereof.)
I definitely choose my social media based on round edges and opaque tiles. Don't you? It definitely isn't for the content or discussion.
I use a grease monkey script to make it basically identically to old Reddit. It’s wonderful. Highly recommended
Got any links for how to do this?
https://github.com/soundjester/lemmy_monkey is what I use.
This assumes you have something like the firefox addon "Greasemonkey" installed. Anything that supports userscripts will work.
(edit -- https://www.tampermonkey.net/ for Chrome/Edge, apparently. I just looked it up. If you need more help, just ask.)
This is what I've been using for a few days: https://github.com/soundjester/lemmy_monkey
Which script do you like?
These are the most important ones I use.
Kbin Enhancement Script User: @SirPsychoMantis
- Add domains to magazines and users for federated content
- Collapse comments
- Collapse replies
- Replies start collapsed
- Move comment box to top
- Fix comment buttons and add a cancel button
- Blur / Hide NSFW domains (thanks to u/le__el)
- Hide random posts
- OP tag in comments
- All features can be toggled on and off
Improved Collapsible Comments User: @artillect
- Improves the comment tree layout and adds a line that lets you collapse replies
Floating Subs List User: @raltsm4k
- Adds a floating subscriptions pane to kbin similar to Reddit
- Supports filtering by name and sorting by subscribe date (default) or alphabetically
Kbin-Unsquash User: @shazbot
- Unsquash inline images in threads by replacing with source image and downscaling to 50%
I'm using the compact version of lemmy_monkey and a script I wrote to force external links to open in new tabs (reddit did this automatically so I constantly forget to press the middle mouse button and then get annoyed that my lemmy scrolling is gone)
Compact lemmy_monkey: https://greasyfork.org/en/scripts/469093-compact-lemmy-to-old-reddit-re-format-observer GM-Open-NewTab: https://greasyfork.org/en/scripts/469196-gm-lemmy-newtab
Both observe on all http*:/// but they both use the same "isLemmy" check to determine if any logic should actually execute, so while it seems a bit rough at first they are not doing anything nefarious or unnecessary besides a single js comparison of the head elements.
I'm ok with the Lemmy plain designs.
I'm just glad it defaults to dark mode. Any site that defaults to light mode can go straight to hell.
It doesn’t default to dark mode, it defaults to the system setting. It’s light on my device.
Which any self respecting site should be doing either way, it’s not difficult to implement, at all.
I love Lemmy's layout. Too much clutter is an eyesore.
... have they seen the reddit apps?
Also color customization is definitely a post MVP thing usually. This platform is not mature
Lemmy UI has a ton of issues
top hour is broken for me because it constantly populated with every new post. Completely broken.
"Do people actually like all of the overdesigned clutter?" Hell nah! Polar opposite here.
I absolutely hate it when sites randomly redesign to look "modern" and "hip" or whatever you want to call it. Forcefully adding flashy, colorful stuff that you can't turn off again or opt out of is a surefire way for me to dislike the site in question immediatly. Emojis, animated smileys, glitter effects, neon-colored letters, autoplay-animations, and worst of all: sound effects! Nope. Nu-uh. Get that sh*t away from me. I like my black-squared, simple layout and silent browsing experience, thank you very much.
I think it's clear that reddit employees are working overtime for damage control, and you can easily tell when they flood a comment section with their identical silly talking points, a bunch of whiny naysayers who never care about anything, except licking boot. they love to cry about UX and protests being an inconvenience, but never about censorship or the fucked up things reddit does. another thing they do is constantly bring up Musk all the time for no reason and distract from spez. seriously those comments are like a plague over there, it's insane. imagine trying to make the crashing and burning of reddit, somehow about another guy, that has nothing to do with any of it. while Twitter is just doing its thing and they don't even give a shit. tl;dr: fuck spez
In the middle of 2010, "Due to a controversial redesign brought on by Digg, disgruntled users declared a "Quit Digg" day where they posted links to Reddit and left Digg behind to join Reddit. Reddit subsequently overtook Digg in search popularity. "
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_Reddit
Here's what Reddit looked like on August 7, 2010
https://web.archive.org/web/20100807085503/http://www.reddit.com/
This is what Digg looked like on August 7, 2010
https://web.archive.org/web/20100807080410/http://digg.com/
Reddit's had 18 years to tweak the user interface. Lemmy's Initial release was May 5, 2019; 4 years ago. Honestly, I have no issue with Lemmy's interface, but I feel confident in saying that given another 14 years of development, Lemmy will probably not look like it does today.
You can also make it look any way you want b/c it's open source
Reddit used to be open source as well
Reddit still looks pretty much the same as that to me whenever I connect to it. RES probably helps though.
They look the same?
Yeah, I'm over here writing CSS to remove junk (avatar icons, sidebars, etc, bump up nested comment indent, yada yada) from Lemmy pages because it's not text-only enough.
It's cool that others like a fancier view. I want it to be almost nothing but text.
Personally I like the custom CSS each subreddit could apply but to each their own I guess.
Yep, I usually turn it off, but for particularly inspired ones I like to leave it on, like the reddit sub (mildlyinfuriating I think?) where the text is slightly crooked and there is a hair in the background.
You can skin and theme an instance however you want, and the lemmi-ui code is open source so you can completely customize that side of things too. It's a complete non issue the instant someone with design capabilities contributes.
Web design is important. It's part of grievances against reddit with the app and old reddit. It took me awhile to accept new Reddit design.
With Lemmy my biggest issues:
Often slow to respond and sometimes return undeclared error (just html value,,.etc). Likely due to traffic coping.
A bit harder to navigate, I'm not sure yet how to go to kbin and join. When I search I get meta.
Though this place is very promising attempt compared to past ones.
This is an actual use case for 'the customer is always right'. No matter how much you prefer the layout, there will be others that prefer something else. And if we want to attract more users, that's something that we'll need to consider.
By far the most off-putting thing about lemmy is how people think themselves too good to consider the preferences and experiences of the average user coming from reddit.
Personally, I love the clutter-free design of lemmy.world it's a good mix of looking pretty without being too empty.
That being said, this is a refreshing take after reading through some of the top comments. I wish more people were a little more level-headed like this.
Maybe there could be other instances with different themes that appeal more to the casual reddit user? I'm still not sure how the themes work when it comes to Lemmy and its instances.
"The customer is always right, except in matters of taste" is the full quote I believe.
I love the homogenized look. If any chances are made I would hope they'd be optional so people who want the current look can keep it.
The content, not the buttons to click on it are the draw right?
I agree. The content is key.
Ah, a preview of people defending Reddit for removing old.reddit eventually.
I mean, I started to use reddit in it's
newstage, and only discovered, started using old.reddit much later and gotta admit it's a wee bit clunky around the edges compared to thenewversion.I love Lemmy interface, it's a modern look of old.reddit.
Lemmy clients could definetly benefit from more customization options. Let everyone have it as they want.
try Jerboa
Reddit's UI and performance was pretty horrible for me in the browser. That being said, I find Lemmy's UI and performance worse. 😢
They definitely need to hire a real designer and work on performance. It's pretty bad when I try to subscribe to a community on lemmy.ml from lemmy.world. It takes like minutes for me for the request to go through.
The contrast between white and lime green is pretty bad too. The design makes the app feel cheap. That matters for a lot of people.
I'm hopeful Lemmy will get better over time. 👍
Everything looks better on Jerboa. I went back on the browser to see what you're talking about and immediately saw what you're talking about!
Shouldn't be too hard to change the CSS, but I wish this isn't the default. Even grey would look better.
I hope the devs check these posts out.
I honestly have a hard time using it outside of Jerboa. It's not just UI, but functionality issues as well. I don't blame people for being turned off. It's a big part of the reason why I don't think we'll see large scale adoption. And I don't even think the current way things are set up can handle large scale.
Lemmy is a good experiment, but I'm not sure this form of federation is going to work.
Lemmy hosters don't need to use the official UI, it's just the only one that currently exists, we just need a better front end developed by someone
I also didn't like Lemmy's default UI. But even as the early wave of Reddit refugees started trickling in a couple of weeks ago, there have already been custom CSS and custom scripts made to customize Lemmy, like the one I'm using right now:
No comment about the performance though. I think Lemmy just wasn't ready when the blackouts happened. There just wasn't enough time to prepare. It's understandable that their current focus is, well, making sure that things keep running smoothly under increased load. In time, I hope Lemmy gets to optimizing their browser performance.
Lemmy is still a baby. I am sure we'll see tweaks/improvements over time. We'll also see scripts/extensions. Overall, I am enjoying my experience using Lemmy.
TBF Lemmy UI/UX is horrible. So is Reddit's IMO, for completely different reasons, but still. It's a valid criticism, it's just also not an endorsement of Reddit.
Yeah, Lemmy is still a bit rough around the edges in a lot of ways. I hope the surge in users brings some frontend devs over.
The new apps should help a lot, but it's still a bit of a pain to use on PC. I also have issues with the feed just going wild and poping in new posts so fast I can't read anything on the web.
Lemmy needs work, but I'm not here for the design. I'm here to wrestle control away from corporations. Anyone that doesn't understand that is a bot.
I also have issues with the feed just going wild and poping in new posts so fast I can't read anything on the web.
Oh yeah I saw that last night too. Lemmy is relatively new, and will get better in time. I'm excited for sync to be released. Slide might get re-purposed for lemmy too.
I'm not really sure, I think some of them might which is weird. Though I think a lot of them are just trying to find reasons to complain about Lemmy because they are addicted to reddit, don't want to make the switch and they know that if people start leaving Reddit they're going to have to switch to something else and that scares the shit out of them. So they're going to complain about Lemmy or the alternatives because they desperately don't want to lose Reddit, their source of dopamine and fulfillment.
Though I think a lot of them are just trying to find reasons to complain about Lemmy because they are addicted to reddit, don't want to make the switch and they know that if people start leaving Reddit they're going to have to switch to something else and that scares the shit out of them.
It sometimes amazes me how opposed to change people can sometimes be. Yeah sure Lemmy is different, but not radically so.
Honestly dig it, reminds me of the early days of reddit when it was more of a community than an advertising platform. People are just looking for any little thing at this point.
Form over function, it's been all over the place for the last few years.
Right now I can see buttons I may not use immediately in the interface… to me it's fine. To modern designer these must be hidden and only show up contextually or with an hover, and keep the space empty otherwise.
I don't really like modern design, but it is true that a lot of people (mainly younger people or old people that never really looked at internet much before) really enjoy the "simplicity and lean look". These people also enjoy interfaces that requires a lot of waiting and moving around to do simple thing, so…
Idk, customized accents and images/identity is an accessibility thing for a lot of people, helps them have a sense of being where they're intending to be & not lost in the content soup, which I do think a lot of decentralized projects do fall a little flat. It's a tough line to toe!
(edit: i think i maybe misunderstood some here, but imo lemmy's ui could use a little more clarity and polish, but ultimately like its lighter load visually)
I think critiques are pretty helpful in the early stages of growth. There's several little UI/UX tweaks we can do to make these places feel more inviting.
Lots of people are listing bug reports or submitting PRs, I've got one going that'll add your profile image next to your name, something simple but nice to have.
With time these sites are all going to shine :)
I’d rather see avatars removed entirely.
I would love to see the Settings menu and sections achieve the level of UI customization as the Apollo app.
Instead of gripes like “too much whitespace” or “needs more rounded corners” or “text is too small” and committing to a single combination of all these complex conditions as “the official design,” every user should be able to customize the UI exactly how they like it.
I would love to disable everything but text on the page: no avatars; no scores; no icons; no buttons except “Post,” “Reply,” and “Report”; light/dark mode inherited from system/device preference. That’s it. Boom! Done.
But you need robust HTML and CSS for this, and it is insanely difficult to find frontend devs who actually truly deeply know HTML, CSS, and JS. There are plenty of frontend devs making nice-looking sites, but those sites are typically unmaintainable in terms of CSS, are full of inaccessible nested tag soup in terms of HTML, and are locked into unremovable technical debt from the get-go via JS frameworks that will inevitably go out of vogue (as they all do).
Something as simple as native aspect ratios for thumbnail images is broken on kbin, so we immediately know that the HTML and CSS for this site are not in good shape, and until those things are addressed with growth and change in mind (and not just closing out bugs or hitting a launch date), it’s all going to fall apart eventually.
Are those points meant to be bad things?
Using Kbin, and the default minimalistic design with everything in discrete text-boxes reminds me much more of older forum's than Reddit ever did. I like it!
People are different. I never really liked or used Reddit, because it was a cluttered mess to me. This here? Nice, clean, resource efficient. I like Lemmy!
its beautiful. i used to read reddit through redreader. simple is good. is there any good lemmy app? im new here :)
Jerboa is good, throws some errors sometimes, but that's probably because of the huge influx of members
Jerboa is the way to go. Many other apps are in development for Lemmy as well. Sync, thunderbolt, lemmur revival, and plenty others I've seen. Jerboa is the best working one atm.
No. I like functionality, I don't care how it looks.
I like a simple design. Lemmy is simple.
I do think there's opportunity to refine the UI. Doing simple but also beautiful and intuitive isn't easy, and Lemmy isn't all the way there yet. I think there could be benefit from a few really good design nerds working on the design.
Honestly I like it better than old.reddit for some things. Comments are automatically scaled up to a friendly size. I'm not killing my eyes by being too lazy to zoom in anymore ha.
Some of the formatting could use work, but it's hardly a deal breaker.
Honestly when signing up they should just be assigned an instance. It does not matter to most users. Then send them the login server per mail
That's also the beauty of Lemmy... they can host an instance of their own, and customize it to their hearts content, while still having access to the broader community's content!
The platform is not the content. The content is the content.
They had me at dark grey and blue
I mean they're not wrong
use Jerboa
I just downloaded and as soon as I launch it, it crashes
Not a fan, as I usually have problems distinguishing comment lines for some reason (I always get them mixed and blended up) and Lemmy isn't as clear as Reddit in that regard. But it's definitely usable and I hope it gets some day customizable and more organized.
I wouldn't worry. Those are the people that joined Reddit late (in the last few years) and came from other social media platforms (like Facebook). I think Lemmy is safe for a long while at least.
The same complaint was raised on Lemmy yesterday. Also some people gravitate towards kbin mainly for design reasons :p
Strange, I think Lemmy highly resembles Reddit. Maybe this user is talking about an app? Ironically, the apps are what this is about.
Eh... that is just good ol' projection mixed with damage control.
I definitely miss Reddit's stylesheets. Giving mods control over the page's CSS was just really neat. Everything had an individual flair
Lol did people use reddit without turning off sub specific stylesheets?!
I left them on if they supported dark mode.
Lemmy defaults to dark mode. Praise be to Lemmy.
Let's not kid ourselves, some subs were awful. Few like mildly infuriating actually were creative with it and added to the experience. Others were crimes against design. I disabled them with RES globally and only activated a few select ones. Too many mods thought that red text over black background was a good idea. Then there were those who had a highlight effect on the selected comment and made the white text unreadable. Design is a Art.
Yea I had it set to never use custom CSS, imo was much better that way.
Yeah there are a few requests on the lemmy GitHub for flairs
i like the dataterm.digital design
Nah I stayed on old reddit because I like that every sub has it's on interface and personality. I used to visit lots of new subs just to see their unique design. Lemmy's interface is very sterile and boring to look at.
A lot of these people don't understand that Lemmy and other sites like this are made by coders and not UI people. It took me a while to get use to the stripes back nature of Lemmy but it makes sense when you start using it.
Just wait till they have to use the reddit app only. Plus if these people want to they can invest there time and run a Lemmy instance. Develop their own tools to make it look the way the want. Rather than complaining about free too hosted freely by people who care.
i agree. the only reason why i hae accounts on shit like this is to prepare for the VERY VERY MINISCULE chance that reddit will shut down due to them making shit decisions.
bring back css for every community
It's FOSS so someone will probably make what they want, if they just give it a sec to appear for free out of thin air then they'll have to come up with another excuse.
I agree with you. Also funny coincidence, I was just listening to petrodragonic as I scrolled by :p
WOO!
All the real ones came from old.reddit anyway. Honestly with the amount of projects I see being started for these platforms I'd be surprised if we don't eventually see customization option updates from instances to communities. That complaint has an expiration date IMO.
Wait. All it takes is "it's round and not blue or grey"?
Lol. They should've seen how I used to browse Reddit. White text on black background only.
Same here and I'm using kbin in dark mode with Dark Reader on top of it. I'm here to read and write, not to play Candy Crush.
Dark mode rocks!
They are kinda right though. An appealing design is important for many people. (Except for some reason people involved in opensource and linux stuff... fite me!)
Also a nicer design doesn't mean that it will be cluttered. You're just creating a strawman there.
I’m a self-hosting, linux stuff, user, and HOW DARE Y… No, no, it checks out
I got a bit confused: is that about the reddit app or themes of particular subreddits or something? When I first saw your post I thought you meant Lemmy was the one with overdesigned clutter. I was using old.reddit.com for web browsing and Redreader as a mobile client, and had subreddit CSS turned off so it always used the plain default theme.
I noticed after a few minutes with a mobile browser on my ultra cheap (limited bandwidth) data plan, that Lemmy uses at least 10x more data transfer than Reddit does. I figure that is a combo of being more pic heavy and having a bunch of javascript bloat. I hope to switch to some kind of plain text client soon. Lemmy is great in many ways but uses way too much dysfunctional web 2.0 tech for my tastes.
If we could get a vim version of lemmy in some way that would be awesome!
Yeah I've been thinking about that, both a gnus.el interface, and a web reader that is text based like lite.cnn.com .
Coming from apollo i could agree it could look alot better but its still miles above the native reddit app.
I don’t quite understand how we cant use kbin style on the rest of lemmy. Or hexbears super nice looking theme which is a fork of lemmy.
I don't mind the design, but it's definitely not pretty. Like a pair of Birkenstocks, ugly but effective.
Hopefully once sync is up and running we'll have something both utilitarian and attractive on mobile.
Reddit website is one of the slowest among big corporations, hdare they judge others.
Definitely multiple sites on the fediverse can use some UI/UX tweaks and a high level pass on user flow and functionality. Like I get it, people shouldn't flock here and expect it to be a Reddit clone, but if people want mass adoption (and you do because you want comment and engagement), there needs to be QOL improvements to the core experience.
Lots of devs going around though trying to fix things up. I'm looking into kbin myself, but give it a few months and everything will be in a much better shape
I agree that a major blocker for the average people to enter the fediverse is indeed the lack of UX design in general. Collapsing comment threads comes to mind, for example, or a better layout for reactions (up-downvote is in top right corner, but reply/boos is bottom left, not really the best approach).
I hope we get a chance to customize to our liking at some point - but not like it matters that much to me anyway since I'm mostly mobile. I just hope my rif-like app comes soon enough.
Super strange though to complain from Reddit the lack of customization.
Normal users don't want to spend time to customize! The site should just provide a few reasonable, good-looking options by default...
People aren't like "oh this looks bad, I'm gonna make it look nice", they are more like "Oh this looks bad, so it must be a bad site, I'd better leave".
I love the simplified interface. I do wish I could have a 'Front Page' view that creates an equivalent Community of all my subscriptions.
Good news, you can. Go to settings and scroll down to "Type". Change that to "Subscribed". That'll set your default view to the communities you've subscribed to.
Isn’t that just switching the feed to “subscribed”?
Yeah that's all it does. It doesn't actually create the equivalent of Reddit's Front Page.
People saying these things are the summer children of the internet. They are innocently naive and simply don't understand what they saying.
Or, they perfectly know what they're doing and are trying to divert people from alternatives. Hanlon's razor does not always apply, stupid can be at either side of the stick/carrot.
In all seriousness, I agree that is quite likely the case.
Exactly, they should search how Reddit’s original frontpage looked like. I have a feeling none of the people saying that even use websites, just apps
Ummm... Servers can customize themselves all they want. It's decentralized FOSS, after all
I wish everyone switched to a fully decentralized system. That would be cool to see. I do not know for sure if it would be a bit slower though.
In the world of 4 and 5G, 'tis but a scratch in the speed
Nobody wants to monetize "devoid of style and design"! KISS principle for the win.
These people are why new paint colors are a major selling point for cars, or new default wallpapers are at the top of the changelist for an OS release. They are why "all new cars look the same" memes have to blank out the rims/hubcaps, because some people think different wheel decorations fundamentally change the aesthetics of the vehicle, and the aesthetics are a primary factor for them.
I like to watch Brandon Butch on Youtube doing his thing for the beta releases for the new iOS 17 coming later in the year. I understand why he does, but every single time it's "Check out the new wallpapers!" like okay...? That's great, but definitely not a new OS feature 🙄
I love the fed designs. The dark minimalism is so nice and clean.
There is like 10 or so apps in development for Lemmy rn and I don‘t know if any for kbin, but I fully expect some of these apps to allow us to change themes.
Kbin is still getting it's API fleshed out. There's one old mate who's been putting in a heap of effort getting it sorted so that's something nice to look forward to.
There's at least one in development for kbin, which has been aptly renamed Artemis. There may be more than that, but I haven't really been following the subject intensely so I wouldn't have run across them
I will say for me that kbin looks extremely outdated. I'm very much a fan of newer layouts and in my opinion (at its current stage) kbin doesn't look nearly as attractive as new Reddit (at least on mobile).
It is WAY more responsive though, and I also have faith it will improve. I'm definitely here for the long haul as it has way better content and a better community. I am definitely looking forward to the apps though!
old.reddit is still widely used because people can't stand the new layout. If reddit had forced the new layout on everyone when it dropped, this migration would have happened right then instead of now. Crap UI/UX is legitimately the only reason reddit exists in the first place - because Digg made that same mistake.
Kbin looking like new Reddit would be a downgrade.
I like it. And with users creating user scripts, a nice interface like RES is bound to appear.
That describes Reddit, back in the old days when it was good.
Kbin's default UI is pretty chill
Kbin's is much nicer than Lemmy's in my opinion. I think that might be because of how familiar it feels to reddit.
Well whoever wrote that post in the OP clearly hasn't explored too much yet.
Even beyond that, though, there are styles, they are modern and clean, and people are already making apps and extensions anyway. This seems like a pretty low effort bar to pass.
Oh, that's so neat. I'm personally a fan of the minimal UI, but I love that we can do that. I actually might look into them if I could change the vote buttons, etc to stuff.
Although their complaint kind of confuses me. I'm not aware that reddit was anything other than various shades of gray either, and while lemmy seems to lack the ability right yet(?), kbin already has the rounded corners option right there in settings where anyone would look for it.
It's not exactly impossible that they just haven't found out, but it's an easy thing to ask if you don't understand what little comes up on Google, and asking is what you do when you first move platforms. I wonder if they're one of the ones that never even signed up in the first place.
Don't like the Reddit interface? ==> Good luck! With the API price change it just became more difficult to change the UX/UI for Reddit users.
Don't like the interface of any of the fediverse platforms? ==> Pick your poison: choose another platform/instance or built your own, nobody is stopping you!Or you can just build a different front-end for fedi platforms. I'm not aware of any instances which are blocking their api. Just use the api !
The content, not the buttons to click on it are the draw right?
Let me ask you this, what made you use Apollo rather than the 1st party Reddit app?
For me it was the far superiour UI.Well good, maybe they'll stay on Reddit.
All these years, somehow, I've never seen new Reddit. No idea what it looks like or what it does.
Sometimes less is more when it comes to user interface.
To be fair, Apollo and other phone apps set a standard of quality for the content we expect. Old reddit is efficient but even kbin and lemmy are a little rough on the edges compared to that. It’s the first impression that matters to a lot of people and it’s not up to the standard most expect. It’s a good start, but just that, a start.
I’m sorry, but kbin is light years ahead of old.reddit these days. I can customize my feed to show full pictures on kbin, but old.reddit is minuscule thumbnails and ever failing parts. I sure miss full functional RES, but kbin has been great. Besides the lag, 503and 404
Issues. But I’m old and patient.@1chemistdown Yeah, I'm definitely missing some aspects of RES.
But I figure that we'll get there soon enough.
My one small issues is I still see less posts on a single page on kbin then I do on old reddit, even with compact mode on
I don‘t think this is entirely true. Sure there are better designed apps, but the main userbase uses the new Reddit, the official Reddit app and things like MS Teams. Most people wouldn’t use this platforms if user experience and first impressions really matter. The same goes for MS Windows. MS published a rather unstable OS for over 10 years and still it is the most popular OS.
I think kbin is pretty nice as it is and I am sure the developers will make it even better in the future.
A really nice bonus is the lack of advertisements on the platform (or maybe I am blocking it, I dont know?). compared to official reddit it feels very refreshing to only have content to focus on.I do use Lemmy because the whole thing with Reddit just sucked, but holy hell yeah, new Reddit looked so much better. It's not the world, I can get used to it and it's fine, but the preference is clear.
What did you like about it? Apart from some rounded corners and extra spacing, I think they made it a lot worse. My least favorite things about it are the nag screen to use the app, the "tap to read replies" button, and the fact that I can't always tell where the thread ends and the "other stuff you might like" section starts.
Reddit is ridiculously slow in the last several years. When I click CMD+F to start search I need to wait several seconds because of all the JavaScript running.