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.
That’s too much padding. It needs to be more like Hacker News.
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
You really trying to convince us with a screenshot of the ugliest ui i ever seen huh
The Lemmy UI is easy enough to use IMO. Where the problems show up are:
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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 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.
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)
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.
I think many people use Bluesky instead of Mastodon because of its UX, not its UI. Both looks great (I think Mastodon even nicer!).
I personally use Mastodon, but I’ve seen people complain about their experience with it.
The ootb experience is what matters to most. As people seem to just want it to work. I personally love the bare bones… but most users don’t really customize much or want to conduct a whole study on alternative apps or settings. I would be fine with polished and basic settings complemented with an advanced settings menu and other apps.
most users don’t really customize much or want to conduct a whole study on alternative apps or settings.
Usually I just recommend
- one instance: https://discuss.online/
- one app: Voyager
They can figure the rest themselves later, but that’s usually a good way to set people up
I would actually prefer this: sacred.computer
I’m new to Lemmy and quite tech savvy.
I’d like to get more people I know to join, but the standard UI really wasn’t nice. Thanks for showing me Photon, I like it so much more!!
I’m using Sync on mobile, I miss the Upvote & Downvote bar, any idea how to get it back?
Photon is currently the best and most mature alternative UI, offering a visually appealing, modular design that feels familiar to users of new Reddit.
What about Tesseract?
This is why I propose that large servers like lemmy.world adopt Photon UI as the default web interface.
That’s something to be discussed per server. You should maybe ask LW staff to open a poll on their announcements community
Why photon? alexandrite is insanely much better imho: https://a.lemmy.world/
Have you tried https://next.lemm.ee/ ?
The information density in the UI is crazy high.
I’ve only used it on mobile. I don’t know what the desktop looks like. But i like the smaller font. It’s more “crisp” than the default UI.
I always forget about it. The speed is impressive!
Yeah. I haven’t used it in a few months, but i did use it for a long time. I like it.
I believe it’s still missing moderation tools, but I could be wrong. Im not sure which update it’s at now.
Personally it misses the comments view, but I know that one is not that popular
Lemdro.id uses Photon as it’s default UI, but it’s incredibly slow and sometimes it doesn’t even load properly. As much as I love the polish, I wouldn’t recommend it as default UI. Using photon as an alternative UI is much better option.
I might have missed it, but why is it clear that lemmy is reaching a plateau of users?
https://lemmy.fediverse.observer/dailystats
First graph
Mastodon is easy to use, it had no chance to become neo-twitter for other reasons.
Can you accept organic growth and not being the bestest best with three billions people?
I feel like this also was reddits main issue. I started occasionally using reddit way back, probably around when I was also heavy on slashdot. I hated reddits website. Honestly even old is crap. There used to be a simplified app like version of the website you could access, forget what it was though. That was at least user friendly and functional. When I found sync is when I actually got heavy into reddit because something had solved all of reddits glaring issues.
