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.
EDIT: The image I attached is from photon.lemmy.world, which I just realized is using the outdated version of Photon, I have updated the image to the updated current photon version from phtn.app. There are a lot of improvements made.
Photon is dope, pretty sure its developed by our very own Admiral Picard. But I haven’t seen a Lemmy UI that I didnt like yet.
That’s Tesseract.
Photon is developped by @[email protected]
Ah, both are dope though. Can’t say I hate either one for their modern looks. Though the only UIs I have ever hated have all been ones I made.
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
Different OG ex-redditor here. I think Lemmy’s UI is vastly superior. But full disclosure, I used old reddit.
How is it clear that Lemmy’s growth is nearing a plateau? And why does Lemmy need broader growth? That seems like a solution in search of a problem. A major advantage of not being a corporate social media property is not having to think like one.
Nice! But the average users graph shows continual staggering growth, no sign of a plateau.
45k monthly active users on 14 October
44k monthly active users on 11 DecemberThe first graph is generally considered the most relevant to assess the activity on the platform
On a longer time scale the monthly active users has been steadily trending down for 4 months, from 48k to 44k. But the users per day has been steadily growing - apart from whatever TF happened on Oct 14 when it suddenly dropped by 50k if I’m reading it right. Database problem?
I’m kind of curious how these readings are taken. The Fox News claim of being “America’s most watched cable news network” is based on a Neilson rating that records TVs multiple times a day, which heavily overweights ones people keep on it all day whether they’re watching or not. Fox does much worse on another Neilson stat called the “qume” which only records one hit per day per TV if that TV was tuned to a channel at all during that day - a much better indicator that people deliberately switched to a channel to watch it for a while. I don’t suppose we know how these Lemmy averages are arrived at.
Anyway, the posts and comments per day - which to me defines “activity” better than number of users, are both steady upward lines - unless fewer users who are more active is a bad trend.
There’s a lot of discussion about the “comments and posts per days” metrics, the consensus seems to be that they should be “total” rather than “per day”
https://lemmy.world/comment/13761285
People are posting the same, the graphs just go up because they are about the total number of comments and posts, not daily.
Meaning that we indeed have hit a plateau of 44k monthly active users.
I thought the point of Linux was the ability to customize anything, including your layout?
Not criticizing, just confused as to who this use case would be aimed at.
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.
Agreed on all counts.
I don’t think Reddit’s redesign is a good thing to aim for.
I’m on Eternity for lemmy. Best app cause I came from Infinity for reddit
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
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: next.lemm.eeedit: though I’ll keep using this UI or Photon if it stays like that. It is, at the moment, very ugly.edit 2: wrong information
Wait, are you sure? I thought it was only a project by @[email protected] : https://lemm.ee/post/27356044
Oh lol, my bad. Didn’t see that.
Lemmy isn’t a UI, it’s just data. Each app that connects to lemmy (not instances in the fediverse, but apps that let you sign into a lemmy account) has their own interface. A person can (and probably has) made an app with a modern interface for lemmy.
We are not confined to a specific app or interface, anyone can interface with Lemmy and present the data in their own way.
The most used UI for Lemmy is developed by the Lemmy project. Lemmy UI is modular, but Lemmy is definitely also a UI.
I forget people look at Lemmy on desktop/laptops. I just assume everyone has 15 minutes to kill and picks up there phone and opens the app they prefer, that they put on the second screen, 3rd row, 3rd column from the bottom where it belongs. If you have it somewhere else… Well maybe you have 5 columns instead of 4, or are wrong. But never on the first page … that would be obsessive. It has to hide, lurking on that second page laying in wait. For its 15 mins to shine
I don’t think the problem is the UI. Fediverse is more complex by nature than a centralized platform.
You have to choose a server, then an app to visualize (not only online but on the phone too) and there’s plenty of alternatives.
If everybody joined the same server we end up with a centralized system and if every large server has to use specific UI what’s the point on decentralizing?
I also thought that fediverse had to try to be easier to use but the point is that it’s more complicated precisely because the user has more power and hence has to do more decisions.
And I think people have to understand the basics of the fediverse, otherwise people will not stay precisely because it’s more complicated. If I didn’t care a bit I would be on Reddit not here and I’m currently using both because there’s simply much more content there and hopefully with time I can use Lemmy more and less reddit. I’m willing to do the effort of slowly transitioning because I believe in this but people who doesn’t care won’t stick around.
Hi everyone, I’m the dev. Reading all these comments really hurts when it’s something you’ve poured your heart and soul into for over a year.
There’s reasons I do everything I do in this UI, and my primary goal is to make Lemmy accessible for everyone.
This is the “cozy” view as well, but there’s a “compact” view for people like me who enjoy more information density. Again, my end goal is to make Lemmy accessible. I don’t do this for the sidebars for convoluted reasons I won’t get into.
I’m not the one trying to advertise it, and I’ve never really tried to because of the fear of disapproval. I think I should advertise it myself now because then I can showcase the best parts and not get misunderstood. This screenshot uses the “list” view, imo the worst one, with some cursed chrome scrollbars.
Now that I see that the majority of users believe this sucks, I’m not sure if my mission is worth it or if I’m even doing it right.
I’m probably being too sensitive to criticism which I should expect from any project. But this project is the only one I used to feel proud of, then people chiming in claiming it’s the ugliest thing they’ve seen. I don’t know im blind to design which is the only thing I considered myself “good” at in terms of web dev.
Yeah Lemmy has an unfriendly community. UI is really hard and I know exactly what you mean when you say everything has a reason behind it.
FWIW, Ima migrate my personal private Lemmy to photon because I think it looks great.
The reason why Reddit killing third-party apps is an issue is that everyone has an opinion on UI, and all of them are correct. The perfect UI for one person will be terrible for another. Don’t take what others are saying too harshly. Make the UI that you think is best and there will be other users who agree and want it too. If you make something where you’re trying to please everyone you’ll end up making something no one likes.
My other comment was blunt so here’s my attempt to be more constructive, this is all my personal opinion and my reaction was in response to making it the default I don’t think that you should stop working on it or even that I am objectively correct.
There is way too much empty space. I don’t use it but from OPs screenshot it appears this is to allow for larger thumbnails. It would be better to have them smaller and expandable if someone finds one interesting. Moving the thumbnails to the left of the text would eliminate all the blank space your eyes have to travel across to view them as well.
Shitty microsoft paint edits to demonstrate what I’m trying to say:
Freed up space in green:
That’s an option. You can change the thumbnail alignment to the left, then use compact instead of list mode. OP is using bad settings.
Just played around with it a little and it is much more tolerable than OP makes it look like. I wasn’t able to get it as compact as the default view but I don’t hate it.
OP is using bad settings.
That’s very important
Hello @[email protected] ,
First of all, really sorry that you took it that way. A few comments were indeed harsh, and I guess people were just focused on the interface and forgot that there’s actually someone behind it.
I personally value Photon a lot, it definitely helps a lot of people who prefer this type of interfaces.
I think I should advertise it myself now because then I can showcase the best parts and not get misunderstood.
I think you don’t even need to advertise it that much. We have Photon as an alternative frontend on one of the instances I follow, and people regularly bug the admin to update it because they like it!
The negativity this post received is probably because interfaces are a very personal matter, and trying to uniformize the default interface is always going to lead to heated discussions
Take care, you are doing an amazing job.
don’t worry, you’re doing fine
Dude UI (and anything to do with looks) is always a subjective thing. Some people will like it and some people will hate it. I know every dev wants their UI to be loved by everyone but that’s a fools errand as there are always people with opposing opinions. What matters is that
thatyou like what you have created. Also know that there are people like me and many others who use photon daily and love the design. Don’t let subjective opinions get you down.Don’t take it that way. I find the default UI horrible and primarily use Lemmy on Voyager on my phone because of it. Finding this thread let me find that I can comfortably use Lemmy on desktop too! 🥳
I didn’t join Lemmy for a while because I liked the “new” reddit UI better and found Lemmy too different to use easily. I tried all the different options and I didn’t like them. THIS IS EXACTLY WHAT I WANTED ON DESKTOP!
And remember survivorship bias. The ones that can put up with the Lemmy UI, or switch to something they like better, are (for the most part) the only ones here now giving feedback.
Hey man you and the team did a great job. Love the default UI. It’s all open source yeah? So they can change what they want. Kinda like what semaphore social did with mastodon.
Never used your project but don’t let this thread get you down.
Clearly OP loves it - don’t let those who don’t know it or don’t like it be the voices that ring loudest in your ears even if they hurt the most.
I worked professionally in open source at a company with lots of funding. The tools I worked on were used by millions and millions.
Every negative comment hurt so much. Every angry user I wanted to talk to. Most of them wanted to TALK AT me. It all hurt. And I was being paid. The engineers on my teams were burnt by the community time and time again.
If you love what you’re doing and you have a growing or happy audience - stay the course. Listen to criticism, decide if you agree (and maybe take some time when it hurts because the criticism might be valid), make a decision and move on.
Also, and this is going to be tough, maybe think about expanding or modifying what you mean when you say making Lemmy accessible for everyone.
Do you mean making a UI that will become the majority default or making a UI that brings some features (or perspective) for users who see value in those features? Trying to make something for everyone in a pond as small as the fediverse, where there are already a plethora of options is a big lift.
Above all, do you. And that includes this comment which I encourage you to promptly ignore. ;)
Well said.
I for one am a fan of everybody doing UI Fediverse improvements. It is very literally paving the future of the internet, because the future of the internet is not corporate bullshit. The Fediverse needs to be as slick as possible, and more people working on that is sorely, sorely needed!
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I assume you mean the dev of Photon UI?
An important thing to remember when it comes to feedback is that there are different audiences. The only feedback you’ll get here is from Lemmy users, the people already here, the grognards, the Linux heads who don’t understand why anyone would need a GUI at all when the terminal is right there! All to say, a bunch of wads who would rather leave a big community for a smaller one that suits their preferences. They don’t know jack all about jack shit when it comes to designing for a general audience.
All to say, if what you want to design is accessibility… solicit feedback from people who need and understand accessibility features. I have no idea where those people are but I bet you’re savvy enough to find them.
If you can design something that looks like OP’s screenshot (and better, based on your comment), you straight up need not concern yourself with the negative feedback on this thread. Bunch of wankers. Continue being awesome and making awesome stuff!
Don’t be disheartened. You did a great job with your version.
People complain about Apple and Google UIs that they spend hundreds of millions on creating and user-testing. There’s no one-fits-all in UI or UX.
This is a good example, look at the Magic Mouse for something coming out of a multi-trillion dollar company compared to Logitech although am sure Jony Ive had pure passionate intent in his heart.
I haven’t met a single person that didn’t like Photon. Photon is the only reason I started browsing on desktop regularly. It’s lean, clean, and packed with gorgeous transitions; I’ve rarely ever found a project that gets form and function right.
The internet is a shitty place. I’m not surprised that on Lemmy we have shit like
- “client with no JS when?”
- “I don’t want normies anyway”
- “I’m too old to appreciate a modern-looking UI”
- “eww I don’t like this thing that carries subjective opinions, let’s never let anyone use this.”
The troll energy is strong, but it doesn’t change that this is a great project. Alternative UI’s are what make Lemmy unique, and you’re doing your part. That’s appreciated.
I’m not surprised that on Lemmy we have shit like
That’s indeed unfortunate
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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.
genz here too, lemmy ui with the thumbnail (if explicitly posted, not auto generated from an article) full screen size by default would be the best of both worlds
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I don’t love the default Lemmy web UI, but I agree with the sentiment of preferring a lighter, faster UI…Which makes me surprised to read that you love it.
I don’t know why, but it occasionally slows way down for me when signed in and browsing. It’s nearly driven me to switching interfaces to see if they’re any better with performance.
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 $$ niche in Japan selling modern-internal, vintage-external laptops with DVD drives and old-style keyboards. https://old.reddit.com/r/thinkpad/v0t06p literally has both a VGA and a thunderbolt lol)
Fun fact: if you think that ppl sticking to old designs is silly, Panasonic has a whole $$ 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
Just in Japan?? I’ll buy one of these right now!
I love the Lemmy UI.
But I’m a gen Xer.
So what?
I’m sure you know that the value of a user or an opinion has nothing to do with their age.
Why be ageist to yourself?
I think you badly misunderstood my take.
I think you badly misunderstood my take.
Nah I just responded to a minor part (which I might have misunderstood). Sorry … 😈 🤣 .
I actually agree with everything in your post.
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
-
a quick reference to the text commands easily found somewhere (ie: sidebar)
-
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
This needing double entry is unintuitive and wrecks many new user’s first hundred post’s appearance.
It’s been standard since the late 70s. Markdown inherited it from TeX. Actually the convention should go back even further, roff etc. and of course plain text files themselves. It is perfectly intuitive if you understand what a text file is. “Text file”, not “word document”. What’s next, using > to indicate quoting is suddenly unintuitive? Again: That convention is older than the internet.
It also works exactly like reddit. They use a slightly different (and I think non-standard) markdown version over there. If you want to change anything about it then you’ll need to write a whole wysiwyg thing because otherwise everyone that’s perfectly used to and comfortable with markdown, me included, is going to be utterly, utterly, confused.
…if you want, you can now imagine a rant about the youth nowadays with their smartphones and tablets unable to understand markup languages or type. On a keyboard. With ten fingers.
Btw have you noticed the “preview” button? The ?⃝ symbol on the top? There’s even a bloody tutorial.
While I am not old enough to have experience with typing in the 70s, in my decades of experience with text input methods I cannot ever recall one using this method of 1 carriage return being ignored. No forum, email or word processor (even WordPerfect for the c64) or Notepad uses this, so my guess is your experience is in some niche technical field which does not apply to what the general population expects.
Most UIs don’t even have a preview option, let alone need one, because they don’t require you to have a stick up your ass to ‘get’ using them.
No forum, email or word processor (even WordPerfect for the c64) or Notepad uses this
I think the convention of 2 newlines for each paragraph is a longstanding norm in plaintext. The old Usenet, list servs, plain text email, etc., was basically always like that, because you could never control how someone else wraps their text. 2 new lines would be a new paragraph no matter what, while single new lines could create ambiguity between an author’s intentional line break versus the rendering software’s decision to wrap an existing line.
For lists and the like, you’d want to be able to have newlines without new paragraphs, but you’d generally want ordered lists or unordered lists at that point.
For an obvious example of markup languages where newlines and carriage returns don’t have syntactic meaning, look at literally the most popular one: HTML.
So markdown was essentially enforcing the then existing best practices for pure plain text communication, to never use single line breaks except in lists.
Most UIs don’t even have a preview option, let alone need one, because they don’t require you to have a stick up your ass to ‘get’ using them.
It was pretty common before Markdown took over that forums and other user-input rich text fields used raw html (or a subset of html tags), or something syntactically similar to html’s opening and closing tags (BBcode, vBulletin markup, etc.).
Markdown was basically the first implementation that was designed to be human readable in plaintext but easily rendered into rich text (with an eye towards HTML). It’s not a coincidence that it took off in the early days of the “web 2.0” embrace of user-submitted content in asynchronous forms.
I get the complaint. But I think markdown makes a lot of sense as a way to store and render text, and that one compromise is worth it overall.
No forum,
I already mentioned reddit. bbcode does it differently, yes.
email
Random mail off the LKML. What you see there is standard formatting established back in the days of 80 column terminals. Also have a (not so random) RFC.
or word processor (even WordPerfect for the c64)
Inherently wysiwyg.
or Notepad uses this,
Is a text editor, not a format.
so my guess is your experience is in some niche technical field which does not apply to what the general population expects.
Reddit, discord, discourse are neither niche nor aimed at a techy audience. Markdown is everywhere nowadays. It’s a standardised, machine-readable format picking up all those conventions of ole. It’s 20 years old by now.
Most UIs don’t even have a preview option, let alone need one, because they don’t require you to have a stick up your ass to ‘get’ using them.
The standard lemmy UI does. Those wysiwyg-style UIs also require you to point+click a thousand times to get what you want because there’s no way to markup your text by typing – because the markup is not textual. Have you ever tried doing actual formatting by using those formatting buttons in the lemmy UI. Do you select a word, then hit “bold”, or, noticing that all it does is put asterisks around the word, type *word* instead?
I don’t have a reddit account so I can’t verify, but IIRC it doesn’t ignore single return commands, and for certain Discord pushes the message immediately on hitting enter. This is closer to what most modern interfaces use, and what anyone using SMS is used to. Shift+enter allows the user to force a new line and 2x gives the paragraph break.
I’m not saying markdown isn’t a thing, but it isn’t used nearly as often (edit: as in Lemmy’s particular implementation) as being described and setting up Lemmy’s interface to require it feels clunky. My specific issue is the handling of 1 enter being ignored. Everything else makes sense because I too use markdown manually quite often.
I don’t have a reddit account so I can’t verify, but IIRC it doesn’t ignore single return commands
I do, and can verify that it does ignore a single return character.
No, it doesn’t.
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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