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I wish Lemmy's default design was more of a copy of old.reddit.com. For me, that design was better than both HackerNews' design and way better than the current

I wish Lemmy's default design was more of a copy of old.reddit.com. For me, that design was better than both HackerNews' design and way better than the current default look of Lemmy instances.

tester457 3y ago
Same. However it seems most people don't like the old.reddit look, only 4% of redditors use it. Most people are content with the slow bloated new reddit. When redditors talked about what sites to migrate to most of them preferred the modern interfaces over text based ones like tildes.net.
- Narishma 3y ago
  How many even know that old.reddit exists?
  - aerio 3y ago
    5%
- tuchsen 3y ago
  I wonder how much this has to do with the devices people use to access Reddit. I always preferred the old.reddit site on the desktop. Although when I'm on my phone, it gave me eye strain to try and read the tiny font, and pinch/zooming all the time is super annoying. The newer Reddit web app was still incredibly annoying, given all the "install the desktop app" prompts, and it's general lagginess, but allowing me to just flick scroll through articles was actually better for me. Lemmy's the same way for me, hate the UI on the desktop but it's fine on my phone.
  - Gigachad 3y ago
    I don’t think there is anything visually wrong with the new reddit. My issue is with how slow and buggy it is. And all the dark patterns and engagement tricks it’s full of.
- handsclean 3y ago
  4% usage doesn’t mean only 4% prefer it. It’s a buried setting that’s default off, that alone makes the choice for ballpark 80%. It doesn’t support mobile, which drops another huge segment, and it doesn’t support “new” features like images and tags, and Reddit spent years aggressively pushing everybody to switch. I wouldn’t be surprised if 4% is the vast majority of Redditors who actually tried both and had the opportunity to choose.
- JamesBell 3y ago
  I wonder what % of content is generated by old.reddit.com users, and what % from third party apps too. Figures not mentioned by Reddit mgmt so I'm assuming they don't favor their desires to end them.
- dublinben 3y ago
  This is highly subreddit dependent. Those numbers might be true for larger, image-based communities. For smaller, discussion based communities old is more like 60-70% of new, among desktop traffic. Mobile web and apps still make up the majority now, but that’s true of pretty much everything.
rglullis 3y ago
It's quite easy to change the css from Lemmy, and from a quick look their HTML is reasonably clean. I'm tempted to attempt it.
- chaosjevil 3y ago
  It's clean because they don't need to obfuscate anything to avoid people blocking ads.
- dirkt 3y ago
  Please do, a more condensed variant like old.reddit.com would be really appreciated by me and probably many other people. I have also started looking at it, by $REAL_JOB doesn't leave that much time.
gerdesj 3y ago
old.reddit.com looks rather dated to this 53 y/o bloke. Very busy too. I don't actually care because content is king and presentation is not but it would be nice if it looks good. Modern Reddit looks OK to me but I have recently deleted all comments I've ever made on Reddit and also my account. I will keep the mail alias alive for a while to see what shite turns up. For me Reddit was a new and vaguely exciting thing once and I used it for around a decade and have now discarded it. I've dumped the Register too after around 20 years. I have no idea why I still have a /. account! that's next along with Facebook. Back in the day I was asked to investigate this new fangled world wide web thing by an org with loads of cash and twiddling thumbs and I reported back it looked a lot like Gopher and WAIS but different. I might have also mentioned Teletext too. I'm not an evangelist worth listening to but I've been here before. Just allow yourself to destroy accounts on systems that are no longer useful or productive anymore. Move on.
- lmm 3y ago
  > old.reddit.com looks rather dated to this 53 y/o bloke. Very busy too. I don't actually care because content is king and presentation is not but it would be nice if it looks good. Displaying actual content seems to look "dated" and "busy" by today's aesthetic standard. Do you have any example of a UI that has the information density of old.reddit.com but "looks good" by your standards?
  - spiralx 3y ago
    My personal user style for old.reddit.com extends the comment width to the whole screen and moves the horizontal action list for each comment to align with the username and the right side of the screen, while changing the font to one I find easier to read as well as bumping the font size and line-spacing, as well as generally adding some small amounts of space and colour here and there to help separate elements. It's evolved over a few years now and the combination of changes means that I don't generally lose much in the way of content density in the general case of a post with mostly small to medium comments where the increased body text size is balanced with the removal of the space for the action bar. And it was even better before I got a bit older and decided that I should bump the font size up another pixel to make things easier on my eyes :)
courseofaction 3y ago
I am a fan of the software but I agree that the default design is horrible, it would probably serve Lemmy to get that addressed ASAP to get more people in the door. It's open source, any UI/UX people spot some low-hanging fruit? https://github.com/LemmyNet/ https://github.com/LemmyNet/
- glenstein 3y ago
  Lemmy has a built-in capability to cycle through various themes, but unfortunately all this themes seemed preserve the basic spacing and overall structure. I do think customizability with themes would hold huge potential if it had any true variety to it, along the lines of, say, winamp skins or something. I don't mean that example too literally, only to illustrate how much unrealized potential there is for themes, which are already built in, to truly add value.
- asoneth 3y ago
  Judging solely by the desktop screenshot [1] it doesn't seem like a bad first pass but there are a few things that could be improved: What jumped out first is the irregular post layout. For example the up/down arrows are farther from the image than the title, possibly to accommodate large, centered numbers. The titles can be at least three rows tall which results in posts that are quite different in height. The post images are all different heights and widths. Some users also have large circular icons that increase the height of the row while others have no icons. The other icon buttons are all slightly different sizes and appear to be from different sets. Finally, the content appears to be laid out a little haphazardly: why is the star icon next to the comments but the book icon next to the post's age? Why is the article's domain sandwiched between the community name and the age, and do we really need to show subdomains? (As an alternative, you could truncate large numbers with postfix magnitude to shrink their padding, make all images the same height/width, truncate long titles to two rows, make all icons the same optical size, and collapse the metadata to a single row such as: "From domain.org · Submitted by @name to community 11h ago · # Comments · star".) The gray text on gray background results in poor contrast which makes it harder to read than necessary. This is especially apparent in the Posts/Comments and Subscribed/All toggles as the unselected option looks entirely disabled. Finally, I'm not sure it works to put so many communities in one large block of wrapping rows. It may fit more content on the screen but makes for a loud block of bright green text that is attention-grabbing but hard to scan, especially since the list doesn't seem to have a visible sort order. It's also driving me crazy that the communities with icons result in inconsistent leading between rows. In that case I might start by finding out whether the page really needs to show six dozen subscriptions in the sidebar in the first place. [1] https://raw.githubusercontent.com/LemmyNet/joinlemmy-site/main/src/assets/images/main_img.webp https://raw.githubusercontent.com/LemmyNet/joinlemmy-site/ma...
class4behavior 3y ago
Well, there is this: https://github.com/soundjester/lemmy_monkey https://github.com/soundjester/lemmy_monkey
- neardeaf 3y ago
  This already looks way better
ronsor 3y ago
In my opinion, the old Voat [0] design was the best one for a Reddit-style website. [0] https://web.archive.org/web/20160216023609/https://voat.co/ https://web.archive.org/web/20160216023609/https://voat.co/
jacooper 3y ago
No, please no, if Lemmy looked like old.reddit no body will ever use it. There are custom themes, but it should be never the default.
xigoi 3y ago
Old Reddit is not responsive.
mariusor 3y ago
I work on a link aggregator that uses a more minimalist design. An example instance is at https://brutalinks.tech https://brutalinks.tech
alex3305 3y ago
Completely agree. More so because font sizing is IMHO all over the place. I'm using my OS and browsers' zoom because I'm visually impaired and than Lemmy is kind of a mess.
Okawari 3y ago
Lemmy supports alternate frontends. I'm kinda intrigued by https://fedibb.ml/ https://fedibb.ml/, which replicates the default phpBB theme.
- polski-g 3y ago
  Its dead, Jim.

I wish Lemmy's default design was more of a copy of old.reddit.com. For me, that design was better than both HackerNews' design and way better than the current default look of Lemmy instances.

tester457 3y ago

Same. However it seems most people don't like the old.reddit look, only 4% of redditors use it. Most people are content with the slow bloated new reddit. When redditors talked about what sites to migrate to most of them preferred the modern interfaces over text based ones like tildes.net.

Narishma 3y ago
How many even know that old.reddit exists?
- aerio 3y ago
  5%
tuchsen 3y ago
I wonder how much this has to do with the devices people use to access Reddit. I always preferred the old.reddit site on the desktop. Although when I'm on my phone, it gave me eye strain to try and read the tiny font, and pinch/zooming all the time is super annoying. The newer Reddit web app was still incredibly annoying, given all the "install the desktop app" prompts, and it's general lagginess, but allowing me to just flick scroll through articles was actually better for me. Lemmy's the same way for me, hate the UI on the desktop but it's fine on my phone.
- Gigachad 3y ago
  I don’t think there is anything visually wrong with the new reddit. My issue is with how slow and buggy it is. And all the dark patterns and engagement tricks it’s full of.
handsclean 3y ago
4% usage doesn’t mean only 4% prefer it. It’s a buried setting that’s default off, that alone makes the choice for ballpark 80%. It doesn’t support mobile, which drops another huge segment, and it doesn’t support “new” features like images and tags, and Reddit spent years aggressively pushing everybody to switch. I wouldn’t be surprised if 4% is the vast majority of Redditors who actually tried both and had the opportunity to choose.
JamesBell 3y ago
I wonder what % of content is generated by old.reddit.com users, and what % from third party apps too. Figures not mentioned by Reddit mgmt so I'm assuming they don't favor their desires to end them.
dublinben 3y ago
This is highly subreddit dependent. Those numbers might be true for larger, image-based communities. For smaller, discussion based communities old is more like 60-70% of new, among desktop traffic. Mobile web and apps still make up the majority now, but that’s true of pretty much everything.

rglullis 3y ago

It's quite easy to change the css from Lemmy, and from a quick look their HTML is reasonably clean. I'm tempted to attempt it.

chaosjevil 3y ago
It's clean because they don't need to obfuscate anything to avoid people blocking ads.
dirkt 3y ago
Please do, a more condensed variant like old.reddit.com would be really appreciated by me and probably many other people. I have also started looking at it, by $REAL_JOB doesn't leave that much time.

gerdesj 3y ago

old.reddit.com looks rather dated to this 53 y/o bloke. Very busy too. I don't actually care because content is king and presentation is not but it would be nice if it looks good. Modern Reddit looks OK to me but I have recently deleted all comments I've ever made on Reddit and also my account. I will keep the mail alias alive for a while to see what shite turns up. For me Reddit was a new and vaguely exciting thing once and I used it for around a decade and have now discarded it. I've dumped the Register too after around 20 years. I have no idea why I still have a /. account! that's next along with Facebook. Back in the day I was asked to investigate this new fangled world wide web thing by an org with loads of cash and twiddling thumbs and I reported back it looked a lot like Gopher and WAIS but different. I might have also mentioned Teletext too. I'm not an evangelist worth listening to but I've been here before. Just allow yourself to destroy accounts on systems that are no longer useful or productive anymore. Move on.

lmm 3y ago
> old.reddit.com looks rather dated to this 53 y/o bloke. Very busy too. I don't actually care because content is king and presentation is not but it would be nice if it looks good. Displaying actual content seems to look "dated" and "busy" by today's aesthetic standard. Do you have any example of a UI that has the information density of old.reddit.com but "looks good" by your standards?
- spiralx 3y ago
  My personal user style for old.reddit.com extends the comment width to the whole screen and moves the horizontal action list for each comment to align with the username and the right side of the screen, while changing the font to one I find easier to read as well as bumping the font size and line-spacing, as well as generally adding some small amounts of space and colour here and there to help separate elements. It's evolved over a few years now and the combination of changes means that I don't generally lose much in the way of content density in the general case of a post with mostly small to medium comments where the increased body text size is balanced with the removal of the space for the action bar. And it was even better before I got a bit older and decided that I should bump the font size up another pixel to make things easier on my eyes :)

courseofaction 3y ago

I am a fan of the software but I agree that the default design is horrible, it would probably serve Lemmy to get that addressed ASAP to get more people in the door. It's open source, any UI/UX people spot some low-hanging fruit? https://github.com/LemmyNet/ https://github.com/LemmyNet/

glenstein 3y ago
Lemmy has a built-in capability to cycle through various themes, but unfortunately all this themes seemed preserve the basic spacing and overall structure. I do think customizability with themes would hold huge potential if it had any true variety to it, along the lines of, say, winamp skins or something. I don't mean that example too literally, only to illustrate how much unrealized potential there is for themes, which are already built in, to truly add value.
asoneth 3y ago
Judging solely by the desktop screenshot [1] it doesn't seem like a bad first pass but there are a few things that could be improved: What jumped out first is the irregular post layout. For example the up/down arrows are farther from the image than the title, possibly to accommodate large, centered numbers. The titles can be at least three rows tall which results in posts that are quite different in height. The post images are all different heights and widths. Some users also have large circular icons that increase the height of the row while others have no icons. The other icon buttons are all slightly different sizes and appear to be from different sets. Finally, the content appears to be laid out a little haphazardly: why is the star icon next to the comments but the book icon next to the post's age? Why is the article's domain sandwiched between the community name and the age, and do we really need to show subdomains? (As an alternative, you could truncate large numbers with postfix magnitude to shrink their padding, make all images the same height/width, truncate long titles to two rows, make all icons the same optical size, and collapse the metadata to a single row such as: "From domain.org · Submitted by @name to community 11h ago · # Comments · star".) The gray text on gray background results in poor contrast which makes it harder to read than necessary. This is especially apparent in the Posts/Comments and Subscribed/All toggles as the unselected option looks entirely disabled. Finally, I'm not sure it works to put so many communities in one large block of wrapping rows. It may fit more content on the screen but makes for a loud block of bright green text that is attention-grabbing but hard to scan, especially since the list doesn't seem to have a visible sort order. It's also driving me crazy that the communities with icons result in inconsistent leading between rows. In that case I might start by finding out whether the page really needs to show six dozen subscriptions in the sidebar in the first place. [1] https://raw.githubusercontent.com/LemmyNet/joinlemmy-site/main/src/assets/images/main_img.webp https://raw.githubusercontent.com/LemmyNet/joinlemmy-site/ma...

class4behavior 3y ago

Well, there is this: https://github.com/soundjester/lemmy_monkey https://github.com/soundjester/lemmy_monkey

neardeaf 3y ago
This already looks way better

ronsor 3y ago

In my opinion, the old Voat [0] design was the best one for a Reddit-style website. [0] https://web.archive.org/web/20160216023609/https://voat.co/ https://web.archive.org/web/20160216023609/https://voat.co/

jacooper 3y ago

No, please no, if Lemmy looked like old.reddit no body will ever use it. There are custom themes, but it should be never the default.

xigoi 3y ago

Old Reddit is not responsive.

mariusor 3y ago

I work on a link aggregator that uses a more minimalist design. An example instance is at https://brutalinks.tech https://brutalinks.tech

alex3305 3y ago

Completely agree. More so because font sizing is IMHO all over the place. I'm using my OS and browsers' zoom because I'm visually impaired and than Lemmy is kind of a mess.

Okawari 3y ago

Lemmy supports alternate frontends. I'm kinda intrigued by https://fedibb.ml/ https://fedibb.ml/, which replicates the default phpBB theme.

polski-g 3y ago
Its dead, Jim.