this post was submitted on 03 Jun 2023
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Lemmy

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Everything about Lemmy; bugs, gripes, praises, and advocacy.

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I've heard many people saying that the front-end looks old and needs more work, but I've never heard someone describe how it could look better. To me, it looks perfectly fine. I wish it had a card layout similar to libreddit, but aside from that, I think it's nice. If people want a completely different look, then there's lemmyBB, and there will probably be other front-ends in the future. However, we should hear opinions about which styles people want.

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[–] AgentElement@lemmy.ml 31 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (3 children)

There's two things that I miss from my current reddit frontend:

  • The density of posts. Lemmy feels sparse. Most of the UI is empty on my 16:9 monitor. I would like to have the equivalent to reddit's classic layout, where the sidebar is all the way to the right, and content has no padding before/after it. Everything in blue is dead space.

  • Comment nesting is kind of hard to follow. I suspect that this is because lemmy currently visually indents comments, but does not have indentation guides that extend below the current comment. Compare the following nesting visuals (the second is from old reddit, the first is from a text editor):

With a lemmy thread:

Notice how the red line does not extend all the way down to the bottom of the yellow line. I think that's much more difficult to follow than if it did. If, say, the toplevel comment were above the visible screen, we would not know how nested the comment we are reading is on first glance. A reader would be reliant only on color (which is also bad for accessibility reasons) to understand how nested a comment is, instead of receiving a coarse estimate from the number of vertical lines preceding a comment.

[–] CannotSleep420@lemmygrad.ml 12 points 1 year ago

I made a PR implementing your idea for comment threads. I'll get to your other suggestion later.

[–] YetAnotherYeti@lemmy.ml 7 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I'm brand new here, but you've written and shown my exact thoughts. Seconded, for sure.

[–] FaceDeer@lemmy.ml 5 points 1 year ago

Thirded. My main comment was going to be "an interface more like Old Reddit please" but these two points (the "low density" and the unclear nesting of comments) are really the core of the problem I'm having with it.

I'll probably encounter more as I experiment more with actually doing stuff, but visually speaking those are front and center for me.

[–] Veritas@lemmy.ml 6 points 1 year ago

You are right about the colors being difficult to distinguish by some people, I liked it because it was clean, but now I think it shouldn't be the default option if there can be a clearer one.