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TheArstaInventor @lemmy.world

As an average OG ex-redditor, Lemmy needs to move away from it's base barebones UI to something like Photon by default, here's why.

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.

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243 comments

  • 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
    • 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 this

      For the links, it's being worked on, should be part of 0.20: https://lemmy.ml/post/23245384

    • 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?

243 comments