1y ago

informal PSA: we are sorry the UI got worse and more annoying to use, please blame Lemmy for all the shit that is now that little bit more irritating

we already collectively dislike a substantial number of 0.18+'s UI decisions, most of which are minor but are already adding up to be that much more annoying collectively. maybe we can sand some of these off with theming in the future. for now though please hang with this and petition them to merge better decisions in the future, thanks

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This post makes the Beehaw admins look really bad, to be honest. Personally, I had not even really noticed any big differences, so if you hadn't told me I wouldn't even know about them. The small differences that I did notice seem like improvements to me.
However, this post seems to be needlessly criticizing the Lemmy devs without any actual constructive feedback. The post is nothing more than "We would like to make you aware that the experience got worse and you SHOULD BLAME the devs!!" to me. It doesn't help anybody. It just makes you look very unprofessional, entitled and will damage your relation with the Lemmy devs. If you can't code and improve Lemmy yourself that way, that's totally fine. Don't like an update? That fine too! But if you want to be actually helpful and have your voice heard, go to Lemmy's Github page and give the devs constructive feedback. Report bugs when you run into issues or do a feature request for changes you'd like to see. Enter discussions about other bugs/requests. There are so many things you could do without the need to be a programmer.
But don't post a vague complaint to your community, pointing fingers and hoping to get more people angry to pressure the devs into what you want. I came to Beehaw because it promised to be a safespace. A positive place. The fact that an admin posted this complaint here doesn't reflect that idea at all to me.
I really hope you guys can see why this behaviour is not desirable and a one-time thing. Otherwise, I can't keep supporting Beehaw and would have to leave the instance for another, which would be a shame.
- What makes this further interesting is that the lemmy back end and front end are actually two different stacks so theoretically anyone can make a front end to their liking.
- Assuming good faith needs to go all directions and we're asking for a little bit of empathy to vent some frustrations when we see them. Not everything we say is with an admin hat on. This is explicitly in the chat community, and it's specifically titled 'informal'. We don't desire to be stuffy and impersonal all the time because then you have no insight into who we are as people or the issues we go through.
  
  Lots of toxic behavior in social media is people venting frustrations. So in that sense what you are doing is not that weird.
  Now think about the community you say you want to foster here and the values you say you want uphold.
  This should not be Reddit or Twitter, right? We expect better from people, right?
  Please, think about the optics, reflect and do not double down, unless you are 100% sure this is the kind of criticism you are ok with having in Beehaw, because is what you are going to get.

Constructively criticize -- remember that the decisions they made seemed like the right ones to them. Remember the human. And be specific: "Make better decisions" isn't useful, but "now that Lemmy does this, unfortunately that happens for me as a result" might just result in the changes you need.
- Whoa buddy what's all this empathy stuff doing here
- I'd ask for you to remember that we're humans too - we just put a bunch of resources into a very messy upgrade. We've been asking for plenty of other fixes, busy running a website, collecting moderators, setting up services for our users and to manage the site, ensuring that emails send because the app doesn't notify approval/denials, and in general scaling up for the unprecedented growth. We also had to defederate and caught a lot of flak for it, have had to deal with a lot of unsavory users, and in general have had very few people sympathize with our position.
  I think it's absolutely fair to be upset about changes and to vent that frustration. I also think it's fair to point out it's not constructive, but please see it from our perspective- it's another headache we don't know how to deal with right now, and it's incredibly frustrating. It's upsetting to see parts of the platform regressing, many of our concerns glossed over, and to face pushback from many users not even from our instance.

not a good sign to find myself on a platform where fellow admins are criticizing the developers like this. in a healthy ecosystem we'd leverage more formal channels to help direct the development. if you haven't already, it might be good to document the regressions and start/join the discussions on github or matrix (link for it can be found on the Lemmy github page). i've used these in the past for this project and the devs were reasonably quick to reply and apply fixes.
- not a good sign to find myself on a platform where fellow admins are criticizing the developers like this. in a healthy ecosystem we’d leverage more formal channels to help direct the development.
  if lemmy can't handle us personally saying we dislike a significant number of the software-wide UI choices made by 0.18+, an upgrade that mind you we can't go back on, i feel like that speaks to a much less healthy ecosystem than this post. in any case, they're busy, we're busy, and most of the fixes we want aren't in the pipeline at all because they're administrative in nature, not cosmetic.
- Oh no, criticism! How will Lemmy ever survive!
  Wait until you find out that at least one of the main authors is a literal tankie
  
  That seems like a bit of a needlessly hostile response to someone who was offering constructive criticism and encouraging others to do the same.

What about something like this?
“¡Hi! You might have experience some changes in the interface of Beehaw. The admin team is not really happy with them but remember, we do not build the software that powers this community, so if you are experiencing problems make sure to report them to the Lemmy developers. We are already doing it.
In the meantime we are making some plans to mitigate this problems with theming on our end.
If accessibility is being a problem, take a look into these alternative clients.
In the end Lemmy is still in an early stage and it’s the responsibility of every instance to help in any way we can to help make it as good as it can be”
No need to throw anyone under the bus. To be honest it’s not the kind of criticism I expected from this community. Maybe you would be chillier if you had a downvote button to get all… that… out of your system.
You sound really adversarial against the people that build our tools. Even if you are frustrated, this leaves a really bad taste.

This post lacks constructive feedback. Just complaining - without proposing any solutions or fully describing the issues - is a smooth-brain move.
Personally I like the UI changes. I no longer have to zoom the page out to get a decent font-size. Comment-collapse buttons are now on the left so it's easier to collapse comments as you move down the page.
I would like to see a bit more indentation for comment replies. Currently scrolling down threads where many comments have single replies, the replies have more highlighting that the comments themselves, and the indent margin isn't quite wide enough to obviously set replies apart from top-level comments.
However, all of my comments could be easily fixed with CSS in either a theme or with a user-applied style.

Idk everything looks better to me? Font size looks about the same, I can see all the buttons. Scrolling is a lot smoother. This is on Safari iOS
- I suspect it is mostly an issue on desktop, as I also can't say I noticed any difference on mobile.

While I understand that most of Beehaw's administrators are not programmers, I think it would be helpful if you reached out to the developers and ask that the Lemmy software offer greater levels of configuration when it comes to the UI. Making a vague post about "issues" on your own forum ensure that whatever issues you have will never be heard by the developers.
- While I understand that most of Beehaw’s administrators are not programmers, I think it would be helpful if you reached out to the developers and ask that the Lemmy software offer greater levels of configuration when it comes to the UI
  with how many feature requests they (and we) already have on their plate i'm gonna be honest i cannot imagine this is significantly more actionable to them than the OP is. it's not like they can just snap their fingers and give us that ability

Honestly I dont mind it that much,
It's smaller but I ctrl+ on my keyboard and blow it back up. Some of the layout of the posts is different on the main page but I wasnt the biggest fan of the original either so thats more a wash. The comment box has a different formatting button layout which is fine.
Being on the all tab and not having a random subinstance federate with or update all at once is excellent. It was so annoying to try to click something, and wind up being too slow as what I wanted to click got bumped down. Usually by porn. Nothing against the porn instances, mind you, but I was trying to click some silly meme not get an eye full.

What's worse about it?
- I like the smaller fonts, fits more content onto each page. I don't know what all the angst is about, I can't be the only one who is largely enjoying the design changes. 🤷

All of the buttons that had any value at all are completely missing -- upvote, reply, report... I don't even have the button to add a screenshot of what I do see. (Brave, MacOS)
- That's a cache invalidation problem. You need to force-reload the page (Shift+click reload in Firefox; not sure what it is in Brave).
  @alyaza@beehaw.org, I was getting 304 Not Modified for the icon images. The browser is caching them incorrectly.
- I noticed that too, but a hard Refresh or Reload (override cache) (Ctrl+Shift R) or (Ctrl-F5) made them come back.

On mobile it seems pretty decent? At least nothing that had bugged me so far.
Don't sweat it guys, I think most of us understand that Lemmy will have a somewhat bumpy road ahead and are fine with it! It's kind of fun to be here during it's growth :)

I have to say (and it's probably just me being oblivious) but I haven't noticed anything different. What's changed?

Well on the plus side, the Lemmy frontend is designed to be replaceable; there's even an old forum style frontend for Lemmy as an example. If Lemmy-UI shits the bed too hard, then we can always make a better one.

On desktop I use FoxScroller, a scrolling extension, which barely works now - but I'm probably the only one here with this objection. Everything seems to be working fine.

I thought I was just seeing things, but the font sizes were actually reduced. The weirdest thing is that now the body size is smaller than 1rem.
- On desktop I just ctrl+ my way back to comfortable size, I imagine on mobile browser this is going to be annoying, but the app flood is coming to save us on phone
  
  On desktop I just ctrl+ my way back to comfortable size,
  i... should not have to do this in the first place. it should just be at a legible size as a baseline, lol
- See also the PR. Apparently “people” want the fonts smaller. Can't imagine who or why.

ignoring all the reasons i hate these changes from a design standpoint, from an accessibility standpoint, this is objectively a worse build in almost every way

oddly enough I prefer the new ui over to the old ui. Feels snappier
(Probably because I'm on mobile though?)

Finally, my laziness paid off (didn’t update from 17.3 yet) !

Is it possible to develop a different UI without forking?
- Check out wefwef.app. It's a skin for Lemmy that looks just like Apollo.

oh also these are actually 0.18+ UI choices (i have edited my post to note this) so it's not like we can revert them lol. we're stuck going forward until they're fixed or we sand them off. sucks!
- Given these appear to be just font size changes in the CSS, could we not just change them back to the old values for Beehaw itself?
  https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy-ui/commit/aee7e4d45b24667dc34a29f72ef353e78ed1009c
  
  if they're changes in CSS yes we can probably change them trivially but that'll also probably just come as a part of theming then, we have some stuff in the works there 😉

Much as I dont like the changes, it does seem overall faster and more stable - at least on my browser (safari)
So at least there's that?
- It does seem overall faster and more stable - at least on my browser (safari)
  for all the headache it better be, this was half of why we upgraded

But hey, things are much snappier at least, which is definitely a plus. Still getting some "worker bee" pages but not nearly as often as on 0.17.4. All in all a very good update, even though the font sizing may be a bit small for some peoples' tastes
- All in all a very good update, even though the font sizing may be a bit small for some peoples’ tastes
  oh god if this was the only problem we'd be so happy but trust us, it is not, and we've already gotten a bunch of bug reports to that end

53 comments