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.
I just use the Voyager app, which has a great UI, with no need to visit the website at all.
I should mention this is mainly for desktop users :), but even for mobile users, people usually check the website first before downloading apps.
Voyager also has a web version web version
I love Voyager on mobile but feel constrained by it on desktop. (It reminds me of using Gnome, which is not my personal preference.)
I don’t think it was ever supposed to be used on desktop, it is made for touchscreen so the experience is suboptimal on desktop
Agreed. It’s touch optimized, not mouse and keyboard. That’s not a criticism!
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Voyager FTW, imo
Eww. I don’t like that screenshot at all. I vastly prefer the more info dense version I use that looks like classic reddit.
I mistakenly used the old photon version, I have updated the post with the image of the new current updated version of Photon.
You can customize photon’s post layout to make it more info dense, even more than the newer image I have attached on the post.
While that is preferable to the previous one, it’s still only showing 3 posts with tons of wasted space. This is putting an infosparse UI over an infodense application/platform and when you do that you lose functionality and make using the platform more tedious and time consuming. In a way it’s nice but it loses too much function to be appealing in this application. I could see that being an acceptable UI for another platform but not a link aggregator where the whole reason for existing is to gather a lot of information together.
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.
Mastodon is easy to use, it had no chance to become neo-twitter for other reasons.
Can you accept organic growth and not being the bestest best with three billions people?
While I do favour that UI improvements are needed - in particular for guest views and community sidebars, I’d say defo chasing the “big social” trends and UIs is not the way to go. Heck, I left Reddit partly because of the new UI (I know about old.reddit, it’s just there’s no promise of any kind to maintain it).
Why photon? alexandrite is insanely much better imho: https://a.lemmy.world
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
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.
I think many people use Bluesky instead of Mastodon because of its UX, not its UI. Both looks great (I think Mastodon even nicer!).
I personally use Mastodon, but I’ve seen people complain about their experience with it.
The ootb experience is what matters to most. As people seem to just want it to work. I personally love the bare bones… but most users don’t really customize much or want to conduct a whole study on alternative apps or settings. I would be fine with polished and basic settings complemented with an advanced settings menu and other apps.
most users don’t really customize much or want to conduct a whole study on alternative apps or settings.
Usually I just recommend
- one instance: https://discuss.online/
- one app: Voyager
They can figure the rest themselves later, but that’s usually a good way to set people up
Great advice, didn’t know about discuss.online.
Is there any other “human-readable” instance out there?The question I usually get is “what is Lemmy?” when sharing a post
jlai.lu is basically reddit (as “read it”) but written in French
Indeed, so I wouldn’t recommend it to non-French-speakers
Probably https://reddthat.com/
Be cautious, downvotes are disabled
What’s the consequences with disabled down voting? Is there any difference on how the post displayed ?
Yes, downvotes will be ignored. On the other hand, you can’t downvote any post. This comes from a time where there was no option to disable downvotes display at a user level (came in 0.19.4 I think, LW is still on 0.19.3, so you probably never tried it out).
Got it! Thanks.
I’ve been planning to move from world but apparently there’s no easy way to migrate with everything intact yet afaik.
For those who may not be aware there are alternative front ends available for Lemmy.
MLMYM is like old reddit. You can see what it looks like here:
mlmym.walledgarden.xyz
Voyager is multi platform interface that also offers a Lemmy frontend. Our implementation is here:
voyager.walledgarden.xyz
I am not as tech savvy as most people on Lemmy and I use voyager without any issues. I thought it was quite easy to get up and running.
I personally really dislike new reddit and the Photon theme. I’d say no to any change to my main instance.
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.
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.
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.
Hello @Xylight@lemm.ee ,
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 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.
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
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.
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.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!
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.
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.
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 worry, you’re doing fine
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Photon is amazing, and I use it daily. I love it. I’m sorry about the users in the comments that don’t understand what “subjective” means.
Thank you for all your work, and keep doing what you’re doing!
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
We tried at communick.news a while ago, it didn’t work so well. Perhaps the situation has improved, so it’s worth to take a look.
Hey, how are you doing?
https://phtn.app/ has the latest version, seems quite faster
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 thisFor 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?
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.
-
This UI is so beautiful
I basically only use mobile apps, so I don’t even remember what the desktop UI looks like. But if you say so!
Yup. Voyager/Wefwef is basically the new Apollo. It’s not 100% there in terms of feature parity, but it’s damned close and is being actively developed.
