I made the mistake of checking Reddit (using my last few days of Apollo) and came across a complaint about Lemmy that flabbergasted me
Do people actually like all of the overdesigned clutter to the point where it makes them not want to switch sites?
To me, the stripped down clarity on Lemmy is a feature. I remember back in the day when people flocked to Facebook from MySpace, in large part because they were sick of eye gouging customized pages and just wanted a simple, consistent interface. The content, not the buttons to click on it are the draw right?
The reason I used Reddit is Fun WAS because of its stripped down, bare bones style. I only wanted to read thoughts and opinions, and choose to view images/video/ads when I wanted to. This is absolutely a feature of Jerboa (and Lemmy) for me
It's about personal preference. It's important to have a user interface that's modular and comfortable for the end user and manageable for the devs. Options are always the answer, the ability to enable or disable certain aspect or details is what drives me towards one app or the other. (This is coming from someone who used Infinity for Reddit for the past 4 years.)
Yes people do like nice design and user interfaces. Apple managed to grab a large market share by understanding that.
It doesn't have to be cluttered but it doesn't have to be ... this.
If you want things to improve, you are going to have to accept criticism that your current crush isn’t perfect. There is already a lot of the toxic Reddit’ness that has come over, we don't need more.
"The hosts are too lazy" says the person whining about it without doing anything.
Try switching to a platform you've never used before and making a community out of nothing, or host the Lemmy instance and be forced to deal with thousands of new users daily. Lazy my ass...
Reddit's UI and performance was pretty horrible for me in the browser. That being said, I find Lemmy's UI and performance worse. 😢
They definitely need to hire a real designer and work on performance. It's pretty bad when I try to subscribe to a community on lemmy.ml from lemmy.world. It takes like minutes for me for the request to go through.
The contrast between white and lime green is pretty bad too. The design makes the app feel cheap. That matters for a lot of people.
TBF Lemmy UI/UX is horrible. So is Reddit's IMO, for completely different reasons, but still. It's a valid criticism, it's just also not an endorsement of Reddit.
Dark grays, blues? Squared? Good. I love simplicity! Not to mention, Reddit started out like that too, and among the older wave of users old.reddit was still a favorite for that reason.
But as a designer, I understand where they're coming from. Especially if they were using the new reddit design on the web and Apollo on mobile. At the very least though, I think Lemmy's default UI looks much better than old.reddit (and I say that as someone who still uses old.reddit).
I've noticed my friends my age (late teens/ early 20s) say that lemmy and kbin look old. They also are new reddit users so they are probably used to the social media, ads before content approach of modern websites compare to those who enjoyed more simple site designs that were functional
One thing I do dislike, the post width on desktop is limited. Between the sidebar always being shown and the container being 1140 px wide, the comment section ends up only being 760 px wide; way too narrow for me.
I wrote a Stylus script for Firefox to make the posts full-width.
If you don't like the UI, you can always download a browser extension that change the CSS of the website. However, if this is the main criticism people do to Lemmy, I would say that's not bad for a relatively new platform
"Do people actually like all of the overdesigned clutter?" Hell nah! Polar opposite here.
I absolutely hate it when sites randomly redesign to look "modern" and "hip" or whatever you want to call it. Forcefully adding flashy, colorful stuff that you can't turn off again or opt out of is a surefire way for me to dislike the site in question immediatly. Emojis, animated smileys, glitter effects, neon-colored letters, autoplay-animations, and worst of all: sound effects! Nope. Nu-uh. Get that sh*t away from me. I like my black-squared, simple layout and silent browsing experience, thank you very much.
Form over function, it's been all over the place for the last few years.
Right now I can see buttons I may not use immediately in the interface… to me it's fine. To modern designer these must be hidden and only show up contextually or with an hover, and keep the space empty otherwise.
I don't really like modern design, but it is true that a lot of people (mainly younger people or old people that never really looked at internet much before) really enjoy the "simplicity and lean look". These people also enjoy interfaces that requires a lot of waiting and moving around to do simple thing, so…
I'm especially annoyed by the way videos are shown on every Lemmy UI, I can't be bothered to click on a link every time there's video content on my feed
I think critiques are pretty helpful in the early stages of growth. There's several little UI/UX tweaks we can do to make these places feel more inviting.
That's also the beauty of Lemmy... they can host an instance of their own, and customize it to their hearts content, while still having access to the broader community's content!
You can skin and theme an instance however you want, and the lemmi-ui code is open source so you can completely customize that side of things too. It's a complete non issue the instant someone with design capabilities contributes.
I think it's clear that reddit employees are working overtime for damage control, and you can easily tell when they flood a comment section with their identical silly talking points, a bunch of whiny naysayers who never care about anything, except licking boot. they love to cry about UX and protests being an inconvenience, but never about censorship or the fucked up things reddit does. another thing they do is constantly bring up Musk all the time for no reason and distract from spez. seriously those comments are like a plague over there, it's insane. imagine trying to make the crashing and burning of reddit, somehow about another guy, that has nothing to do with any of it. while Twitter is just doing its thing and they don't even give a shit.
tl;dr: fuck spez
Honestly I like it better than old.reddit for some things. Comments are automatically scaled up to a friendly size. I'm not killing my eyes by being too lazy to zoom in anymore ha.
Some of the formatting could use work, but it's hardly a deal breaker.
In the middle of 2010, "Due to a controversial redesign brought on by Digg, disgruntled users declared a "Quit Digg" day where they posted links to Reddit and left Digg behind to join Reddit. Reddit subsequently overtook Digg in search popularity. "
Reddit's had 18 years to tweak the user interface. Lemmy's Initial release was May 5, 2019; 4 years ago. Honestly, I have no issue with Lemmy's interface, but I feel confident in saying that given another 14 years of development, Lemmy will probably not look like it does today.
Nah I stayed on old reddit because I like that every sub has it's on interface and personality. I used to visit lots of new subs just to see their unique design. Lemmy's interface is very sterile and boring to look at.
Lemmy is still a baby. I am sure we'll see tweaks/improvements over time. We'll also see scripts/extensions. Overall, I am enjoying my experience using Lemmy.
I wouldn't worry. Those are the people that joined Reddit late (in the last few years) and came from other social media platforms (like Facebook). I think Lemmy is safe for a long while at least.
There's a lot of bullshit being posted about Lemmy over there, but lots of folks spreading the good word of the Fediverse as well. I'm doing my part until Bacon Reader stops working.
i agree. the only reason why i hae accounts on shit like this is to prepare for the VERY VERY MINISCULE chance that reddit will shut down due to them making shit decisions.
I'm not really sure, I think some of them might which is weird. Though I think a lot of them are just trying to find reasons to complain about Lemmy because they are addicted to reddit, don't want to make the switch and they know that if people start leaving Reddit they're going to have to switch to something else and that scares the shit out of them. So they're going to complain about Lemmy or the alternatives because they desperately don't want to lose Reddit, their source of dopamine and fulfillment.
Idk, customized accents and images/identity is an accessibility thing for a lot of people, helps them have a sense of being where they're intending to be & not lost in the content soup, which I do think a lot of decentralized projects do fall a little flat. It's a tough line to toe!
(edit: i think i maybe misunderstood some here, but imo lemmy's ui could use a little more clarity and polish, but ultimately like its lighter load visually)
I do think there's opportunity to refine the UI. Doing simple but also beautiful and intuitive isn't easy, and Lemmy isn't all the way there yet. I think there could be benefit from a few really good design nerds working on the design.
I hope we get a chance to customize to our liking at some point - but not like it matters that much to me anyway since I'm mostly mobile. I just hope my rif-like app comes soon enough.
Super strange though to complain from Reddit the lack of customization.
Using Kbin, and the default minimalistic design with everything in discrete text-boxes reminds me much more of older forum's than Reddit ever did. I like it!
There is like 10 or so apps in development for Lemmy rn and I don‘t know if any for kbin, but I fully expect some of these apps to allow us to change themes.
To be fair, Apollo and other phone apps set a standard of quality for the content we expect. Old reddit is efficient but even kbin and lemmy are a little rough on the edges compared to that. It’s the first impression that matters to a lot of people and it’s not up to the standard most expect. It’s a good start, but just that, a start.
People are different. I never really liked or used Reddit, because it was a cluttered mess to me. This here? Nice, clean, resource efficient. I like Lemmy!
I got a bit confused: is that about the reddit app or themes of particular subreddits or something? When I first saw your post I thought you meant Lemmy was the one with overdesigned clutter. I was using old.reddit.com for web browsing and Redreader as a mobile client, and had subreddit CSS turned off so it always used the plain default theme.
I noticed after a few minutes with a mobile browser on my ultra cheap (limited bandwidth) data plan, that Lemmy uses at least 10x more data transfer than Reddit does. I figure that is a combo of being more pic heavy and having a bunch of javascript bloat. I hope to switch to some kind of plain text client soon. Lemmy is great in many ways but uses way too much dysfunctional web 2.0 tech for my tastes.
I do use Lemmy because the whole thing with Reddit just sucked, but holy hell yeah, new Reddit looked so much better.
It's not the world, I can get used to it and it's fine, but the preference is clear.
Honestly dig it, reminds me of the early days of reddit when it was more of a community than an advertising platform. People are just looking for any little thing at this point.
I will say for me that kbin looks extremely outdated. I'm very much a fan of newer layouts and in my opinion (at its current stage) kbin doesn't look nearly as attractive as new Reddit (at least on mobile).
It is WAY more responsive though, and I also have faith it will improve. I'm definitely here for the long haul as it has way better content and a better community. I am definitely looking forward to the apps though!
Simple and clean UIs are an improvement over what's now considered "modern web design" meant to manipulate your attention to particular things. It feels like the agency is taken away from the user. I am loving the fediverse for this reason and have been a fan and user of FOSS apps for over a decade because the design goals of the software match the actual use-case of the app without trying to tie you in to something else. No distractions, no advertisements, no walled gardens. Just, here's the app, here's the functionality, it's been delivered. Now use it as you see fit without an ulterior motive from the developer or their investors (or lack thereof.)
It's FOSS so someone will probably make what they want, if they just give it a sec to appear for free out of thin air then they'll have to come up with another excuse.
Not a fan, as I usually have problems distinguishing comment lines for some reason (I always get them mixed and blended up) and Lemmy isn't as clear as Reddit in that regard. But it's definitely usable and I hope it gets some day customizable and more organized.
They are kinda right though. An appealing design is important for many people. (Except for some reason people involved in opensource and linux stuff... fite me!)
Also a nicer design doesn't mean that it will be cluttered. You're just creating a strawman there.
Just wait till they have to use the reddit app only. Plus if these people want to they can invest there time and run a Lemmy instance. Develop their own tools to make it look the way the want. Rather than complaining about free too hosted freely by people who care.
This is an actual use case for 'the customer is always right'. No matter how much you prefer the layout, there will be others that prefer something else. And if we want to attract more users, that's something that we'll need to consider.
By far the most off-putting thing about lemmy is how people think themselves too good to consider the preferences and experiences of the average user coming from reddit.
Definitely multiple sites on the fediverse can use some UI/UX tweaks and a high level pass on user flow and functionality. Like I get it, people shouldn't flock here and expect it to be a Reddit clone, but if people want mass adoption (and you do because you want comment and engagement), there needs to be QOL improvements to the core experience.
Lots of devs going around though trying to fix things up. I'm looking into kbin myself, but give it a few months and everything will be in a much better shape
These people are why new paint colors are a major selling point for cars, or new default wallpapers are at the top of the changelist for an OS release.
They are why "all new cars look the same" memes have to blank out the rims/hubcaps, because some people think different wheel decorations fundamentally change the aesthetics of the vehicle, and the aesthetics are a primary factor for them.
I think kbin is pretty nice as it is and I am sure the developers will make it even better in the future.
A really nice bonus is the lack of advertisements on the platform (or maybe I am blocking it, I dont know?). compared to official reddit it feels very refreshing to only have content to focus on.