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.
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.
Nah, the current UI is fine. We don’t need fancy shit on a link aggregator. Reddit went to shit after “updating” the UI.
Your opinions of “good” or “best” aren’t the same for everyone.
This UI is so beautiful
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.
Lemmy continues to primarily attract tech-savvy individuals, politically left-aligned users
You say that like it’s bad 😊
Your points are valid, but you do run on the assumption that growth is good, which is not an universal truth IMO.
I think we need to actually do some new user testing, instead of endless discussion with nothing to back it up.
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.
Why photon? alexandrite is insanely much better imho: https://a.lemmy.world/
I personally really dislike new reddit and the Photon theme. I’d say no to any change to my main instance.
That’s too much padding. It needs to be more like Hacker News.
I mostly agree. Maybe a nice idea to make it opt-in by default, with the option to switch back to the ‘old’ UI
Perhaps a modal the first time someone visits that shows the different UI options and directions on where to switch
- With what I think are near enough default settings, Voyager shows me about 9 stories. It doesn’t feel cramped and the layout is regular, everything lines up.
- With what I think are near enough default settings, my browser here shows me 14 stories, with a good accessible font size by default and me easily zooming out to 80%. It doesn’t feel cramped and the layout is regular, everything lines up.
- I can see 2 stories in that screenshot. Why would I want to have something that’s at least 5 times worse, it feels cramped and parts of it line up I guess?
/me pines for the days of protocol over interface. NNTP + killfiles were the bees knees. Then we could just all pick our own interface to connect to any lemmy host.
I don’t think the problem is the UI. Fediverse is more complex by nature than a centralized platform.
You have to choose a server, then an app to visualize (not only online but on the phone too) and there’s plenty of alternatives.
If everybody joined the same server we end up with a centralized system and if every large server has to use specific UI what’s the point on decentralizing?
I also thought that fediverse had to try to be easier to use but the point is that it’s more complicated precisely because the user has more power and hence has to do more decisions.
And I think people have to understand the basics of the fediverse, otherwise people will not stay precisely because it’s more complicated. If I didn’t care a bit I would be on Reddit not here and I’m currently using both because there’s simply much more content there and hopefully with time I can use Lemmy more and less reddit. I’m willing to do the effort of slowly transitioning because I believe in this but people who doesn’t care won’t stick around.
I’m working on my own Lemmy client that I’m hoping will be both a better UI, but also universally better as an app (phone and tablet), MacOS app, and on the web. Voyager provides a web version, but it’s not optimized for larger screens.
My app will deliver the best experience on all screen sizes and will take the best of Reddit, Voyager, etc.
I’m 14 days in lol but if anyone is interested please DM me. I’m happy to share what I’m working on, but I just ask you have realistic expectations as this will likely be 6+ month project to deliver something that can actually compete with existing clients.
