I’ve heard many people saying that the front-end looks old and needs more work, but I’ve never heard someone describe how it could look better. To me, it looks perfectly fine. I wish it had a card layout similar to libreddit, but aside from that, I think it’s nice. If people want a completely different look, then there’s lemmyBB, and there will probably be other front-ends in the future. However, we should hear opinions about which styles people want.
You can expand the text of a post by clicking on the book option. Posts with image urls can be expanded by clicking on the thumbnail. I’ll take a crack at the whitespace stuff when I get the chance.
Ah, I didn’t see that icon. Might I suggest that the icon replace the blank thumbnail space for text posts then? Smaller than the thumbnail space, larger than the current icon. And I may have been assuming the images acted like the text posts. Hmm. Or perhaps there is not enough visual distinction between image posts and website URLs. I see now that there is an icon in the upper-right corner of the image. Maybe I just need to retrain to figure that out.
I mentioned this in another piece of the thread, so I don’t know if you saw it, but a website I go to a lot (Royal Road) solved whitespace with a nice neutral-to-slightly dark landscape that everything goes over. So this way central column width could be expanded a bit without covering the whole screen.
Improving on that idea, perhaps you can even provide several options in the settings. Nothing high res, that’s not the point, but a pleasant space filler.