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.
Probably what rehashing what people have already been saying but the things I would like to see changed are:
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Wider. Please please make it wider. It doesn’t have to be a copy of old reddit but I find it distressing just how little space is used - 730px is just too damn narrow. It would be better (but not perfect in my eyes) if the sidebar was collapsible - I don’t need to see it all the time.
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Opening text and images inline is different - you click on the image to open it inline but the text placholder thing takes to to the post directly? I know you can press the little “book” icon but that moves between every post. I don’t really understand this choice.
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Related to the above - it sometime isn’t obvious when a thumbnail is going to take you to another website or just open it inline. The little “picture” or “external link” logo in the top right sometimes doesn’t show up at all well on dark images.
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Can’t say I’m a fan of drawing an orange outline over every single UI item I click on.
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The main view should be more compact - honestly I don’t really care for avatars but sure, I guess people do like them. If the view was wider the third line could easily be removed.
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More indentation to the comments or an inset box -again less of an issue if the page was wider but I find the couple of pixels between indents not very visually distinct.
Don’t get me wrong, the site is very usable and I’m not saying it has to be a direct copy of old reddit but I currently think it is very cluttered - so many icons and things going on in such a narrow space.
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It would be very cool to partner with a designer and improve the UX in a professional manner
The mobile UI/UX needs some ❤️
especially the burger menu
Completely agree with you. Also we need more themes, cooler ones or more accessible too
Make sure yall open issues (specific ones please, not a ton in one issue), on the lemmy-ui github. Otherwise they’ll likely get lost, and people won’t be able to work on them easily.
For me, the primary issue now is it’s not clear how federation works. The UI now seems to be heavily inspired by traditional media (e.g. reddit, Twitter). But there’s not a whole lot of clarity when it comes to federation-specific features.
- I’m not exactly sure which communities and users are from where? It’s not always obvious? Since moderation rules are different for different communities, this seems vital. Subtle uses of BG color or icons could go a long way.
- Speaking of moderation rules, where are they?
- How can I explore other communities on other instances? I know there is All. Is that before or after my instance’s filtering?
- Are there ways of automatically exploring/aggregating similar communities on different instances? I saw someone use #hashtags, they took me to a website I don’t recognize. Are hashtags even part of the protocol?
- Clicking on links to other communities in Jerboa takes me to the browser. Huh?
- Jerboa: tapping a comment in a list (e.g. profile, inbox) doesn’t take me to that comment. This seems vastly more important than preserving text selection in those contexts.
I don’t think “old” is a bad thing. Mostly, it’s just kinda rough around the edges.
The menus could look more … “menuy”. Like when you open the main menu from the hamburger button on the top right, it’s just a flat list of links with no styling other than font and color. It could use a visual bounding box.
The user menu (when you click/tap your username) could use the same treatment and definitely needs some left padding so the text isn’t jammed along the edge.
The thumbnails should fill a fixed size box (though the size could/should scale with the user device’s display).
Some of the alignments get out of whack when interacting with interface elements. Like the subscribe/unsubscribe links in the community lists (also, those could look more like buttons instead of plain links).
I could have sworn there was a dark mode just earlier today when I turned off the “night mode” feature in my browser, but now it’s suddenly gone? In any case, would be nice to have, but my browser’s built in night mode works well enough.
There’s probably more, but I haven’t been there that long.
The menus could look more … “menuy”. Like when you open the main menu from the hamburger button on the top right, it’s just a flat list of links with no styling other than font and color. It could use a visual bounding box.
I’m intetested on what that would look like.
It occurred to me the hamburger button only shows on small displays. Nonetheless, I don’t think it needs to be anything too fancy. Just a little tweaking to signify “this is a control element”, similar to the sidebars. I just tweaked the CSS in dev tools and took a screenshot:
Also affects the element on wider screens
A couple of other things I noticed while writing this reply. It took me a bit to figure out that the [preview] button can be clicked again to return to “edit” mode. I think it the button should “edit” to indicate it’s function during preview mode.
I’m not a fan of how the search button immediately redirects to the advanced search. Personally, I’d prefer a text box with execute (the magnifying glass) and advanced buttons.
One last thing (for now lol) I noticed while reading comments is that some of the control icons are hidden without first clicking the menu button to expand the list. It seems like an unnecessary extra step when there’s ample space for all the icons anyway.
The only thing I would like is a more compact UI, it feels lime a lot of the screen is taken up by big text and whitespace.
I would say the main improvement could be the available app customization and features. Right now it’s very barebones, I can’t even find how to sort comments by their upvotes (if someone knows how, let me know), I also can’t collapse comments which makes it very hard to go through a lot of replies. I’m using Jerboa currently
I don’t like how it feels like a copy of new Reddit. I would prefer a layout similar to old.reddit. This seems geared towards mobile with everything justified in the center so a tone of blank space on either side on desktop
I actually really enjoy the theme and general layout, maybe some small quality of life adjustments. My bigger concern would be things like profile import/export so people can move to different servers, fixing the ability to customize your default starting page (All / Active, Subscribed / Top for Day, etc.). We may need a good way to share a link to the post & its thread, I did share a link to someone and it provided only the post’s image, it could be a misunderstanding on my part, but I was wanting the recipient to also be able to view the comments.
I love the theming and how intuitive everything is given the complex environment.
Not sure about desktop but on mobile, I don’t really get the “Sidebar+” button. Want to make a post? For some reason you need to press Sidebar then create post. On a community page, I’d have this literally as its own “Create Post” button.
I’m also not sure if there’s a quick way to get to a community I created. I need to go to my profile and find my post on the community to get to it.
I’ve tried several apps for Reddit on android over the past few years and this is what I’m currently finding uncomfortable using Jerboa for Lemmy:
- the numbers on the top right corner of the posts are confusing. Like right now they are saying “24 13”. Based on the upvote behavior I think 24 is rating. I’m guessing 13 shows how old is the post but it looks counterintuitive without a measurement unit. Is it 13 mins or 13 hours or 13 months or what?
- is there a way to collapse comment threads?
- on some of my previous apps for Reddit there was a way to hide read posts. I don’t really want to scroll past everything I’ve already seen every time I open the app.
That said, I really like Lemmy and hope it’ll get the fanbase it deserves.
hold the top bar of a comment down to collapse it
Oh, thank you, today I learned something new :3
is there a way to collapse comment threads
Tab and hold top of the comment.
It’s almost impossible to navigate to other instances via the android app unless they’re saved in your subscriptions.
Yeah, that’s not a lemmy ui issue, though. Links to lemmy communities or posts open in a browser window from jerboa. Is there a standard way that apps should use to determine if a link is to a lemmy object (on any instance) or just a web page? Maybe a
HEADrequest and checking headers?My problem is in android 12, they no longer let you manually define urls for apps to open. Am app has to give you “verified links” now. This is like really really shitty because in the jeroba app, everytime someone posts a link to another place on lemmy, it won’t open that shit. I’m probably going to buy an older phone because this is really fucking me. I do have an unlocked bootloader though but Java fucking sucks and reverse engineering an entire rom just to unfuck 1 shitty feature is like a 1 year long job.
Remember when newer tech used to actually be better than old tech? Pepperidge farm remembers.
I think it should look a bit more like old.reddit + RES (though not a copy). Pretty much if the choice is between looking more like old.reddit + RES or looking like new Reddit, go with the old.
Some specific issues I am seeing:
Half my screen is dead space, and why is the sidebar right up against the main column of text?
Extraneous stuff should be right (or left, depending on layout) justified, putting space between the main content and the sidebar. Also, let the center column be wider if someone has a wider screen.
I would like to be able to expand text or images without going all the way into the post. Basically, push everything else down and show the post, but leave the user on the front page and don’t load the comments.
I would like to be able to expand text or images without going all the way into the post.
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.
You can expand the text of a post by clicking on the book option
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.
Some suggestions a buddy of mine made when we were checking out Lemmy (we both use Reddit a decent amount so these are more like “stuff we’re used to seeing”):
- Number the posts displayed on the page
- Permalink button that copies to clipboard rather than acting as a hyperlink
