in a thread complaining about the general state of lemmy, I read a comment where someone linked the alternative lemmy UI Photon. some general thoughts:

  • this shit looks like new.reddit, which I hate
  • however, it is extremely fast
  • it looks like someone with UX experience was at least in proximity to this at the time it was designed?
  • I don’t think there’s an easy CSS way to make this look less like new.reddit
  • having tried it on a test instance, the promise of better mod/admin tools seems ambitious currently, though maybe they’ll get there faster than lemmy-ui
  • overall, it feels a lot nicer to use than either lemmy-ui or new.reddit

you can hook Photon up to awful.systems using the Accounts option in the menu on the top right, though for opsec reasons I can’t encourage anyone to log in to this weird external site with their awful.systems credentials. check it out with the guest instance option (which doesn’t need a login) or use a disposable lemmy.ml account or something

what I want to know is: does anyone use this thing, and does anyone want it here? if there’s demand for it, I can spin up a secure copy of it for our instance under an alternate path. for me it’s a bit of a hard sell due to its resemblance to the reddit redesign, but lemmy’s UI is decoupled enough from its backend that running this thing shouldn’t impact much

  • 200fifty@awful.systemsEnglish
    4·
    1 year ago

    If it’s an improvement over current lemmy UI, I’ll take it lol. It’s not like standard-lemmy-ui is some old-Reddit-interface-style minimalist barebones thing, but the “new-reddit-ness” doesn’t bother me too much personally.

    The main reason I can’t stand the actual new.reddit is because it collapses threads after like 2-3 replies, and then when you go back out of a sub-thread it has a tendency to lose your place. I’m assuming it’s some kind of stupid growth hack on Reddit’s part to prevent people from reading comments for too long (not enough ads in the comments section!)

    So as long as this one doesn’t have that stupid behavior, I’m fine with it lol

    • self@awful.systemsOPMEnglish
      6·
      1 year ago

      I’m assuming it’s some kind of stupid growth hack on Reddit’s part

      this is a solid explanation for most of the worst parts of reddit really

    • kuna@awful.systemsEnglish
      4·
      1 year ago

      The main reason I can’t stand the actual new.reddit is because it collapses threads after like 2-3 replies

      I think you might be on to something here, it’s been a while since I’ve last used reddit but I might have confused my distaste for dark UI patterns with the superficial look itself. I’m for the Photon UI then.