Sure, I added support for it now :).

Looks great!

Would you consider adding my Lemmy theme as well? https://github.com/pkrasicki/lemmy-modern-ui-theme-addon

It seems that they need a UI expert.

I’m currently developing the addon myself. I will be maintaining it as long as I use Lemmy. The addon needs to work with multiple versions at the same time, so making changes and testing them is more complicated. It would be nice if all instances just used this theme (or any other modern theme), because then the addon wouldn’t be needed anymore. We could just have a simple theme to maintain and I want other people to contribute, so that it doesn’t just rely on me. This theme depends on the default litely and darkly themes. So it doesn’t have thousands of lines of CSS like other alternative themes, which hopefully makes things simpler.

The theme improves accessibility a little bit, because some of the default text colors have poor contrast and don’t meet accessibility guidelines. I don’t think it affects it in any other way. Here is the default contrast in 0.18.1RC on some elements:

Something needs to be done about Lemmy’s UI. Currently multiple developers develop their userscripts independently. But if big instances chose one common theme, it would be a lot easier to maintain it and most people could enjoy a nice UI without having to install anything.

It doesn’t have to be my theme, so feel free to post alternatives. I don’t know of any modern looking ones. I’ve seen some nice userscripts though and maybe they can be turned into a Lemmy theme.

I think those would be nice if we changed the backgrounds, but I don’t think they are maintained anymore: https://github.com/2xx04/lemmy-ui-themes

I don’t know the developer’s exact intentions, but my issue was a specific, easy to implement proposal. It wasn’t meant to be a discussion.

There have been UI improvements, but the design is still outdated. The theme you linked to is also not a modern design. What we need the most is an improved default theme, so that everyone could enjoy an easy to read website.

I already made a proposal to improve the default theme, but my issue was closed without any response from the developers. The required changes were small on purpose and should be easy to implement for anyone already familiar with the code. So it seems that UI is not a priority to Lemmy developers. That’s why I had to develop my addon, which I then also turned into a theme. I hope that one day Lemmy instances will start using some kind of modern theme (doesn’t have to be mine), so that my addon is no longer needed.

My theme is just a small amount of styles applied on top of the default litely and darkly themes, which should make maintenance easier. Unlike an addon, a theme doesn’t need to support multiple versions of Lemmy at the same time, so we could simplify it even more. Lemmy 0.18 uses CSS variables now, so that also makes things easier.

Something needs to be done about Lemmy’s outdated UI and I’m not sure if the current approach of developing multiple userscripts and addons is efficient. I understand if you think this might cause too much work for you though.

That’s awesome! It turns out that using the theme breaks my addon, so I will have to fix that :).

There are less bright and distracting backgrounds, which should make the site easier to read. Here are some screenshots from the default theme:

Here are some screenshots from 0.18 default:

You just need to follow this to use it on your instance: https://join-lemmy.org/docs/administration/theming.html. Then you can select the new theme in the admin panel.

RC4 is latest for backend. But Lemmy UI has RC7.

I just released a new version with small fixes for Lemmy 0.18.1-rc.7, which lemmy.world just upgraded to.

Thank you for your service. Would you be interested in testing my modern UI theme for Lemmy on your instance? It works with Lemmy 0.17 and 0.18.0. You can get the CSS files from the releases page.