this post was submitted on 07 Jun 2023
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I greatly dislike the UI. Makes for a bad UX.
Unfortunately, the UI source is not approachable to me (despite being very familiar with web tech). Theming documentation is not there yet either.
As far as content goes, it's still niche, so amount and usefulness varies a lot between communities and overall. But I've liked it in principle, posted comments, and found interesting links/infos.
I'm curious what your problems with the UI are? To me it's pretty close to old reddit.
Everything is small with many things without focus for obviousness.
On comments I want a vertical bar like on reddit to both see vertical thread relation and to be able to collapse it from anywhere in the thread. Instead I have to navigate to the top, locate and press visually the weak collapse button.
On post listings images thumbnails are too small, and the post has no direct link to the image. (On Reddit I hover over the image link and see the full image. The in-page preview/view specifically is a browser extension though.)
I am not using old Reddit design. I like being able to open a post, and at the end close it (click to the side of it) and be back to the listing. On Lemmy I have to work with tabs or back navigation.
On the listing the info I am secondarily interested in (after the headline or image) are not obvious. Community icons are [often] less useful than the community names. Weblinks are small and greyed out as if they were unimportant/aside when it's the primary content of the post.
Comment upvote and downvote should be to the side, like on posts. That'd be more obvious and visually consistent. Red on downvote I find irritating. As if it were a highlight color. Reply action is not distinct enough - goes under between the other buttons.
Notifications and their linking, marking read, and toolbar are a mess too.
Dropdown for reply language selection is suboptimal to say the least.
Edit should be a primary toolbar action. Not hidden within a collapsed section. Only half the horizontal space is used even when expanded. But then visual separation is missing again between the different types of actions.
…
Sounds like you want a few new reddit features when this site is more modeled on old reddit as many people prefer that.
> On post listings images thumbnails are too small, and the post has no direct link to the image.
How big would you want them to be? From a quick check they seem to be about the same size as new reddit's "classic" mode, about 100px wide by 80px tall. The main difference is lemmy doesn't crop the image to make it fix that box exactly.
And they do have a direct link, you should see it when hovering on the thumbnail, and middle clicking will open it in a new tab.
> I am not using old Reddit design. I like being able to open a post, and at the end close it (click to the side of it) and be back to the listing. On Lemmy I have to work with tabs or back navigation.
Those are pretty different UX philosophies and I doubt Lemmy would go for the former. Personally that's one of the things I hate about new reddit. All I can say there is middle click is your friend for opening new tabs.
> Comment upvote and downvote should be to the side, like on posts. That’d be more obvious and visually consistent.
The idea there is that you have to actually read through the comment before providing your opinion on it.
> Dropdown for reply language selection is suboptimal to say the least.
How else would you accomplish that?
> Edit should be a primary toolbar action. Not hidden within a collapsed section.
Yeah probably.
> But then visual separation is missing again between the different types of actions.
What do you mean there? There's decent spacing and different icons. I can't think of anything else to do besides color.
(As a note: I contributed a bit to the functionality of post listings, but I'm not a lemmy dev)
I have two languages configured, so it's 3 options: undefined, en, de. 3 flag icons would suffice - make it more obvious (visual differentiation between them) and be usable with one click.
When expanded, my comment has 7 action icons. All of them are greyed out, and are visually on the same layer and type.
When I look through them I see different groups though:
On your comment, when expanded, I see 8 action icons. Even more. All the same visual weight with no differentiation.
What I would like to see is visual grouping of the different kind of activities. That'd not only make correlation, relation, and interaction closeness more obvious, but provide visual help to the eye in locating the desired actions. It'd also make it more obvious what the icons (which have no visible text labels) mean through differentiated association.
I'd do a DOM edit mockup, but it looks like the HTML source is minified.
The thumbnail links to a little bigger version of the thumbnail.
Only the top right icon (small) that allows you to expand in place links to the full image.