Recently, I made a post here, which gained some traction in support of the cause. However, I mistakenly used an outdated screenshot of Photon. It turns out that photon.lemmy.world is running an older version of Photon, which caused some misunderstandings.
For those who saw that post and were misled or disliked Photon because it appeared to display only 2-3 links on-screen, similar to new Reddit, let me clarify. While Photon is modern and intuitive, it is not like new Reddit in this particular aspect. This outdated screenshot gave the wrong impression, which I’ve since updated, but I wanted to create this new post since many people may not revisit the previous one to see the corrections.
The latest version of Photon, which can be seen at phtn.app, is a big improvement over what’s on photon.lemmy.world. Photon is modern, intuitive, and, speaking as someone with years of Reddit moderation experience who has also started moderating a few communities on Lemmy, it offers a far superior moderation experience. For example, Photon allows you to view the mod queue for all communities at once, making moderation much easier compared to the base UI or other alternatives.
Photon’s modularity and customization options are comparable to, if not better than, Kbin’s UI. You can easily change fonts, reposition docks and panels, apply custom themes, adjust sorting, and customize the modular side panel to arrange and pin items in any order you like. All of this can be done without needing CSS or additional technical knowledge. It’s probably the most modular yet user-friendly UI available right now.
Here’s an example of the latest Photon interface settings:
Here’s a more customized version I created in just a few seconds—it can be personalized even further:
In my previous post, I emphasized the need for a modern, visually appealing, and intuitive UI to help the Fediverse grow and attract mainstream users. Currently, Lemmy remains dominated mainly by discussions of political topics and critiques of Elon Musk, while its user base is still relatively small at around 40k+ users. For Lemmy to thrive, it needs to expand beyond its current niche and cater to more general topics and interests.
Personally, I use Reddit for far more than just shitting on Elon Musk, discussing politics, or even tech, especially FOSS. For example, I frequently engage with communities about cars, gaming, TV shows, entrepreneurship and general topics that are largely missing or underdeveloped on Lemmy. These general-interest communities are what make platforms like Reddit so versatile and appealing to a wider audience.
If we remain in our current comfort space, Lemmy will likely continue to stagnate as a niche platform. Meanwhile, other alternatives could grow and potentially replace Reddit one day, and it may not be decentralized, open source or community-funded rather centralized and driven by investors/VCs, Just as we’re seeing with platforms like Bluesky gaining traction over Mastodon to replacing X/Twitter. By embracing a UI like Photon’s, which is both modern and user-friendly, we can create a more inviting experience for mainstream users, helping Lemmy grow into a platform that caters to a broader audience.
That is highly unlikely to happen. This was a response from dessalines, one of the lemmy devs:
@erlend-sh We have no association with whoever made photon, and they’ve never contributed to lemmy-ui or the lemmy backend. I don’t see us accepting as “official”, a front end that we have no control over.
Source: https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy-ui-leptos/issues/15#issuecomment-1747293678
Could happen on other instances
After your first post, i’ve thought about your points, and i’ve changed my opinions a little.
I agree, we should replace the default lemmy UI as a whole. Out with it. But photon wasn’t designed to be a “default” UI. It was designed as an alternative.
The point of a default UI is to be as accessible as possible, yet still functional. That’s why most users on the fediverse usually use a 3rd party client (Including me, i use photon + raccoon on mobile). While the current lemmy UI checks the “performance” box, the functionality box? not so much. It feels like everytime i use it i am overwhelmed with information density, and the auto expand feature implementation is just bad. Photon does the opposite. It checks the functionality box, but scratches the performance box. Even on a modern PC, photon is choppy for me, and the frosted glass effect is not helping.
I don’t think we should have a default lemmy UI, as in, every instance uses the same UI. As i said in the first post, it should be up to the instance maintainer to choose their own UI. This comes with its own problems. Lemmy.world’s photon is outdated, and so is lemdro.id.
Ultimately, this is in the hands of the instance maintainers, and Xylight himself. He is rewriting photon for more performance, so my answer may change.
It seems you’re uncomfortable with the term “default,” and I can understand why. However, when I use “default UI,” I’m referring to what users see when they access a server through its primary link (rather than alternate UI links like those offered by lemmy.world, for example). My proposal to replace the current base UI with Photon doesn’t take away the option for users to continue using alternative UIs if they prefer. That flexibility remains intact. However, the average user, especially those new to Lemmy, is likely to access and evaluate the platform through the default link.
Unless every single server admin changes to alternative UIs manually on their own, “default UI” will exist because a lot of servers, atleast to begin with, settle on whatever Lemmy comes with.
This proposal is aimed at both server admins, particularly those managing “general-purpose” servers where average users are most likely to join, and Lemmy devs themselves. A modern, intuitive default UI could significantly improve first impressions and help attract a broader audience.
In my experience, Photon has been responsive and largely glitch-free in terms of performance, especially compared to Reddit’s new UI, which I personally find horrible. That said, hearing that Photon is being rewritten for further performance improvements is encouraging and only adds to its potential as a suitable base UI.
Photon came up in this discussion amongst the Lemmy developers.
I’m pretty sure we agree at this point. My end point was that it is in the hands of the instance maintainers and Xylight (he has agreed) and that is what you are saying here, too.
I think overall it’s not a bad suggestion, and yes Photon looks very sleek, and I have even contributed a language translation for it.
However, my main concern is: what would happen if the main dev loses interest and drops support of the interface? Lemmy backend may add a new feature that either breaks Photon, or Photon can’t make use of it until updated. If the development of this frontend could be more integrated with the Lemmy project team and funded, I would be less concerned.
While it would be best if lemmy devs can be more involved with photon, photon is still completely open source and the project is open to contributors, worst case hypothetical scenario of if the project ever gets abandoned it can always be forked, continued, or even better it can be handed by the current dev to someone who can continue to keep it alive.
If photon is widely used I see no reason the dev would just abandon it as it is rather than handing over the project to someone else who has already been contributing.
photon is still completely open source and the project is open to contributors, worst case hypothetical scenario of if the project ever gets abandoned it can always be forked, continued, or even better it can be handed by the current dev to someone who can continue to keep it alive.
Like the old.lemmy interface which hasn’t been updated since July?
I’m pro FOSS, but that’s not a silver bullet that magically attracts developers to work on projects. We’re still a 45k monthly active users community which relies on 5 devs which work on Lemmy, and maybe 2 on each of the alternatives (Mbin and Piefed).
The appeal for text-based forums just isn’t there anymore.
Fine by me as long as you keep old.lemmy for the rest of us. The current UI is about as good as it can be. I wouldn’t change a thing.
I frequently engage with communities about cars, gaming, TV shows, entrepreneurship and general topics that are largely missing or underdeveloped on Lemmy.
There’s more potential for than just tech on Lemmy, but it seems like people just prefer to talk about this. A community like the two listed above, or !casualconversation@lemm.ee could be much more active, but people just don’t seem really into this.
I mostly agree with you on so much of this - like perhaps the main reason that hobbyists don’t use Lemmy rather than Reddit is that we have no actual “content” that they would like (politics + Linux just isn’t everyone’s thing). Which in turn relates to people not being here, which in turn relates to still other things. One chief among the latter issues is the overall lack of moderation, which in turn relates to the overall suckiness of existing moderation tools (reputedly?), especially across instances that do not currently receive reports (one Lemmy dev, Nutomic, has added that to the Roadmap, but not until ~0.20, and while the current version is 0.19.7, Lemmy.World is still rocking 0.19.3, so this does seem like the work of the better part of a year to get fully deployed to ~80% of the users on the Fediverse?).
However, and unfortunately I am not joking, fully 100% of the people that I have recommended Lemmy to have turned around and actively chided me for having recommended it to them. Obviously the big 3 tankie instances (lemmygrad.ml, hexbear.net, and lemmy.ml) can be quite toxic hellholes - I almost quit the Fediverse myself after mistakingly making a couple of comment over on those, and receiving replies for WEEKS and WEEKS afterwards, each - but even so I could not quite understand the vehemence of the response for the longest time. Until I put myself in their shoes: did you know that (1) a Google (not DuckDuckGo, but which one are mainstream normies going to use!?) search pulls up lemmy.ml as the top instance for “Lemmy”; (2) the default sort method there is set to Local, not All; (3) that instance is chock-full of content that makes fun of people in Western nations, particular Americans but also Europeans too. NO WONDER!?!?!
And related, so many Lemmy instances (such as lemm.ee the #3 one overall, after lemmy.world and lemmynsfw.com) still federate with hexbear.net and even lemmygrad.ml - as I mentioned earlier, I almost left the Fediverse myself after being trolled by them. They can do whatever they want, but so too can I, and why would I desire to expose myself to that?
So I would argue that the top issues with Lemmy relate more to lack of content, presence of toxicity, lack of mod tools, and in particular lack of “niche” interests that make people feel welcomed. To help with that, I petitioned my instance Discuss.Online to defederate from hexbear.net (it was) and created !AskUSA@Discuss.Online. We already have the likes of e.g. !asklemmy@lemmy.world, !asklemmy@sh.itjust.works, !nostupidquestions@lemmy.world, !showerthoughts@lemmy.world, !politicaldiscussion@lemmy.world, etc. - but this makes people, particularly Americans from Reddit, feel more welcomed when there is a space particularly suited for them (actually: us, as I am one of 'em!:-). I hope more people do more activities such as this. Also, check out https://piefed.social/ - it’s not quite ready for the masses yet as it lacks many features, but damn it is so welcoming and friendly and fills me with hope for our future when I see those.
All that said, yes a snazzy UI will profoundly help as well - not in isolation of but in combination with all the rest of the work that we need to do in order to grow this wonderful place that we like to call our own:-).
Also, check out https://piefed.social/ - it’s not quite ready for the masses yet as it lacks many features, but damn it is so welcoming and friendly and fills me with hope for our future when I see those
Yes. Many people are too hung up on mastodon and lemmy to see that there are other software in fediverse. And if lemmy UI doesn’t quite work for one, they should try a different one. There’s no need to stick to the most popular software.
As for communities, there’s not much one can do about it.
Regarding mod tools: someone can teach themselves to program, learn Rust, and then develop that functionality and contribute it for free to the Lemmy codebase. That’s a tall ask though.
A more readily accessible contribution would be for someone to start a community. More importantly, someone can fill an existing one by writing posts with content. But then people will ignore it or worse, possibly downvote it into the negatives. Some people want the Fediverse to grow, while others just want to be fed meme-style content. These people are at odds with one another, and yet it takes all kinds.
Agreed, IMO the default UI is going to suck for most new users. For a smooth transition it should be fairly close to reddit, that’s where most users come from.
How’s it look on mobile?
Good, but slow
Thanks for sharing. Looks like the designer still has more to do. See Mastodon web UI for mobile.
To be honest you are better off using 3rd party apps on mobile, web is mostly for desktop use and it’s best on desktop. That being said hopefully photon improves in coming updates on mobile as well.
To be honest you are better off using 3rd party apps on mobile
It’s a matter of preference: https://lemmy.world/post/22994355
I completely agree.
@TheArstaInventor@lemmy.world Okay, you’re right, this actually looks better than the first screenshot you posted, I know that Lemmy already develops new UI tho, so I am not sure there’s really a point because it’s gonna change anyways?
