Welcome Lemmy.world

How many even know that old.reddit exists?

I wonder how much this has to do with the devices people use to access Reddit. I always preferred the old.reddit site on the desktop. Although when I'm on my phone, it gave me eye strain to try and read the tiny font, and pinch/zooming all the time is super annoying. The newer Reddit web app was still incredibly annoying, given all the "install the desktop app" prompts, and it's general lagginess, but allowing me to just flick scroll through articles was actually better for me.

Lemmy's the same way for me, hate the UI on the desktop but it's fine on my phone.

4% usage doesn’t mean only 4% prefer it. It’s a buried setting that’s default off, that alone makes the choice for ballpark 80%. It doesn’t support mobile, which drops another huge segment, and it doesn’t support “new” features like images and tags, and Reddit spent years aggressively pushing everybody to switch. I wouldn’t be surprised if 4% is the vast majority of Redditors who actually tried both and had the opportunity to choose.

I wonder what % of content is generated by old.reddit.com users, and what % from third party apps too. Figures not mentioned by Reddit mgmt so I'm assuming they don't favor their desires to end them.

This is highly subreddit dependent. Those numbers might be true for larger, image-based communities. For smaller, discussion based communities old is more like 60-70% of new, among desktop traffic. Mobile web and apps still make up the majority now, but that’s true of pretty much everything.

It's clean because they don't need to obfuscate anything to avoid people blocking ads.

Please do, a more condensed variant like old.reddit.com would be really appreciated by me and probably many other people.

I have also started looking at it, by $REAL_JOB doesn't leave that much time.

> old.reddit.com looks rather dated to this 53 y/o bloke. Very busy too. I don't actually care because content is king and presentation is not but it would be nice if it looks good.

Displaying actual content seems to look "dated" and "busy" by today's aesthetic standard. Do you have any example of a UI that has the information density of old.reddit.com but "looks good" by your standards?

Bluesky is a lot of fun in that “great party before the trolls show up and shit on it all” way. Try it out, as a fellow old timer it’s all about finding communities before the turn to shit and moving on. Totally agree!

Lemmy has a built-in capability to cycle through various themes, but unfortunately all this themes seemed preserve the basic spacing and overall structure. I do think customizability with themes would hold huge potential if it had any true variety to it, along the lines of, say, winamp skins or something. I don't mean that example too literally, only to illustrate how much unrealized potential there is for themes, which are already built in, to truly add value.

Judging solely by the desktop screenshot [1] it doesn't seem like a bad first pass but there are a few things that could be improved:

What jumped out first is the irregular post layout. For example the up/down arrows are farther from the image than the title, possibly to accommodate large, centered numbers. The titles can be at least three rows tall which results in posts that are quite different in height. The post images are all different heights and widths. Some users also have large circular icons that increase the height of the row while others have no icons. The other icon buttons are all slightly different sizes and appear to be from different sets. Finally, the content appears to be laid out a little haphazardly: why is the star icon next to the comments but the book icon next to the post's age? Why is the article's domain sandwiched between the community name and the age, and do we really need to show subdomains? (As an alternative, you could truncate large numbers with postfix magnitude to shrink their padding, make all images the same height/width, truncate long titles to two rows, make all icons the same optical size, and collapse the metadata to a single row such as: "From domain.org · Submitted by @name to community 11h ago · # Comments · star".)

The gray text on gray background results in poor contrast which makes it harder to read than necessary. This is especially apparent in the Posts/Comments and Subscribed/All toggles as the unselected option looks entirely disabled.

Finally, I'm not sure it works to put so many communities in one large block of wrapping rows. It may fit more content on the screen but makes for a loud block of bright green text that is attention-grabbing but hard to scan, especially since the list doesn't seem to have a visible sort order. It's also driving me crazy that the communities with icons result in inconsistent leading between rows. In that case I might start by finding out whether the page really needs to show six dozen subscriptions in the sidebar in the first place.

[1] https://raw.githubusercontent.com/LemmyNet/joinlemmy-site/ma...

This already looks way better

Its dead, Jim.

it'll be interesting to see if at that point, federation starts to become the way of scaling or not. If it was seamless, it wouldn't matter where you signed up and they could just host multiple lemmy instances on different servers. So far I have rather spotty experiences though with content sometimes making it to federated servers, sometimes not etc etc.

I honestly wish that the answer is "when we get so big to the point that a single machine can not handle it, we close registrations".

Can we please drop the "number must go up" mentality? The whole point of federated systems is to avoid concentration of power in a handful of servers. I'm sure that the people doing there have good intentions, but why can't we just let things just a little bit dispersed?

1TB RAM Hertzner servers are available, so at least 8x more scaling before that's a problem.

2TB RAM is common in commodity servers, albeit expensive ones ($1000ish/month). Somewhere between 4TB to 20TB RAM is the pragmatic limit (where costs for vertical scaling start to get far worse)

Federation takes quite a toll.

The way I read the article is that they didn't upgrade every time the load was (almost) too high, but instead opted immediately for the beefy dedicated server (considering the price it makes sense – it's on par with beefy VMs that have less power). They probably have resources to spare right now, but no need to go through the hassle of an upgrade soon (although 4 mins downtime sounds like they have things under control).

Having said that, I'm sure there's plenty to improve in Lemmy, given it's used at a bigger scale now.

Keep in mind a lot of instances are preparing for what they anticipate to be the largest migratory wave yet when third party apps shut down at the end of the month.

base64 is a helluva drug.

A sort of “safe space”, if you will

And then you lose the benefits of federation.

A community is like a garden. You can weed it aggressively and cultivate only certain things, or do nothing and let it go wild.

I have found communities that cultivate for good discourse seem to end up the most balanced, but also attract lots of enemies.

HN has a lot of optimizations and limitations on the user experience.

For example, I don't see the scores of every other post on HN - and certainly don't see them updated in realtime. New comments and posts show up when I reload the page - not as I scroll. There's only one HN instance - without having 100 more instances trying to mirror the content (just one - firebase).

... and HN is an example of a single, centralized, unfederated server.