I wish Lemmy's default design was more of a copy of old.reddit.com. For me, that design was better than both HackerNews' design and way better than the current default look of Lemmy instances.
For me Reddit was a new and vaguely exciting thing once and I used it for around a decade and have now discarded it. I've dumped the Register too after around 20 years. I have no idea why I still have a /. account! that's next along with Facebook.
Back in the day I was asked to investigate this new fangled world wide web thing by an org with loads of cash and twiddling thumbs and I reported back it looked a lot like Gopher and WAIS but different. I might have also mentioned Teletext too.
I'm not an evangelist worth listening to but I've been here before. Just allow yourself to destroy accounts on systems that are no longer useful or productive anymore.
Move on.
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?
It's evolved over a few years now and the combination of changes means that I don't generally lose much in the way of content density in the general case of a post with mostly small to medium comments where the increased body text size is balanced with the removal of the space for the action bar. And it was even better before I got a bit older and decided that I should bump the font size up another pixel to make things easier on my eyes :)
It's open source, any UI/UX people spot some low-hanging fruit?
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...
I'm kinda intrigued by https://fedibb.ml/, which replicates the default phpBB theme.
I have also started looking at it, by $REAL_JOB doesn't leave that much time.
When redditors talked about what sites to migrate to most of them preferred the modern interfaces over text based ones like tildes.net.
Lemmy's the same way for me, hate the UI on the desktop but it's fine on my phone.
[0] https://web.archive.org/web/20160216023609/https://voat.co/