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.
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. Modern Reddit looks OK to me but I have recently deleted all comments I've ever made on Reddit and also my account. I will keep the mail alias alive for a while to see what shite turns up.
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.
> 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?
My personal user style for old.reddit.com extends the comment width to the whole screen and moves the horizontal action list for each comment to align with the username and the right side of the screen, while changing the font to one I find easier to read as well as bumping the font size and line-spacing, as well as generally adding some small amounts of space and colour here and there to help separate elements.
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 depends. I think a link aggregator needs that much density. The Reddit re-design makes it look like 9GAG and prioritizes mindlessly scrolling through memes.
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!
I am a fan of the software but I agree that the default design is horrible, it would probably serve Lemmy to get that addressed ASAP to get more people in the door.
It's open source, any UI/UX people spot some low-hanging fruit?
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.
Same. However it seems most people don't like the old.reddit look, only 4% of redditors use it. Most people are content with the slow bloated new reddit.
When redditors talked about what sites to migrate to most of them preferred the modern interfaces over text based ones like tildes.net.
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 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.
I don’t think there is anything visually wrong with the new reddit. My issue is with how slow and buggy it is. And all the dark patterns and engagement tricks it’s full of.
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.
Completely agree. More so because font sizing is IMHO all over the place. I'm using my OS and browsers' zoom because I'm visually impaired and than Lemmy is kind of a mess.
There were some Lemmy-related discussions going on this past weekend. I think this is the one tidbit everyone around Hacker News wants to know:
> The current VPS couldn't be resized that much anymore, and load was going up with all the new users. So I bought the same server at Hetzner: a 32-core/64 thread 128GB RAM dedicated server. (For Mastodon, I doubled the RAM. For Lemmy I don't think it's needed yet.) I migrated the Lemmy software and database there, and moved over. This took 4 minutes of downtime.
So 32-core/64-threads with 128GB of RAM is running Lemmy.world, which is supporting ~36.7k users at the moment.
32 cores and/or 128GB RAM - for how many concurrent users, 36.7k? It seems like Lemmy requires a fair bit of resources per user for a primarily text-based API, more than I'd expected. Wonder where the majority of the resource burden lies - uncached local database queries? Too many simultaneous database connections?
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.
with some basic extrapolation, at how many users they'll hit the extra expensive Hertzner servers? or in other words, at which point they'll need to improve their architecture?
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?
Sure, until you google some error, or some other random thing, find some thread somewhere, want to comment/ask/contribute, and you can't, since the registrations are locked.
I'm on kbin.social and participate in communities across ~20ish other instances regardless of whether they've turned off registrations temporarily or permanently. Disabling registrations only prevents new accounts on that instance, it doesn't stop people from posting and commenting from other instances.
Parent comment is the perfect example of how we got so used with dealing with shitty and user-hostile systems. We've been dealing with walled gardens for almost a generation now, it's like they don't even understand that it is possible to interact with a remote system without having everything in one centralized database.
I think what the parent is alluding to, is the fact that, Googling something and ending up on a Lemmy instance that is not your local one. You can, in fact, not comment on these instances. You must access it through your local instance (e.g. lemmy.world/c/community@remote.com).
A browser extension? While I agree, the client (browser) probably has to know about ActivityPub, or store some state that sites can read (without third party cookies), it's not fair to expect users install a browser extension for what would be basic functionality in their eyes.
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.
Its "community" (on Lemmy), or "magazine" (on kbin) scaling that seems hard.
But since each server has a local-copy of the community that its serving out, maybe the hardest part has already been solved by the Federation model. Each federated-instance is effectively a proxy / front-end for the users on that instance.
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I guess Mastodon is way larger than Lemmy though and they haven't had issues yet.
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)
Interestingly it seems max memories have been going down or at least not increasing in commodity x86 servers. Vendors advertised 24 TB servers enabled by lots of (192?) DIMM sockets in 2018 or maybe even earlier.
> I started paying for the Lemmy cloud servers from the mastodon.world funds.
Did this person ask to the mastodon.world Patreon [1] and Open Collective [2] supporters that he was going to use money for other project? If not, seems disingenuous to me.
Having worked in the tech legal and compliance, privacy, and security spaces for a very long time the idea of letting thousands of strangers upload binary files to a server I’m legally liable for is terrifying.
Even "text" files can be encoded binary files -- it was a big shift in USENET.
I had a heated discussion with some Nostr advocates who thought that by calling servers "avocados" or something, then they wouldn't be responsible for what users posted on the "avocados".
I've not looked into ActivityPub or the Fediverse enough to know what is hosted locally and would (not) be protected by Sec 230, but it might drive some centralization toward corporations or other accountable organizations.
In practice, I think only the NSFW Lemmy's have to be worried.
This isn't straight binary file hosting. Its just text, image, and video. Images/Video can get into trouble but if you have a Safe-for-work only policy and defederate from NSFW instances, you're probably in the clear?
And I'm pretty sure any large amount of data is going to be throttled. So not even "big" videos are going to be hosted, more like a few-second .mp4 memes at best.
I want lemmy to succeed, but if it doesnt change, it never will.
I got the idea of "Ill find some communities from reddit there". Typed Lemmy into google, first result was relevant - good there. Got to mainpage, decision to join or create server - well, I chose join coz that seemed more instant.
But then it made me chose between several instances with no instant info about how will my choice affect what I see, and I just gave up there. I dont want to choose instance, I dont want to learn how it works. I want content first, and if I like it, then maybe I learn the inner workings to get more of it.
But as it stands now theres just no way Lemmy will ever become mainstream.
It feels like there's an easy fix for this too. Instances already have an about section. Simply add a short form version that can be used in circumstances like this.
lemmy.world, for whatever reason, absolutely guzzles CPU cycles. I can't imagine what it could possibly need to do that requires executing that much javascript. It's all minimized, so it's hard to follow in the profiler.
Took a look at mastodon.world out of curiosity. Total conformity of belief on the entire front page timeline. Maybe it’s another one of those Mastodon instances where anti-capitalist social justice is the approved dogma, and dissenters are banned? Seems to be a lot of those…
Sorry to see you are being downvoted for making an observation.
I have been looking across various Lemmy instances and I recall seeing one or two that was cyberpunk-based or technology-focused in their local streams, but far too many have the "smug American Liberal" [1] style comments that made me leave Reddit [2].
Simply spinning up another community is not a quick fix either. Concern trolling means Centrist communities simply do not last, as they eventually get overrun by extremists of one kind of another. It's far, far too easy to take a complex argument and have it dishonestly re-interpreted in a negative way as a a one line meme in public communities. Weeding these people out is far more of a challenge than banning violent remarks, racists and child abusers, as well-meaning people will inevitably misunderstand.
The solution to this is small private communities and group chats with people you trust, personally. You won't get the hit from having constant content to consume, but it's not as bad for you; getting in the door is the real problem.
Federated social media is currently predominantly housing innovators (maybe already some early adopters? One can hope). Innovators tend to look forward and are very open to change. With that mindset it's not hard to see how painfully obvious it is that capitalism isn't sustainable, while we absolutely need to move to a sustainable future. What that sustainable economic system looks like is obviously still unknown, hence lots of discussion.
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.
The default Lemmy deployment docs don't have a lot of breathing room.
It would be reasonable to break off the postgres server Lemmy uses to a separate server, but at the moment there is only an Ansible playbook or a docker compose file, both of which assume a single server.
There's only so much time in the day and it's much easier to size up than reimplement the install process.
