I really like the concept of a federated message board. This is what I wanted for my life. However, Lemmy.ml is kinda difficult to surf through comments and it’s actually bothering me. It actually clones the new reddit, while the old reddit was much better in terms of reading.
If you can identify exactly which things you like about old.reddit, you’ll have a much better chance of getting them as settings on Lemmy.
I think I will now try to work on listing these things, you are totally right!
There’s an excellent style available through userstyles that might make the experience more bearable. If you have some technical skill and time, you could make one that looks and behaves as old.reddit. I expect something like that will appear soon there as I hear more and more complaints about the UI.
This is already a huge improvement! The fixed width of Lemmy’s default interface is the worst part about it. Why do modern website designers insist on throwing away 50% of your screen? It’s ludicrously stupid.
I’m pretty sure you can create your own bootstrap theme. If someone makes an old.reddit theme for Lemmy I’ll add it to my instance.
PSA: you can choose your default theme in your profile settings. I’m pretty sure the themes available are determined by your home instance’s options
There is LemmyBB as an alternative frontend based on phpBB: https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmyBB
An example instance run by the Lemmy developers: https://fedibb.ml/
There is also lemmy-lite that does not use the websocket interface and uses HTTP interface, very simple rendering. It’s 3 years out of date and the API needs updated. It’s written in Rust and can be a different hostname like old.reddit was side by side with the lemmy-ui full interface we are all using now.
Need some Rust developers to take on the updates to this open source project: https://github.com/IronOxidizer/lemmy-lite
Thee is a whole instance dedicated to Rust development, try to inspire someone: https://lemmyrs.org/c/rustlang
I’ve been using the Tampermonkey userscript found here https://sh.itjust.works/post/53395. I think it’s brilliant, it looks close enough to old + RES that I’m no longer concerned about it.
Oh man - that is absolutely brilliant - please post this to the main lemmy community so more can see!
Lemmy’s UI in its current state is quite a bit of a mess. Hopefully this influx of users will result in devs that can help fix things.
I really like the look of LemmyBB. It’s an alternative front-end for Lemmy that has the look of an “old internet” forum website. A few instances use it, but I haven’t looked into it enough to know if it federates well.
It will only be temporary. I don’t get why they don’t close for new accounts for a few days though.
I suspect this is the chance to make user experience the best. If they deprioritized refugees from reddit then the community would miss a huge growth opportunity. With growth comes more vibrant communities, more open source contributors, which is a feedback loop to make the site more appealing altogether.
Hard agree. I couldn’t put my finger on why there was something missing until I realised it all looks like garbage new reddit
why don’t you build it yourself?
Lemmy is Open Source, so go ahead 👍
The best thing about Lemmy is how it is completely separated from its UI. There are already different UIs available you can install to your instance or ask your admin to install. I think the LemmyBB might interest you: https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmyBB
If lotide federated properly, that might be more up your alley. Sadly, its a bit iffy http://narwhal.city/
There is also https://brutalinks.tech/
(Source-code: https://sr.ht/~mariusor/brutalinks/ )
It’s not a Lemmy frontend, but an unrelated project similar to Kbin that also uses ActivityPub to federate. I am however not sure how well it federates with Lemmy right now. Probably needs some testing and bug-fixing.
On paper there’s lemmy-lite, but I don’t know if any instance supports it.
Probably not, there was no activity in the repo during the last 2 years and since then the API was updated.
If you use kbin someone made a reddit stylus config that makes it like old.reddit
