Do people actually like all of the overdesigned clutter to the point where it makes them not want to switch sites?
To me, the stripped down clarity on Lemmy is a feature. I remember back in the day when people flocked to Facebook from MySpace, in large part because they were sick of eye gouging customized pages and just wanted a simple, consistent interface. The content, not the buttons to click on it are the draw right?
Kbin has support for custom CSS. There are still some bugs and plenty of things to iron out, but once the platform matures, expect there to be plenty of color and vibrance haha.
In theory, custom CSS is a neat idea, but it’s typically a one-and-done project that is difficult to update, and in most cases, an inadvertent “fuck you” to users who rely on the built-in accessibility of native elements.
Also, custom CSS by users is effectively them placing a code freeze on the frontend.
If a better way of doing things comes along (which is a given in the tech world), you either improve the core site CSS and break the customizations (and hear all about it from your users); improve both (which is a ton of work with no tangible difference in what’s rendered to the page), but now the people who made those customizations need to up their CSS game (which rarely happens); or you do nothing and let entropy run its course and do a total rewrite some day. The last one is literally what happened with new Reddit.