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?
I think critiques are pretty helpful in the early stages of growth. There’s several little UI/UX tweaks we can do to make these places feel more inviting.
Lots of people are listing bug reports or submitting PRs, I’ve got one going that’ll add your profile image next to your name, something simple but nice to have.
image
With time these sites are all going to shine :)
I’d rather see avatars removed entirely.
I would love to see the Settings menu and sections achieve the level of UI customization as the Apollo app.
Instead of gripes like “too much whitespace” or “needs more rounded corners” or “text is too small” and committing to a single combination of all these complex conditions as “the official design,” every user should be able to customize the UI exactly how they like it.
I would love to disable everything but text on the page: no avatars; no scores; no icons; no buttons except “Post,” “Reply,” and “Report”; light/dark mode inherited from system/device preference. That’s it. Boom! Done.
But you need robust HTML and CSS for this, and it is insanely difficult to find frontend devs who actually truly deeply know HTML, CSS, and JS. There are plenty of frontend devs making nice-looking sites, but those sites are typically unmaintainable in terms of CSS, are full of inaccessible nested tag soup in terms of HTML, and are locked into unremovable technical debt from the get-go via JS frameworks that will inevitably go out of vogue (as they all do).
Something as simple as native aspect ratios for thumbnail images is broken on kbin, so we immediately know that the HTML and CSS for this site are not in good shape, and until those things are addressed with growth and change in mind (and not just closing out bugs or hitting a launch date), it’s all going to fall apart eventually.
The code is open source, right? I’m tempted to go poking at it. I genuinely enjoy writing good front end code and am a fairly design-oriented developer, so it might be fun to put up a PR or two.
As a backend developer writing frontends (I warned them, “Guys, I’m not a UI designer, this thing will work great, but it’s going to be a visual disaster!”) I’d be interested if you know any good CSS learn resources aimed at experienced developers that teaches how to approach writing well-designed CSS. Most of the guides I’ve seen don’t do a lot to show me how to use CSS in ways that make it work well for larger apps without lots of hacky little bits that are hard to maintain.
Yeah there’s a lot of stuff happening behind the scenes because the project is fairly new. There’s actually about 60 pending tickets that will be addressing a range of issues.
I’m focusing mainly on the UI/UX in my tickets and there’s a few that I’m looking at to improve the mobile experience, definitely the padding and margins are all over the place, it feels a bit disjointed on mobile right now but it’ll get better soon
That’s an option on kbin.social. I’m not sure if it’s the same for all kbins, still not %100 on how well this works. It was actually on by default and it took me rooting around in the settings to find there were avatars at all
There’s an option for “show user avatar” and “show magazines icon” in kbin which will shows those images inline when viewing posts like this.
showing icons
I think the idea if showing your own avatar is a pretty decent change.