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?
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.