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’ve noticed my friends my age (late teens/ early 20s) say that lemmy and kbin look old. They also are new reddit users so they are probably used to the social media, ads before content approach of modern websites compare to those who enjoyed more simple site designs that were functional
It does look old but old is talking about basic html and css with reasonable amounts of scripting. I like this over the over designed UI of Reddit, gmail, protonmail, etc.
Craigslist was the only other big place I go to a lot that has a slim interface, but recently they’ve started making a lot of changes to make it feel modern and it’s a good example of how even modern implementations can go wrong.
Reminds as well of the early iOS days when the UI was dead simple.
I think the nice part about Lemmy is that it has what it needs and nothing else. We’re going to get more and more features over time and not all of them will be popular or well liked. I’d rather people complain about what isn’t here than what is I guess.