I don’t know the developer’s exact intentions, but my issue was a specific, easy to implement proposal. It wasn’t meant to be a discussion.
There have been UI improvements, but the design is still outdated. The theme you linked to is also not a modern design. What we need the most is an improved default theme, so that everyone could enjoy an easy to read website.
I already made a proposal to improve the default theme, but my issue was closed without any response from the developers. The required changes were small on purpose and should be easy to implement for anyone already familiar with the code. So it seems that UI is not a priority to Lemmy developers. That’s why I had to develop my addon, which I then also turned into a theme. I hope that one day Lemmy instances will start using some kind of modern theme (doesn’t have to be mine), so that my addon is no longer needed.
My theme is just a small amount of styles applied on top of the default litely and darkly themes, which should make maintenance easier. Unlike an addon, a theme doesn’t need to support multiple versions of Lemmy at the same time, so we could simplify it even more. Lemmy 0.18 uses CSS variables now, so that also makes things easier.
Something needs to be done about Lemmy’s outdated UI and I’m not sure if the current approach of developing multiple userscripts and addons is efficient. I understand if you think this might cause too much work for you though.
Thank you for your service. Would you be interested in testing my modern UI theme for Lemmy on your instance? It works with Lemmy 0.17 and 0.18.0. You can get the CSS files from the releases page.
Thanks :). Do you know where to find those older themes? It would be interesting to see how they were implemented.
Instructions unclear, I wrote a Firefox addon instead :D https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/addon/lemmy-modern-ui-theme
But you should be able to take the script and easily turn it into a userscript: https://github.com/pkrasicki/lemmy-modern-ui-theme-addon
It works with both light and dark theme, but sometimes the detection fails for me and applies wrong styles. I hope those hacks will last for some time though so that we could have a modern UI. I would change more stuff, but some things are not possible.
That sounds interesting! I wanted to be able to use it myself in case devs weren’t interested in changing the UI. Can you tell me how it works and how to do that?
Thanks! I’m a front-end developer :)
I created a proposal with UI design changes. Feel free to post a comment with your feedback: https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy-ui/issues/1183
More things would need to be changed to make the app more readable, but I didn’t want to propose too many changes at once. So this is just for the main page with default theme.
Perhaps you can read about Mastodon and how it works. It’s also federated, but much more popular, so it might be easier to find information about it.
The front-end repository is actually: https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy-ui
Edit: I suggested some changes to the default theme. Here is the link if anyone wants to take a look: https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy-ui/issues/1183
It seems that they need a UI expert.