in a thread complaining about the general state of lemmy, I read a comment where someone linked the alternative lemmy UI Photon. some general thoughts:

  • this shit looks like new.reddit, which I hate
  • however, it is extremely fast
  • it looks like someone with UX experience was at least in proximity to this at the time it was designed?
  • I don’t think there’s an easy CSS way to make this look less like new.reddit
  • having tried it on a test instance, the promise of better mod/admin tools seems ambitious currently, though maybe they’ll get there faster than lemmy-ui
  • overall, it feels a lot nicer to use than either lemmy-ui or new.reddit

you can hook Photon up to awful.systems using the Accounts option in the menu on the top right, though for opsec reasons I can’t encourage anyone to log in to this weird external site with their awful.systems credentials. check it out with the guest instance option (which doesn’t need a login) or use a disposable lemmy.ml account or something

what I want to know is: does anyone use this thing, and does anyone want it here? if there’s demand for it, I can spin up a secure copy of it for our instance under an alternate path. for me it’s a bit of a hard sell due to its resemblance to the reddit redesign, but lemmy’s UI is decoupled enough from its backend that running this thing shouldn’t impact much

  • JohnBierce@awful.systemsEnglish
    5·
    1 year ago

    I… actually like it a lot, and wouldn’t mind switching to it? But also, if I’m the only one who’d be interested, I don’t want to be a bother, I can use the current format just fine.

  • bitofhope@awful.systemsEnglish
    4·
    1 year ago

    this shit looks like new.reddit, which I hate

    A bit, but it’s fine if the similarities are superficial. At a quick glance it seems to be functionally about on par with the standard UI.

    If it’s not a lot of work for you to implement, I could be interested in trying it out even though I’m mostly happy with the current UI, believe it or not. I mostly wish it were easier to follow new comments in threads.

    it looks like someone with UX experience was at least in proximity to this at the time it was designed?

    On this site I can’t tell if this is meant as a positive or negative thing.

  • 200fifty@awful.systemsEnglish
    4·
    1 year ago

    If it’s an improvement over current lemmy UI, I’ll take it lol. It’s not like standard-lemmy-ui is some old-Reddit-interface-style minimalist barebones thing, but the “new-reddit-ness” doesn’t bother me too much personally.

    The main reason I can’t stand the actual new.reddit is because it collapses threads after like 2-3 replies, and then when you go back out of a sub-thread it has a tendency to lose your place. I’m assuming it’s some kind of stupid growth hack on Reddit’s part to prevent people from reading comments for too long (not enough ads in the comments section!)

    So as long as this one doesn’t have that stupid behavior, I’m fine with it lol

    • self@awful.systemsOPMEnglish
      4·
      1 year ago

      I’m assuming it’s some kind of stupid growth hack on Reddit’s part

      this is a solid explanation for most of the worst parts of reddit really

      • self@awful.systemsOPMEnglish
        3·
        1 year ago

        I was about to say “unless I really love it and use it everywhere like NixOS” but my first post about NixOS here called it fucking incomprehensible so uh

    • self@awful.systemsOPMEnglish
      4·
      1 year ago

      ah yep, I can see how my post could come off to someone unfamiliar with my writing style. I added a bullet point with my (generally positive) impression on Photon, but to restate the two items you quoted with more clarity:

      • I personally don’t like the Reddit redesign, but a lot of that is because it feels janky and slow. Photon on the other hand is fast as fuck and overall feels better to use than the Reddit redesign. but a new.reddit-style UI is still very divisive, which is why I started this thread as an interest check for this instance’s users
      • one of the things the UX designers around here know on contact with lemmy-ui is that a designer wasn’t present at any point during its implementation — it breaks so many conventions for no good reason and is generally miserable to use. Photon does much better in terms of design, and that’s another reason to recommend it
      • overall, regardless of my feelings on new.reddit UIs or whether we adopt Photon, it’s still an engineering feat you should be proud of

      if you’re curious about the tone of my post, awful.systems is broadly a tech cynicism/sneering instance, created to migrate the reddit communities r/SneerClub and r/TechTakes to Lemmy. we do have a couple of lighter-traffic positivity communities, but in general the house style of this instance is roughly what you’d expect from its origins

    • self@awful.systemsOPMEnglish
      3·
      1 year ago

      I know your code isn’t malicious; in general I don’t recommend, write a Nix package for, and deploy malware. the threat model here is that the infrastructure that hosts phtn.app gets compromised by an external malicious actor, who then swaps your code out for a version that hijacks JWTs and steals credentials, which would be a big mess for me to clean up. given how many best practices around JWTs and security best practices the lemmy backend ignores (and of course none of this is a Photon problem, these are just the cards the backend has dealt us both), I prefer an ounce of paranoia over a security event that would be very hard to recover from

  • Phil@awful.systemsEnglish
    3·
    1 year ago

    Personally, I find the default awful.systems theme godawful, so anything else would be an improvement. (I have just discovered that there are themes in the per-user settings & have switched to something less eye-wincingly painful in fact.)

  • David Gerard@awful.systemsEnglish
    2·
    1 year ago

    fwiw I quite like the present UI, I set it to light, works well for me on desktop (I never use this site on my phone)