If you’ve paid careful attention to our sticky, you may have noticed Lemdro.id hosts a few slick web app interfaces for Lemmy. Give them a try!
These are active projects, so please do report any bugs to their respective GitHub pages linked below.
What do you think of them? What kind of tools would you like to see for Lemmy?
Lemdro.id Interfaces
- Familiar for iOS redditors: m.lemdro.id powered by Voyager
- Familiar for desktop redditor: old.lemdro.id powered by mlmym
- Something new: nu.lemdro.id powered by Photon
…okay, that’s a bit confusing but okay.
I have two questions:
- Those web apps are made with theming in mind? One thing that Old Reddit allows is subreddits having their own css theme, some of them are better than the default old reddit. Suppose I’m the owner of a Lemmy instance and want to replicate the look of a specific reddit community, would that be a pain in the ass to do? The same question for Photon and Voyager, as I imagine some instance might want to further theme it, by changing things more thant just the banner and icon.
- Wouldn’t it be better to write those interfaces as Lemmy-UI themes? Or is that impossible?
- those aren’t just themes, they are totally different web apps likely written in different languages (eg. old reddit themes were like ice cream flavours but these are like comparing ice cream with cake, donut, all give you a feeling of sweetness, but use a totally different way)
To be fair, the default Lemmy-UI doesn’t really look that far off from Old Reddit in terms of organization, only in styling.
Those web apps are made with theming in mind? One thing that Old Reddit allows is subreddits having their own css theme, some of them are better than the default old reddit. Suppose I’m the owner of a Lemmy instance and want to replicate the look of a specific reddit community, would that be a pain in the ass to do? The same question for Photon and Voyager, as I imagine some instance might want to further theme it, by changing things more thant just the banner and icon.
These are all open source projects, so you can indeed fork the code to implement your own changes. You can visit the GitHub pages in the OP to see whether it looks like something you’d be comfortable with doing - but it’s all definitely possible.
Wouldn’t it be better to write those interfaces as Lemmy-UI themes? Or is that impossible?
You could fork Lemmy-UI and build in those changes, but it would be pretty messy. These are separate projects being developed using different languages/frameworks/design philosophies. It’s a bit like how there are many different Reddit apps on Android. You could theoretically just fork and reskin an existing project, but there’s a lot to be gained from having something purpose-built.
Forking=/=Theming.
Being open source does not make it easy to theme it. Reddit was closed source, but the tools to create a subreddit theme were far simpler than having to fork the actual visual code of reddit.
There are also open source projects that allows you to edit just the visual files in a simple manner, for instance, KDE’s Plasma is relatively simple to create new themes without having to fork the entire Desktop Environment, because it was made with theming in mind.
Being open source does not make it easy to theme it.
Yeah, I’m not suggesting it’s easy. They’re completely different web apps and Lemmy-UI is its own project that isn’t setup to be themed in such a drastic way.
Lemmy is built to interact well with a wide variety of web and native apps, so I don’t think we’ll see much effort putting into trying to make Lemmy-UI the answer to everything. Once the other options mature enough, instances could just switch their default web apps altogether.
