Hey folks!
I’ve been steadily working through the roadmap for lemmy-ui-next (which is a new alternative Lemmy frontend), and it’s getting to a point where I think https://next.lemm.ee is becoming quite usable. I’ve been personally using it as my main Lemmy frontend for several weeks now, and I know there are a few other brave users doing the same, so at this point, I’m confident enough to ask the wider lemm.ee population to try it out and share some honest feedback.
If you’re at all interested in this project, I would massively appreciate it if you could spend some time using https://next.lemm.ee and letting me know how you feel about it. I’m interested to hear about things like:
- are you running into any issues or bugs
- are there any things that generally annoy you
- are you missing any features
- what would it take for lemmy-ui-next to become your preferred frontend
- anything else that comes to mind
Please keep in mind that this is still a work in progress - some features are planned but not implemented yet (see the roadmap linked above for more details), other features are half-finished and may be a bit buggy still!
Any feedback would really help me out, so please don’t hesitate to share!
I think it’s best to move upvote/downvote buttons for the comments to the bottom of each comment as regular Lemmy UI, since there is a large amount of dead space on the left side of the comments being taken up by the vote buttons that it’s difficult to read past a few level of nesting.
Plus, regular Lemmy UI layout also shows the exact number of upvotes and downvotes for each comment at a quick glance, which I think is an important aspect of Lemmy.
Compare the space utilization of this:
To this:
This sounds good as the bottom makes more sense as if you are reading a longer comment you want to upvote at the end, not have to scroll back to the top to upvote
I actually disagree. Your comment is a good example. You state your case up front, add a bit of context, but then there are some screenshots that take up quite a bit of space. I do appreciate the possibility of voting on the comment without having to scroll all the way down to find the arrows, without gaining much in terms of understanding your message further.
A setting option to have media auto expand only after opening the post would be nice, the currently available option in the settings does it everywhere.
This is purely a matter of taste but I find that the typefaces being used and the way you’re using them, particularly the use of the bold weight for the title results in dense slugs of text that are not as easy to separate out the individual bits of information (Poster, community, instance) at a glance the same way I can with the default theme. This is a minor issue and I dare say that if it’s a problem for other instance owners they can bodge together some css.
Congratulations on your hard work, it is a usable interface. Well done.
I like this a lot in general. It is reminiscent of old reddit which is a style I like. Unfortunately it suffers from the same major issue I have with old reddit. Namely that the content is left aligned and there is just a crazy amount of white space. It’s probably not an issue for many, but as someone who has a large 4k monitor, it means my neck is constantly turned to the left if I have my browser in full-screen mode. Centering the content some would be greatly beneficial. Hacker News and Lobsters do this, although imo HN could be better about it.
Cons:
- I’m already accustomed to the light theme of Lemmy and can’t find how to switch from dark to light in “Next.”
- When I scroll down to the end, there’s 2/3 of the screen that is not being utilized. 2a. The red, green, and blue buttons in the footer seem to do nothing.
- The notion on every post that “Your IP is hidden from another Lemmy instance” is kind of annoying and useless. Why is it there?
- I dislike a little that it tries to copy the old Reddit interface. Although that interface wasn’t bad, and I’m the one who would first say “don’t fix what isn’t broken,” I’m more prone to seeing something new, some experimentation. Right now it feels more like “next to the old Reddit,” which isn’t exactly bad, but still…
Pros:
- I kind of like how images work on “Next.” It feels faster and more “in place.” It’s simpler for me to distinguish between different types of posts (image, link, video).
P.S. I’m on the latest stable Firefox (124.0.2).
I’m already accustomed to the light theme of Lemmy and can’t find how to switch from dark to light in “Next.”
This is planned after the 3rd milestone is complete!
The red, green, and blue buttons in the footer seem to do nothing.
They should change the primary color in the UI - are you sure it’s not doing this for you? Maybe it’s just enough of a subtle change that it’s not immediately noticable?
The notion on every post that “Your IP is hidden from another Lemmy instance” is kind of annoying and useless. Why is it there?
Most (all) other Lemmy frontends will always leak your IP to external media hosts, I wanted to handle this a bit differently in lemmy-ui-next by proxying by default (to improve user privacy). The message is there to let you know if a specific piece of media is being proxied or not - and the only way for something to not be proxied is for the user to manually approve it first.
I guess not all users will care about this, so maybe I can add a setting to hide the proxy indicator completely… I will think about it!
I dislike a little that it tries to copy the old Reddit interface. Although that interface wasn’t bad, and I’m the one who would first say “don’t fix what isn’t broken,” I’m more prone to seeing something new, some experimentation. Right now it feels more like “next to the old Reddit,” which isn’t exactly bad, but still…
It was an initial goal and guiding principle to heavily take inspiration from the great UIs of existing link aggregators like old reddit and hackernews. At the same time, I realize that this approach is not for everyone, so I am not against adding some different layouts (especially for the post list view) in the future.
Thank you for all the feedback!
The red, green, and blue buttons in the footer seem to do nothing.
They should change the primary color in the UI - are you sure it’s not doing this for you? Maybe it’s just enough of a subtle change that it’s not immediately noticable?
Yeah, I totally missed that. It’s actually pretty subtle. Got it now though. 👀
Oh, and hey, just wanted to drop a quick thanks for putting in the work on this Lemmy instance. 😘❤️