Recently, I made a post here, which gained some traction in support of the cause. However, I mistakenly used an outdated screenshot of Photon. It turns out that photon.lemmy.world is running an older version of Photon, which caused some misunderstandings.
For those who saw that post and were misled or disliked Photon because it appeared to display only 2-3 links on-screen, similar to new Reddit, let me clarify. While Photon is modern and intuitive, it is not like new Reddit in this particular aspect. This outdated screenshot gave the wrong impression, which I’ve since updated, but I wanted to create this new post since many people may not revisit the previous one to see the corrections.
The latest version of Photon, which can be seen at phtn.app, is a big improvement over what’s on photon.lemmy.world. Photon is modern, intuitive, and, speaking as someone with years of Reddit moderation experience who has also started moderating a few communities on Lemmy, it offers a far superior moderation experience. For example, Photon allows you to view the mod queue for all communities at once, making moderation much easier compared to the base UI or other alternatives.
Photon’s modularity and customization options are comparable to, if not better than, Kbin’s UI. You can easily change fonts, reposition docks and panels, apply custom themes, adjust sorting, and customize the modular side panel to arrange and pin items in any order you like. All of this can be done without needing CSS or additional technical knowledge. It’s probably the most modular yet user-friendly UI available right now.
Here’s an example of the latest Photon interface settings:
Here’s a more customized version I created in just a few seconds—it can be personalized even further:
In my previous post, I emphasized the need for a modern, visually appealing, and intuitive UI to help the Fediverse grow and attract mainstream users. Currently, Lemmy remains dominated mainly by discussions of political topics and critiques of Elon Musk, while its user base is still relatively small at around 40k+ users. For Lemmy to thrive, it needs to expand beyond its current niche and cater to more general topics and interests.
Personally, I use Reddit for far more than just shitting on Elon Musk, discussing politics, or even tech, especially FOSS. For example, I frequently engage with communities about cars, gaming, TV shows, entrepreneurship and general topics that are largely missing or underdeveloped on Lemmy. These general-interest communities are what make platforms like Reddit so versatile and appealing to a wider audience.
If we remain in our current comfort space, Lemmy will likely continue to stagnate as a niche platform. Meanwhile, other alternatives could grow and potentially replace Reddit one day, and it may not be decentralized, open source or community-funded rather centralized and driven by investors/VCs, Just as we’re seeing with platforms like Bluesky gaining traction over Mastodon to replacing X/Twitter. By embracing a UI like Photon’s, which is both modern and user-friendly, we can create a more inviting experience for mainstream users, helping Lemmy grow into a platform that caters to a broader audience.
I mostly agree with you on so much of this - like perhaps the main reason that hobbyists don’t use Lemmy rather than Reddit is that we have no actual “content” that they would like (politics + Linux just isn’t everyone’s thing). Which in turn relates to people not being here, which in turn relates to still other things. One chief among the latter issues is the overall lack of moderation, which in turn relates to the overall suckiness of existing moderation tools (reputedly?), especially across instances that do not currently receive reports (one Lemmy dev, Nutomic, has added that to the Roadmap, but not until ~0.20, and while the current version is 0.19.7, Lemmy.World is still rocking 0.19.3, so this does seem like the work of the better part of a year to get fully deployed to ~80% of the users on the Fediverse?).
However, and unfortunately I am not joking, fully 100% of the people that I have recommended Lemmy to have turned around and actively chided me for having recommended it to them. Obviously the big 3 tankie instances (lemmygrad.ml, hexbear.net, and lemmy.ml) can be quite toxic hellholes - I almost quit the Fediverse myself after mistakingly making a couple of comment over on those, and receiving replies for WEEKS and WEEKS afterwards, each - but even so I could not quite understand the vehemence of the response for the longest time. Until I put myself in their shoes: did you know that (1) a Google (not DuckDuckGo, but which one are mainstream normies going to use!?) search pulls up lemmy.ml as the top instance for “Lemmy”; (2) the default sort method there is set to Local, not All; (3) that instance is chock-full of content that makes fun of people in Western nations, particular Americans but also Europeans too. NO WONDER!?!?!
And related, so many Lemmy instances (such as lemm.ee the #3 one overall, after lemmy.world and lemmynsfw.com) still federate with hexbear.net and even lemmygrad.ml - as I mentioned earlier, I almost left the Fediverse myself after being trolled by them. They can do whatever they want, but so too can I, and why would I desire to expose myself to that?
So I would argue that the top issues with Lemmy relate more to lack of content, presence of toxicity, lack of mod tools, and in particular lack of “niche” interests that make people feel welcomed. To help with that, I petitioned my instance Discuss.Online to defederate from hexbear.net (it was) and created !AskUSA@Discuss.Online. We already have the likes of e.g. !asklemmy@lemmy.world, !asklemmy@sh.itjust.works, !nostupidquestions@lemmy.world, !showerthoughts@lemmy.world, !politicaldiscussion@lemmy.world, etc. - but this makes people, particularly Americans from Reddit, feel more welcomed when there is a space particularly suited for them (actually: us, as I am one of 'em!:-). I hope more people do more activities such as this. Also, check out https://piefed.social/ - it’s not quite ready for the masses yet as it lacks many features, but damn it is so welcoming and friendly and fills me with hope for our future when I see those.
All that said, yes a snazzy UI will profoundly help as well - not in isolation of but in combination with all the rest of the work that we need to do in order to grow this wonderful place that we like to call our own:-).
Yes. Many people are too hung up on mastodon and lemmy to see that there are other software in fediverse. And if lemmy UI doesn’t quite work for one, they should try a different one. There’s no need to stick to the most popular software.
As for communities, there’s not much one can do about it.
Regarding mod tools: someone can teach themselves to program, learn Rust, and then develop that functionality and contribute it for free to the Lemmy codebase. That’s a tall ask though.
A more readily accessible contribution would be for someone to start a community. More importantly, someone can fill an existing one by writing posts with content. But then people will ignore it or worse, possibly downvote it into the negatives. Some people want the Fediverse to grow, while others just want to be fed meme-style content. These people are at odds with one another, and yet it takes all kinds.
As long as they properly interact, sure. But critical mass is important, and I feel like Lemmy is just getting there.
Aren’t we shrinking though? After a spike of 51.8k Monthly Active Users in March, a steady decline down to 43.4k today, with more users per server growing but no more actual activity so probably reflecting alt accounts (I know I’ve done such - starting on Kbin.social, migrating to StarTrek.Website, then Discuss.Online, now making an alt on PieFed.social). We just don’t seem to be bringing in users, notably even as X implodes and we might have picked up a few from there.