Bit of a tangent here, but if you’re ever looking for experience designers to help out here and there, or to just give something a second set of eyes, I might be able to lend a hand or connect y’all with some bright and chill people.
You probably don’t want me making any PRs, but I know my way around Figma and a user test plan.
If we could end up with a theme that looks a lot more like kbin.social, I’d be so happy. My biggest gripe with Lemmy is all of the white space, and none of the current themes improve that at all. All of the theme options offered by kbin look amazing by comparison, and to my understanding Lemmy theming is done via CSS based on Bootstrap v4, so new theme creation should be straightforward enough.
It’s to the point where, when visiting Lemmy instances, I use a custom CSS extension to modify a few properties to make it a bit more palatable to me.
If you guys ever need help creating custom themes to offer to users I’d be happy to contribute.
But I would very much support having a more compact theme available without a browser extension. I think some tightening up up would make this place look more welcoming. It feels sort of “empty” due to all the white space.
Hey there, sure, currently I’m using this. The border between comments on a comment thread doesn’t look the best, but it makes it easier for me to track comment levels so I like it, though there are certain properties I’d like to change but can’t.
Either way, I’m using an extension called Amino to apply my CSS changes on a domain-level.
This fixes a lot of the whitespace and borders to make differentiating between posts and comments a little easier, while minimizing white space. I think it looks nice.
EDIT: I’ve made a few more changes in terms of color.
thank you I like it! I hate when websites force me to have so much blank space. Like I remember what an improvement it was in 2002 when everyone got into sans serif fonts and padding to their table based layouts and using % widths, but the craft has moved on from those days… For this kind of website I am thinking more of a newspaper and less of a coffee table book.
looks like Amino is only available for chrome and edge. For other ff users I will say I use an addon called Stylus but it might not be the best one; kind of resource hungry on big pages.
Hey so just a heads up, I made a few more changes that I quite like (again, for the red theme, tweak appropriately for the default green theme), so thought I’d just update you.
This changes the main feed quite a bit, adding a bit more of a card-like design to posts, though I have done my best to make sure there isn’t too much white-space from this change, I just feel it looks a bit more modern, but again, feel free not to use it :)
It also, and this is my favorite change, changes the title color of any post you’ve visited, something that I feel is basic but for some reason Lemmy didn’t have before. So now any posts you’ve visited before will be a light-gray color instead. Hope you find some value here.
Thank you for sharing! I will try it when i am on desktop.
I actually used your code as base to start to fix some things that bug me the most… all spacing/positioning the colors are a total mess. So i am interested to see what yours is like. I can tell from looking that yours is more efficient because i do not know what im doing so it is trial and error.
Do you think there is a better place than wherever we are to post? A repo or other code sharing? I think the stylus extension connects to some sort of website but i never investigated it.
The thing is, they have operating costs. I’m sure it’s a boatload of money as well, given the size and scope of Reddit. Almost all startups run at a loss. And then continue to do so long past when they’re a “startup”. The money they “make” is from rounds of investors who believe they will find a way to make money in the future. Eventually investors get restless and demand that they find a way to monetize so they can recoup. Without those investors money, the site will come crashing as soon as they miss some critical payments for stuff that keep the site up. I’m absolutely sure that’s what we’re seeing. I think either way, its time has come.
Pinch the users to try to keep it alive for a little bit more. Don’t pinch the users and it dies in a grinding halt when they miss some key payments.
So realistically, what would a sustainable business model be for something like Reddit?
Something like lemmy or a fediverse platform is going to rely on donations and community support. In the case of mastodon, for example, it’s been shown to work well enough for sustainable operations. For those willing to work on something worthwhile for lower salary, it is potentially a great gig. In a commercial context though, it’s basically a subscription based business model.
If we’re to recover from this ad driven data tracking economy, subscriptions seem like a healthy thing for businesses to adopt.
Reddit may have already signed their deals with the devil. But generally, the point of the fediverse is to escape this corporate manipulation of our basic communications in the internet, and it’s still interesting to ask what profitable but sustainable operations can look like.
Possibly. I’m not sure how true it is that the fediverse necessarily leads to more efficient computing needs per user. I’d bet it’s the opposite.
But, as you perhaps allude to, there are other factors. For those who only want niche smaller communities, they can enjoy a more stripped down experience without needing speedy and beefy servers. Similarly, the platforms here are probably slimmer and not bloated with features that are trying to engage and monetise.
The major factor, IMO, is ownership. Admins literally own their servers. And should have a much closer and codependent relationship with the users in their servers, except in the case of large instances which become different beasts. Additionally, users have much more choice and mobility on the fediverse. All of which means admins/moderators and users have more at stake in their relationship. More ownership over their platform/instance. And therefore actually have a reason to donate and contribute and help out.
I’m familiar with Toki Pona, but like with conlang I only have a cursory interest in it. Not to dissuade the creation of community. I’m hoping by commenting on this, your post can find some more people who will be interested. Best of luck!
i kind of want reddit to die now. people talking to one another shouldn’t be monetized or debased through some spyware algorithm run by antisocial dickheads.
Yeah, definitely Stardew Valley with some mods. It’s pretty close to endless things you can do in that game. Thinking of Stardew Valley have me wondering about the state of the Haunted Chocolatier game.
Former redditor. What do I call myself now? Lemming? lol But I also noticed that I don’t see some Karma score equivalent, which is a great thing to leave behind. Those imaginary points were just useless at best, and used against people who were new at the worst.
That’s really difficult to do with a karma-like system. People posting in echo-chambers can post misinformation but receive many up votes.
Credibility is subjective. For example, people on one side of a political ideology will not think people on the opposite side are credible. So who can really determine an “attribute of credibility”?
We would have to agree on a standard first and that’s just not going to happen.
I welcome new and innovative DEs. I am tired of how some organizations handle things. I must however, acknowledge that with every additional major DE comes further fragmentation. COSMIC seems to really care and for that reason I am rooting for them. The negative effects, however, are always in the back of my mind.
I’ve had a few ghost encounters in my life but this one is the easiest to share. In Copehnagen I was couch-surfing on a 3rd floor flat. The roommates told me the building was haunted. At exactly 1:30 every night you could hear someone walking all the way up the 4 floors in the stairwell then all the way back down and the door would slam. I heard it every night that I was still awake. The steps had a distinct limp which was noticeable and also interesting how the door would slam. That door had a hydraulic on it- it couldn’t be slammed like that if you tried. The roommates cautioned me not to open the door to look as this would “upset him” and then they would find their things go missing. After ‘upsetting him’ in the past, they found their wallet in the VCR, the remote in the freezer- things like that. So I never peeked.
Then one night we had another couch surfer. Up at 1:30, he hear the limping step and asked about it. I said “That’s the ghost” and as I said the word ‘ghost’ our front door FLEW open and the footsteps stopped. It was so freaky.
I’d like to see a GitHub clone for the Fediverse that enabled the cross-instance forking of code. The recent goings-on with the FOSS Invidious make me worry about the future of all open-source software that tries to allow us some level of privacy. Putting it on a distributed network would be extremely beneficial to prevent megacorps from bullying such projects out of existence.
To add: thanks to everyone who’s already joined up and making this a lovely friendly corner of the internet. Whatever happens with Reddit ongoing, it’s great you’re here.
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