Error messages don’t show up and when they do they’re unhelpful. The UI is extremely basic and honestly quite uninviting. There’s almost no consistent iconography, the iconography that’s there isn’t all that clear, and every click causes a full reload.

Expanding images is slow for me. Images from startrek.website don’t load right (they do from every other website so I think it’s a bug on their side but still) and there are tons of UI inconsistencies all around.

Lemmy is great for people like me (and perhaps you) who prefer the internet of old where everything was basic but it worked, but it’s not going to be attracting mass market appeal any time soon. Most people don’t get federation or it’s just not a priority for them, and that’s the main selling point to Lemmy/Kbin.

This isn’t an attack on the Lemmy devs, they’re doing their best with very little resources, but pretending there aren’t any issues isn’t going to help either.

I think that the standard look of web UI, for people accustomed to the look of modern social networks, may not be attractive.

I hate it a bit, its so confusing and has way too many buttons everywhere, the search hidden away etc.

https://blog.erlend.sh/lemmy-frontend-alternatives-are-popping-off

I think lots of them are better for general use, while the official one is most often the best supported. I disagree that many frontends are so great

Photon: https://github.com/Xyphyn/photon
Old reddit style: https://old.lemmy.world
Voyager: https://vger.app

Alexandrite is my favorite. Can also self host it.

• https://alexandrite.app
• https://github.com/sheodox/alexandrite