Discussion for possible improvements to the homepage

tinaun, 11 months ago

one of the best features of (old) reddit was the ease of customizing a communities css, and the way you could make each community you moderate its own and feel like a seperate, unique place to be

I hope Lemmy improves on this front soon, having to fiddle with files on the backend or make pull requests to the application proper introduces a lot of friction. (not to mention I find the default theming kinda mediocre)

Aloso, 11 months ago

I really like the darker colors. But I don't think it's possible to change the styles of this particular instance, it would have to be implemented in lemmy-ui (and then be available to all lemmy instances).

And note that capitalized text isn't particularly accessible. In fact, it is harder to read than regular text, because we have a lot more practice reading regular text than capitalized text.

lightsecond, 11 months ago

Do you know if communities can choose their own custom CSS?

stephenc, 11 months ago

If that were possible I would disable it, same as I did on Reddit. I want to be the one to customize the theme to my liking consistently across all communities I view, not to the liking of each individual community. Maybe what is missing are:

• Improve the default themes
• Custom CSS saved along with your user profile

Aloso, 11 months ago

• Custom CSS saved along with your user profile

You can use a browser extension like Stylus or Greasemonkey. Actually, I could create and publish a configurable userstyle if there's demand for it.

stephenc, 11 months ago

Well sure. I use Stylebot and have already set up a few tweaks to Lemmy to my liking. But it would be more convenient to save it to my profile where it could be used no matter what device I log in with.

tamato, 11 months ago

and note that capitalized text isn't particularly accessible

Yeah admittedly my "sense" in design has a ways to go. After my exams I'm hoping to read "Don't let me think Twice", which is apparently a really good book for UI design. Hopefully maybe i can bring in some of the good concepts from there to Lemmy too

Deebster, 11 months ago

In the UK, a design committee found that they shouldn't use all-caps on road signage (the norm at the time) because it couldn't be read at a glance

They also designed their own font, you might have seen it: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/f9/Road.sign.arp.750pix.jpg

tamato, 11 months ago

I appreciate the example and am happy to admit this is a bad design decision regarding accessibility

As a means of preventing any of these decisions from reaching end-users, I'll make sure to participate in GitHub discussions before making any PRs

Thank you for the feedback

sokkies, 11 months ago

The bolder text looks great!

tamato, 11 months ago

Thank you! I was trying to distinguish title-like elements from regular text using a heavier font-weight. I also didn't like how the Rust logo was hard to see, so I gave it a white background. I was wondering if I could somehow contribute to the website in any way.

Any help would be appreciated!

admin, 11 months ago

This should help you get started:

• There's the umbrella: https://github.com/LemmyNet
• Backend: https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy
• Front-end: https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy-ui

tamato, 11 months ago

This is great, i wouldn't mind helping with all Lemmy instances by contributing to the front-end. Thank you <3