Today the first of Feb is Global Switch day, Spread awareness of the Fediverse in your communities.
this post was submitted on 01 Feb 2026
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I used Lemmy for months, mostly in the browser and my UX was absolutely horrible.
The default browser UI sucks.
I had to try many different settings and eventually through a lot of effort found the Photon UI, which is nice.
The vast majority of users just won't go through that effort. PieFed's default UI is quite clean and modern and much nicer to use, which is why I promote it instead
In what ways does the Lemmy UI suck? I would appreciate feedback in order to improve it. For what its worth I only use the default UI on desktop and mobile, and like it a lot.
Any actions you need to take that could have been avoided = bad UX.
Any time you need to think and not immediately know what to do next = bad UX.
Sadly we're in a time where users expect their hand to be held the whole time and where they expect zero effort to be put in and everything to just work.
For me the biggest issue with default Lemmy is, why do I have to click on a image post to view the image, when it could just have defaulted to a bigger size?
But I don't want a bunch of huge images in my face. Isn't that what pixelfed and Instagramy things are for? I only want to click on the things I'm interested in, not be shown an ugly frustrating stream of giant, semi-traumatic political pictures one after the other. Thumbnails exist for a reason and claiming they're bad UX is incorrect, it's the industry standard design pattern for any control that allows a user to browse quickly through multiple images or to provide an impression to a user before they decide whether or not to open the full content.
Lemmie/piefed is more about text and conversations so titles should always be the largest clearest part so you can read them quickly to know whether you want to engage with the post or not. Otherwise, how is it different from pixelfed? Likes vs upvotes is not a big difference.
I don’t understand your problem. Can’t you just tap the image to see it larger? I don’t have to click an image post like you claim to.
They seem to want new reddit ui and not understand most hate that ui/ux
Like a card style interface? Edit: to clarify, I understand that, but I also don’t get this specific complaint because it doesn’t seem to be true unless I’m misunderstanding it
Piefeds default is images and text are bigger, like a card style while lemmys default is like old reddit and compact.
They've got their complaints in multiple comments in this thread but it basically boils down to wanting reddit but not being on reddit. Which also gets to a lot of other complaints about people moving because it's different than current reddit
I use compact on Piefed. It's a click in settings. I don't think this really means anything.
The op is complaining about default lemmy ui not being as much like new reddit as default piefed is not that there's other options
https://lemmy.world/comment/21900760
How long ago? It was a bit flaky a couple of years ago but for me now it's perfect - like Reddit UI before it enshittified.
I'm sorry but the default Lemmy UI is objectively bad, it breaks so many UX principles.
Photon is good, but go to Lemmy.world and it looks like a website built in the early 90's
If it looks like anything of the past then it looks like the web from 10-15 years ago pre-mass-enshittification, maybe people have forgotten what non user hostile websites look like.
Photon has infinite scrolling, which is horrible.
Infinite scrolling is optional and also a feature the majority of users (not hyper specific tech nerds) want. If we are to have any hope of bringing the average social media user onto these platforms, we have to design it for them. Most of the addictiveness comes from the algorithm (lemmy lacks a personalized one), not necessarily the infinite scrolling itself
Yes there's been enshitification, but not everything has gotten worse. UI's are much better than the past.
Why is infinite scrolling a bad UX? It saves the user from clicking next-page
You could argue that it's dark-ux, but it's not bad-ux
It prevents you from keeping track of how much you've read and makes the site more addictive with no significant upside, and even without that it's worse UX when you try to go back and read something from earlier you have no idea where it is. Commercial sites still use it because they care more about keeping users on the platform than overall UX, but there's no need for software like Lemmy to do it. Yes, dark UX is bad UX, it's the worst kind in fact.
You're describing Dark-UI
Dark-UI isn't Bad-UX
Good UX = Easier to use, Easier to navigate, etc. Good UX makes people use your platform more because there is less friction.
If it works against the user's intention then I'd say that's friction of another sort. For example if you go to a website and scroll more than you wanted to due to dark UX (as opposed to good content), the user may not immediately realise it's a bad experience for them, but still they've wasted extra time hence the site has got in the way of what they were originally trying to achieve. It's become normalised so it's not always recognised.
On a personal note, I want to be able to go on Lemmy and say "OK, I'll read the top 2 pages of my subscribed communities" and let that be it, that's a much more reasonable way of approaching a large amount of content.
I use the the apk called "Thunder" and it does a fantastic job. Much better than just using the website of here or reddit.
I honestly use the Voyager web client in my desktop PC, it works pretty well.
Okay then recommend Lemmy with PhotonUI?
Too much friction, and that's really bad UX.
And now you have to explain to people why the default UI sucks. I tried to promote https://p.lemmy.world/ to people, and they tell me to get lost with that dodgy virus link.
Don't link p.lemmy.world. it's well over a year out of date.
phtn.app probably looks a bit less suspicious, and also lets you use any Lemmy/Piefed instance.
You could say it as "phtn.app is a web portal for the fediverse" or something like that because the concept of web apps is confusing to many
People are very sensitive and suspect of dodgy links.
If you tell someone 'hey checkout lemmy, PS the default UI sucks so actually go to phtn.app'
they simply don't click and think you're trying to scam them
That's just fine. Don't worry yourself too much. I don't know about everyone else, but I only want the people open to making a switch here. If you're so put off by trying something new that you aren't willing to give it a chance, then I'm not going to be begging for you to join my community.
I tried out a handful of Lemmy apps and Thunder is what I used for most of it but then switched to Summit. There's aspects I like about both and aspects I dislike about both, but they don't have a bad UI.