You can now test the alternative Photon UI for Lemmy on:

https://photon.slrpnk.net

It’s one of the few alternative UIs for Lemmy that includes moderation features, so that makes it interesting as a replacement for the default Lemmy-UI.

Right now it is still early days and Photon is very actively developed, so don’t expect a perfectly polished experience. Once it stabilizes, there is a chance we will switch over to it as the main UI for Slrpnk though, as the current official Lemmy-UI is not very actively maintained any more with the main developer working on a re-write.

Update: Linked in the sidebar now. Will probably take a few more weeks/months before it can be used as a full replacement of the lemmy-ui though. Looking very nice overall though.

  • j_robyEnglish
    2·
    9 months ago

    I somehow missed this post.

    I’ve tried both Photon and Alexandrite for a little bit now. I didn’t like Alexandrite at all tbh…

    Photon feels nice and smooth and I like the customizations that are available, but it lacks a few features of the original UI that I really like. I could probably get used to using it tho if needed.

    As buggy as it can be, I’ll probably stick with the original UI for now and give Photon another shot at a later date.

      • j_robyEnglish
        2·
        9 months ago

        Oh hi there dev!

        I could probably get used to using it tho if needed.

        I hope that didn’t come off as offensive in any way! I’m just stubborn and slow to change habits once I form them.

        As far as the features, they’re trivial in the long run and more of my personal preferences. But I do like being able to see the individual upvote and downvote totals separately. And for posts with a text body, I really like the original UI’s button to view the text/body without having to open the whole post or leave my feed. The rest is just me needing to not be so stubborn and getting used to using a new UI.

        I will say tho, the original UI search functions are probably the most buggy, and yours seems to have fixed that entirely. Overall it definitely feels much smoother and faster than the original UI. So, thanks for putting in the work!

        Edit: I should probably add that I use Lemmy exclusively on my mobile device, if that’s of any help.