The other day I started making a UI for lemmy with a different framework than is used by the official one as a way of getting some hands on experience with SolidJS. I considered making a clone of the existing UI, but I started thinking that I could make it look different. Since lemmy doesn’t tie you to a specific UI, it could be nice to give instances another option. At the moment, the only web UIs I know of for lemmy is the official one and the bulletin board one. Does anyone have any ideas about this?
I think it will not be everyone’s cup of tea, because of obvious reasons due to how it was used, but I find Chan image board’s style and simplicity really nice, and it would be nice to have something like that based on Lemmy.
Otherwise, maybe something like HackerNews/Lobsters? Although I don’t like them much.
Still maybe these are too basic GUIs and you want something more complex.
Funnily enough, I’ve considered making a fediverse imageboard once I’ve gotten proficient in rust and look more deeply into how to use the activitypub protocol. However, I don’t think you could get a true imageboard experience by grafting a different UI onto Lemmy.
potentially boring technical details
One major difference between an imageboard and Lemmy is that users can post without being authenticated. There are no usernames or passwords required. Another major difference is how responding to posts works. With Lemmy, each comment responds to a single post, whereas imageboards allow (you)ing multiple posts in the same post. These 2 changes alone would require changes to the backend that would take Lemmy in a direction that I don’t think the maintainers or general userbase would like. In addition, if I ever end up making something like that, I’ll likely do something to make it so it wouldn’t federate with other fediverse software unless maintainers make a small but deliberate change, adding an extra “opt-in” step. I like imageboards myself, but making it so account-less channers can flood the rest of the fediverse seems unwise. There are certainly some things Lemmy does that would apply well to a chan, however. Whichever part of the protocol that Lemmy uses to handle communities would probably map to boards pretty well.
TLDR; you couldn’t get an actual imageboard experience without turning Lemmy into something else.
As for complexity, I’m thinking roughly as complex as the official UI. Solid has a small bundle size and good performance like infernojs (the framework the official UI uses), so I want to put it to the test.
Well, this is not true of all image boards, some require to create an account, and I guess it wouldn’t be a bad necessity to require this after all, so maybe it’s an improvement over the original idea. And the other thing you mentioned, I think it could be camouflaged in the GUI without the necessity to modify the back end, although I’m not sure. The pingin works in chans is that you basically get a hyper link to either a user’s comment in a post, or another post by the number it has, if there is some kind of identification for posts/comments on Lemmy, it could work in a way that you’d only need to ping someone and it brings a hyperlink.
Fair point about requiring an account possibly making it better. Regarding the other point, that may be possible. I’m wondering how that would work for federation. I already see users from Mastodon having replies handled by @ing someone. My main concern is how it would be handled on federated instances. While I probably could put all of the comments in a single thread and use links to go between them to make it work on the instance using the chanlike frontend, the way that replies to posts/comments are handled on the backend makes me unsure of how to make sure comments are saved in a way that other Lemmy instances could understand them.
To better explain, here is what the JSON response of your comment that I’m responding to looks like:
JSON
{ "id": 399554, "creator_id": 99615, "post_id": 647564, "content": "Well, this is not true of all image boards, some require to create an account, and I guess it wouldn't be a bad necessity to require this after all, so maybe it's an improvement over the original idea.\nAnd the other thing you mentioned, I think it could be camouflaged in the GUI without the necessity to modify the back end, although I'm not sure. The pingin works in chans is that you basically get a hyper link to either a user's comment in a post, or another post by the number it has, if there is some kind of identification for posts/comments on Lemmy, it could work in a way that you'd only need to ping someone and it brings a hyperlink.", "removed": false, "published": "2023-05-17T18:34:44.600427", "updated": null, "deleted": false, "ap_id": "https://lemmygrad.ml/comment/399554", "local": true, "path": "0.399459.399469.399554", "distinguished": false, "language_id": 0 }The property that’s important here is
path. Each number after the 0 is the id of a comment in a reply, i.e. 399459 was your comment on my post, 399469 is my response, and 399554 is your comment which this comment of mine is responding to. This allows multiple comments to respond to the same comment. Another response to my response might have the path 0.399459.399469.69420. However, this doesn’t lend itself well to having one comment respond to multiple other comments. That said, I do wonder if something like that would make sense to add to Lemmy. I’m not too familiar with a lot of the other fedverse
Probably not the best place to ask but how do you change what UI you’re seeing?
It’s chosen by the site admins. There isn’t a toggle or anything.
oh thanks
