Do people actually like all of the overdesigned clutter to the point where it makes them not want to switch sites?
To me, the stripped down clarity on Lemmy is a feature. I remember back in the day when people flocked to Facebook from MySpace, in large part because they were sick of eye gouging customized pages and just wanted a simple, consistent interface. The content, not the buttons to click on it are the draw right?
In the middle of 2010, "Due to a controversial redesign brought on by Digg, disgruntled users declared a “Quit Digg” day where they posted links to Reddit and left Digg behind to join Reddit. Reddit subsequently overtook Digg in search popularity. "
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_Reddit
Here’s what Reddit looked like on August 7, 2010
https://web.archive.org/web/20100807085503/http://www.reddit.com/
This is what Digg looked like on August 7, 2010
https://web.archive.org/web/20100807080410/http://digg.com/
Reddit’s had 18 years to tweak the user interface. Lemmy’s Initial release was May 5, 2019; 4 years ago. Honestly, I have no issue with Lemmy’s interface, but I feel confident in saying that given another 14 years of development, Lemmy will probably not look like it does today.
You can also make it look any way you want b/c it’s open source
Reddit used to be open source as well
By that logic nobody should ever switch to lemmy because it’ll always be a decade behind the times.
Unless Tomorrow’s Reddit becomes Today’s Digg. Once hot, now not.
I’m criticizing the logic, not the site
Reddit still looks pretty much the same as that to me whenever I connect to it. RES probably helps though.