Please consider using my theme on this instance, so that everyone could enjoy a more more modern, efficient UI when browsing sh.itjust.works. It works with Lemmy 0.17, 0.18 and 0.18.1rc. It has a light theme variant, dark theme or both (auto).
Repository with more screenshots: https://github.com/pkrasicki/lemmy-modern-ui-theme-addon
Theme files for download: https://github.com/pkrasicki/lemmy-modern-ui-theme-addon/releases
It's also a Firefox addon: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/lemmy-modern-ui-theme
The only downside would be maintenance. Whenever a new version of Lemmy breaks the theme, someone will have to fix it. But I believe that together as a community we can easily maintain our own theme.
Uh it looks nice, I have nothing specifically against it, however:
in general I dislike this type of self-promotion post on agora
if we are going to discuss this, I think people should be free to post any themes they've seen that they like and we can discuss all the themes at the same time and choose 1 for awhile, rather than having a discussion like this each time someone wants to promote a new theme.
Something needs to be done about Lemmy's UI. Currently multiple developers develop their userscripts independently. But if big instances chose one common theme, it would be a lot easier to maintain it and most people could enjoy a nice UI without having to install anything.
It doesn't have to be my theme, so feel free to post alternatives. I don't know of any modern looking ones. I've seen some nice userscripts though and maybe they can be turned into a Lemmy theme.
I think those would be nice if we changed the backgrounds, but I don't think they are maintained anymore: https://github.com/2xx04/lemmy-ui-themes
I guess I have a few questions:
you mention that any independent theme would need to be maintained. Do you have multiple contributors to your project? Or would you be open to? Are you trying to be in this for the long haul yourself or would you be looking to hand it off to someone to maintain?
does the theme impact the accessibility at all?
I'm currently developing the addon myself. I will be maintaining it as long as I use Lemmy. The addon needs to work with multiple versions at the same time, so making changes and testing them is more complicated. It would be nice if all instances just used this theme (or any other modern theme), because then the addon wouldn't be needed anymore. We could just have a simple theme to maintain and I want other people to contribute, so that it doesn't just rely on me. This theme depends on the default litely and darkly themes. So it doesn't have thousands of lines of CSS like other alternative themes, which hopefully makes things simpler.
The theme improves accessibility a little bit, because some of the default text colors have poor contrast and don't meet accessibility guidelines. I don't think it affects it in any other way. Here is the default contrast in 0.18.1RC on some elements:
okay thanks for your replies so far. Good to know you checked the color contrasts.
I don't have strong feelings so I guess we will see what the community does with this topic