TheArstaInventor

Recently, I made a post here, which gained some traction in support of the cause. However, I mistakenly used an outdated screenshot of Photon. It turns out that photon.lemmy.world is running an older version of Photon, which caused some misunderstandings.

For those who saw that post and were misled or disliked Photon because it appeared to display only 2-3 links on-screen, similar to new Reddit, let me clarify. While Photon is modern and intuitive, it is not like new Reddit in this particular aspect. This outdated screenshot gave the wrong impression, which I’ve since updated, but I wanted to create this new post since many people may not revisit the previous one to see the corrections.

The latest version of Photon, which can be seen at phtn.app, is a big improvement over what’s on photon.lemmy.world. Photon is modern, intuitive, and, speaking as someone with years of Reddit moderation experience who has also started moderating a few communities on Lemmy, it offers a far superior moderation experience. For example, Photon allows you to view the mod queue for all communities at once, making moderation much easier compared to the base UI or other alternatives.

Photon's modularity and customization options are comparable to, if not better than, Kbin's UI. You can easily change fonts, reposition docks and panels, apply custom themes, adjust sorting, and customize the modular side panel to arrange and pin items in any order you like. All of this can be done without needing CSS or additional technical knowledge. It’s probably the most modular yet user-friendly UI available right now.

Here’s an example of the latest Photon interface settings:

Here’s a more customized version I created in just a few seconds—it can be personalized even further:

In my previous post, I emphasized the need for a modern, visually appealing, and intuitive UI to help the Fediverse grow and attract mainstream users. Currently, Lemmy remains dominated mainly by discussions of political topics and critiques of Elon Musk, while its user base is still relatively small at around 40k+ users. For Lemmy to thrive, it needs to expand beyond its current niche and cater to more general topics and interests.

Personally, I use Reddit for far more than just shitting on Elon Musk, discussing politics, or even tech, especially FOSS. For example, I frequently engage with communities about cars, gaming, TV shows, entrepreneurship and general topics that are largely missing or underdeveloped on Lemmy. These general-interest communities are what make platforms like Reddit so versatile and appealing to a wider audience.

If we remain in our current comfort space, Lemmy will likely continue to stagnate as a niche platform. Meanwhile, other alternatives could grow and potentially replace Reddit one day, and it may not be decentralized, open source or community-funded rather centralized and driven by investors/VCs, Just as we’re seeing with platforms like Bluesky gaining traction over Mastodon to replacing X/Twitter. By embracing a UI like Photon’s, which is both modern and user-friendly, we can create a more inviting experience for mainstream users, helping Lemmy grow into a platform that caters to a broader audience.

DESCLAIMER: This will be a little bit of a long and maybe even a personal write up, if you do read it all, thank you in advance!

Hello everyone, not sure if anyone remembers much of what happened with my account u/TheArstaInventor on Reddit, In a nutshell, I was the guy who created initiatives like r/lemmymigration and r/kbinmigration, got banned unfairly for a while to be unbanned later after community backlash, I also created guides to help users move to Kbin, Lemmy or the fediverse in general, the one that took off the most was "The Redditor's guide to how Kbin works".

Later I also entered the r/RedditAlternatives mod team, and helped moderate the community further as its popularity grew a ton at the time and a massive increase in posts required a bigger mod team. I also coordinated with other mods at the time at r/ModCoord when the blackout happen and the whole coordination not only made blackout possible but a ton of communities made another home here on the Fediverse.

Although at first, I supported Lemmy massively, I moved to Kbin later instead after learning about some of the concerns surrounding Lemmy's project developers at the time (them being tankies) but then over the months of using Kbin and investing a ton of my time on the project, I came to the harsh reality and conclusion that when it comes to platform maturity and stability, Kbin is years behind thanks to constant errors across the website sometimes, bugs and other instabilities, this also lead me to reconsider supporting and coming back to Lemmy, this time to Lemmy.world.

I also discussed with other people and came to the conclusion that the devs being tankies or their personal idealogies can't and haven't affected the overal project = Lemmy. Sure, there are some instances that cater to their idealogies such as Lemmygrad or even lemmy.ml but thanks to the project being open source and especially part of the fediverse, there are many other general instances, the best one being lemmy.world, that are moderated by entierly different people. The developers of Lemmy, who just help develop the platform, and their personal idealogies, especially on other instances, don't and probably will never matter or be an issue.

There is also a major advantage of open source - keeping the original project in check with the threat of a fork project taking away users from the OG project, this itself will by fundamental design keep Lemmy from questionable changes in the future by Lemmy's own developers. Apart from all this, the developers themselves following this concern released a statement stating their ideologies won't affect the platform itself and even if it does, it is open source and is open to being forked.

This was more than enough for me to jump ship here now, I am personally a little bit exhausted after so much of work I put into Kbin at first, but there are too many issues and is certainly not ready for prime time which has lead me here, I kind of have to start from scratch here but one thing has made be extremely happy.

I don't know if I was a reason for even single person to come here to Lemmy from Reddit, but what happened to my account earlier on showed that Reddit is actually a flaw, a fundamental design flaw that is closed source and centralized, this was the base to all the issues, not just Reddit's recent API changes that surfaced, over the years. I don't know if even that was a reason for atleast a single person to leave Reddit for Lemmy and the fediverse, but I am just happy that a ton of people are now on this site, leaving Reddit for good and I have immense satisfaction that I did atleast 0.1% contribution to it.

I also hope some of my guides and posts inspired and helped people give open source software a real try this time and it seems like a ton of people have settled in the fediverse, really makes me happy that we finally have a self-sustaining community outside Reddit, but not just outside Reddit, but in a FOSS platform.

Putting an end to my long write up above, I want to mention using this opportunity, that I've created c/ModCoord !modcoord@lemmy.world, not exactly the same r/ModCoord from Reddit, in-fact my vision is wider and bigger: A place for all moderators to coordinate, help each other. A place to help new users migrate and ask questions about perhaps moderating a new community created. But most importantly, helping Reddit moderators migrate not only themselves but their reddit communities to Lemmy. Apart from the community on Lemmy itself, I also plan on creating a discord server that will be linked to the c/ModCoord here. Right now there is about nothing there, but I will soon start working on it and you will start seeing a lot of progress moving forward there, so do consider subscribing and supporting our vision and future initatives there - especially if you are a moderator, even better if you are a reddit moderator like me moving here. We also plan on working on a wiki-like post on c/ModCoord with tons of resources to help with community discovery who have already moved from Reddit to lemmy and so on.

Today, I left r/RedditAlternatives Mod team, a great bunch of people who shared my vision but it is clear that those who were really committed to seeing Reddit's downfall left already for alternatives, mainly Lemmy and the Fediverse, so did I, little point in staying there.

As a HUGE car enthusiast, I will be working on bringing car communities to Lemmy personally as well (give me a shout out if you are a car enthusiast!:), especially those I already mod on Reddit.

If you read all that, I really appreciate it and i'm terribly sorry if it was too long but hey, I gave you a desclaimer 😉 😂

Finally, Let's create the next front page of the internet, even better this time.