Why do all lemmy instances have the same web UI?

whoamibro@lemmy.world to Ask Lemmy@lemmy.world – 29 points –
  • Have we collectively agreed to follow the same UI to ensure easier interoperability for users?
  • Can someone provide the link for the source code of the UI?
34

https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy-ui

They literally all run the same program, lemmy.

Thanks, can an instance technically have a different(or enhanced) user interface?

Yes. Lemmy-ui supports themes and you can even choose an entirely different UI altogether. For example this UI: https://mlmym.org/lemmings.world/

Wow, talk about people clinging to old.reddit.com UI.

I fucking hated old.reddit.com lol

I didn't really hate it, but I never got how everyone seemed to love it, it was old and ugly.

I like that it's information dense. Posts don't take up a lot of space, comment chains are easier to track with the boxes, it's more obvious which posts will expand in window and which will go to a new link. I don't care if it's pretty, I find it far more functional.

Tbf, when people say they love old.reddit, they very well could be referring to some of the better-looking themes. A lot of old.reddit subs, for example, use Naut. Some also use Minimaluminiumalism, or Simplit.

Might also be about using RES; a lot of the cool stuff never got ported over to the new UI.

Old, and ugly are 2 very kind words for the outdated garbage it is.

wefwef.app is also another web UI.

But it's not an instance. It's a just a web app for lemmy

Yes you use their backend and you can develop your own UI if you'd like

Or you can make a copy (fork) lemmy-ui and make your changes

It’s got to be two separable layers. Sounds like the lemmy server just happens to be bundled with a particular UI layer that can access the server’s APIs.

Yeah that's the latest lemmy-ui repository. You have the option to choose your own from the backend

But you could switch out the whole lemmy ui with wefwef if you wanted to. It probably doesn't have all the admin functionality, but theoretically it's possible.

Most of them run the default Lemmy UI which comes with the software, although I have seen two which use LemmyBB a front end based on the phpBB bulletin board frontend an example of one such instance would be fedibb.ml

Oh god, I hate that so much, jesus christ. Good luck to them.

Yeah I'm not really a fan of it either. I guess it's good for people to have options though, if they don't want to use the default lemmy-ui front end.

I just noticed it seems like the lemmy update for 0.18.1 broke lemmybb so it seems like they're probably going to be inaccessible until they can get it fixed.

Apparently you can run the wefwef.app front end as well.

I know. Wefwef doesn't belong to instance tho. The reason I asked this was, I wanted to know if the instances are restricted to use the default UI that lemmy provides

With enough nginx config you can probably get around it. You can send certain requests to certain programs and other requests to other programs.

So even if you had a server, with a particular domain/IP, and if lemmy was built to only run the API server alongside a web server whose client consumes from that API, you could reroute any requests that would have gone to the web server, to a wefwef instance instead.

Sorry if the tech jargon’s beyond you.

As an analogy, even if a McDonalds instance is a package deal combining the kitchen and the eating space, there are ways you could make it so that anyone showing up at that street address sees a Starbucks that can get you a McDonalds burger.