Primitive proposal for human-interface improvement on Lobste.rs

This is unreadable (and apparently unusable?) on mobile

Masochist in IRC:

this is not to critique your design sensibilities (they remind me of the design sensibilities of the voat.co devs without the color, and i have no opinion on the design sensibilities of the voat.co devs), nor the hustle of proposing a redesign to get a portfolio piece, the latter of which i very much respect as a bit - but you haven't used the site enough yet to make a solid proposal for a redesign; your proposal as it currently stands is objectively less functional than the current one; it offers no way for users to toggle default sorting back on! (nor to default to some other form of sorting...) - there are also issues like (on page 9) inconsistent margins/padding that just make the entire thing look a bit awkward, and SPAisms that feel wrong for the site (like on page 10); not all of it is bad! but i don't think every site needs to be are.na - especially not lobste.rs, which has a userbase of real salt of the earth, anti-"Thinking Deep Thoughts About Things" users; sort of antithetical to the entire concept of what you're going for

overall i'd say you didn't hit it out of the park this time, but if you use the site for a while, you might gain a better understanding of the sort of things that users would go for, and then you might do so. it's like chesterton's fence

... I just got a black screen with some text that explains the author is "fucking tired" and instructions to "press Z".

So, I'm going to say no, the current Lobsters interface that, you know, actually works, is better.

I recommend interacting with the github issues and MRs. We've had a couple improvements in the past that simply shipped after enough people there said that they are good.

Walking into the garden party with a big presentation on why everything should be re-arranged (after years of it working) is not what you want to do. Best case people shake their heads and ignore you.

My immediate reaction is that the table layout for the feed is vastly less usable than the current one. The point of a table is to be able to focus on specific columns and compare items on just those aspects quickly, then trace back to the rows that have specific properties. For a feed, the point is to be able to consider each item as a whole quickly and decide if you're interested or not, more like a newspaper.

Hmm, I feel like you would've likely gotten a better first impression if you actually made a HTML mockup that we could click around on. From what I gathered from the rest of the thread (and my own experience) Figma's unintuitive controls gave you an undeserved handicap from the get-go.

Some feedback about the stuff actually relevant to your design:

• I like the general layout, it's very minimal and out of your way.
• Making the logo pure white, however, is going overboard with the minimalism. Dark red is Lobste.rs's "brand color" so to speak. With how little color there is on the website otherwise, it's the single most defining shade one thinks of when the site is mentioned. Thus getting rid of it hurts the identity of the site. I know you reuse it for sorting, but still, keeping the L in a red box or just making the L red would solve this issue.
• The sorting stuff I'm pretty ambivalent about. On one hand, having it in one interface is nice and intuitive. The current way of Newest/Top is a little wonky. On the other hand, there is no point in sorting by user, but disabling that one column messes with the uniformity. I personally prefer having separate buttons for navigation on top, especially since with your variant search would become a 2-click operation instead of always being present on the nav bar.
• Having every odd row be a different color is good, it's one of the simplest tricks to make a table easier to parse and it works nicely here too.
• Having the URL be almost the same color and the same size as the post title makes parsing the content harder. I'd personally make it 80-90% of the title text's size and also differentiate it using a shade of even darker gray.
• I'd keep votes first. Hell, I'd arguably place all columns before the title. Having them grouped at the end and with a lot of padding draws attention to them. Lobste.rs encourages engaging with the content instead of karma-farming and that requires making this info secondary.
• I see no point in separating Via/Authored as different columns. Yes, there is a big difference between posting your own stuff and someone else's but that's why we have differently coloured usernames. Two columns just makes things crowded for no reason.
• I'm not sure what your point is on the comment alignment page. To make things more indented? Or to constrain comment lengths to a smaller box for clearer separation? I agree that it's occasionally quite difficult to figure out what comment belongs under what thread, but your solution is unclear to me.
• With the Settings / Compose pages I feel like you're introducing a lot of empty space for no reason. A cluttered UI is bad, yes, but hiding stuff behind menus and giving things unreasonable paddings isn't much better either.

For what it's worth, I like many aspects of what you've presented. However, I don't really feel like you took this whole thing very seriously. And if you don't care about what you're presenting fully, then why should we? You clearly aren't lacking in skills, because this one-day mockup is not terrible. It just has issues that you'd likely avoid, had you spent a week or more on this instead of a day.

The current layout works fine for me.

I think you could achieve this locally with style scripts and some custom Javascript. Maybe use the site that way for a while and see if it is really better.

Am I only one who hates relative date/time and mixed units? If you insist on relative, use hours or days, do not mix both. And I still prefer absolute timestamps like 2026-03-08 14:45:11 +01:00. To make it more structured you can separate (line or color) records by days, weeks, months.

A for efforts.

That said, I vastly prefer ful text boxes. Single lines are good on paper forms because you're supposed to write on it, and english is written above line. But on computers you type thinhs and they may not always be in English (yes, I know, Lobsters prefers English, but we're unicode in TYOSL 2026 doggamit).

The 'duplicated' Active/Recent tags are great because they tell me where on the site I am, like digital signboards.

Overall, this feels very 'modern' but mostly not an improvement in legibility.

Sorry if that is too harsh, but again, A for effforts.

I almost forgot the first rule of receiving a design in progress:

Is there any specific kind of feedback you're most interested in at this stage, or any aspects that are too raw to benefit from critique?

Yo.. let me know guys