important instance shit

in a thread complaining about the general state of lemmy, I read a comment where someone linked the alternative lemmy UI Photon. some general thoughts:

• this shit looks like new.reddit, which I hate
• however, it is extremely fast
• it looks like someone with UX experience was at least in proximity to this at the time it was designed?
• I don’t think there’s an easy CSS way to make this look less like new.reddit
• having tried it on a test instance, the promise of better mod/admin tools seems ambitious currently, though maybe they’ll get there faster than lemmy-ui
• overall, it feels a lot nicer to use than either lemmy-ui or new.reddit

you can hook Photon up to awful.systems using the Accounts option in the menu on the top right, though for opsec reasons I can’t encourage anyone to log in to this weird external site with their awful.systems credentials. check it out with the guest instance option (which doesn’t need a login) or use a disposable lemmy.ml account or something

what I want to know is: does anyone use this thing, and does anyone want it here? if there’s demand for it, I can spin up a secure copy of it for our instance under an alternate path. for me it’s a bit of a hard sell due to its resemblance to the reddit redesign, but lemmy’s UI is decoupled enough from its backend that running this thing shouldn’t impact much