Do people actually like all of the overdesigned clutter to the point where it makes them not want to switch sites?
To me, the stripped down clarity on Lemmy is a feature. I remember back in the day when people flocked to Facebook from MySpace, in large part because they were sick of eye gouging customized pages and just wanted a simple, consistent interface. The content, not the buttons to click on it are the draw right?
Normal users don’t want to spend time to customize! The site should just provide a few reasonable, good-looking options by default…
People aren’t like “oh this looks bad, I’m gonna make it look nice”, they are more like “Oh this looks bad, so it must be a bad site, I’d better leave”.