There have been a number of ongoing conversations and PR’s around trying to add semantics to the lemmy-ui markup to enable developers to more easily create custom themes, userscripts, and browser extensions.

Up until now we’ve had no input from a maintainer, as they are rightfully heads down focused on shipping the 0.18 update. We now have direction on where we should be focusing our effort and to what extent the project will offer support for this:

…I’m fine with adding something like this, with the very bold caveat that we as maintainers will not do custom theme support, and if class names change, and themes break, that is up to themers, not us. I’ve had to close so many issues on this repo for people asking me to do theming support for them, which I don’t have time to do.

This is great news for anyone who has been struggling with incredibly deep class selectors and general lack of specificity. There is further mention of switching UI frameworks in the future, so do expect that whatever you build today may break tomorrow. We’re still in the very early days of the Lemmy maturity lifecycle, but it’s encouraging to receive acknowledgement for this effort.

Relevant links to the various efforts in addition to the post link:

• jsit’s proof of concept for classes

• My PR to add classes and ID’s (merged)

• djv’s thread that started their (post linked) PR

• A thread from 2022 where Dessalines laid out their original motivations for resisting custom classes