I prefer the information density of old.reddit. The wasted space of the default lemmy UI irks me.

But I am also old and crotchety. If the spread out / modern UI of Lemmy (and squabbles.io and tildes and new.reddit) weren't more desirable, they (probably) wouldn't be coded that way.

Probably because a lot of people who are attracted to lemmy might have loved the freedom and anonymity that old reddit offered them back then and this interface reminds them of that. I for one have fond memories of how reddit was a decade ago and it's been a while since I've seen a social network like that. Everything these days are so facebook like.

There is one, click on settings at the top right of your screen.

Seems that there is a dark theme now.

was about to send it 2 u just in case u hadn't seen it lol, thought you'd be interested since you did make the oldy theme

myself i was pretty astounded how much i liked it, because the familiarity allows me to notice details i wouldn't have otherwise, and it's also pretty fast so it has a good feel.

sad that it's developed in Go and has a weird file structure so i can't collab.

I have only seen the instance on mlmym.org, not a lemmy instance, maybe an instance of the UI. Never seen this mentioned anywhere else.

The backend and the frontend can be separate things in Lemmy. In this case, you go to mlmym.org and the first thing you have to do is input your lemmy server name. Then, boom, you're browsing the Lemmy instance you entered, but it looks like Old Reddit. It's a thing of beauty. (I'm using it right now to respond to your comment!)