TheDude recently upgraded the server to the most recent version of Lemmy. You'll notice significant improvements to the user interface, and hopefully the functionality is also improved. There is no official changelog yet because this version is not yet finalized, but I'll link the GitHub releases page where it should eventually appear.
https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/releases
Edit: 0.18.1 is now fully released and we have upgraded to the final version. You can view the link above for the changelog.
Loving the new interface. Seems like it fixed quite a few of the small issues I've had with the UI. Subscribing to a new community from the sidebar is fixed on desktop. Expanding an image, then voting on the post doesn't collapse the image anymore. Voting on posts and comments seems to be almost instant now (probably related to upgrade, but not 100% certain). The "Darkly-Compact" theme is amazing, much more like old.reddit. Haven't seen anything about whether or not @TheDude devoted more compute resources to the instance, but everything seems so, so much more snappy than a few days ago. Read that @db0 somehow tweaked the query parameters for the PG database, which helped reduce the server load (announcement link here). Maybe that would be worth looking into as well to optimize even further.
Edit: Looks like @phiresky has been contributing to Lemmy on GH, I wonder if that's what db0 meant. Though not seeing any commits directly related to DB queries.
Yes! Thank you for pointing that out! I just swapped over and and feeling right at home. It's a much better use of horizontal space compared to the default theme.
"Darkly-PureBlack" + OLED blacks: