I originally asked this question because I'm new to Lemmy and wasn't sure if I was missing something about why the design was this way. I didn't know if there was some setting or other way to modify to get it to have a different design.

Having looked into it a bit more, just seems there isn't a way to do it ourselves, perhaps as the userbase expands there might be someone who eventually develops extensions.

What I have noticed is there's apparently other Lemmy instances that run a different UI, but maybe they aren't really federated with everyone else. Hexbear.net was one I just found out about. Basically I'm wondering if anyone knows of other instances that are part of the fediverse.