As discussed during the Forums governance team meeting - 2022-10-06 these kind of modifications are encouraged to be made by users client-side for now, themes will require a reliable team developing it to be considered:
Site design, involving users in theme selection/modification
- Wait for sidebar update, see if it helps users to track content in categories they are specifically interested in without resorting to muting a lot of categories
- We will immediately tweak the icon size. We expect this to be unlikely to cause breakage on updates.
- Further changes (e.g. visibility of local communities, placing icons in-line with titles on mobile, reducing/removing list of topics on mobile) are likely also possible through CSS changes. We’ll test and consider these in the future.
- Themes elsewhere (e.g. with MediaWiki) have been quite painful because of their maintenance requirements when new versions of the software are rolled out. Adding themes to our Discourse installation should therefore not be done lightly, it would require a reliable team developing the theme.
- Client-side changes with browser extensions such as ublock or stylus do not impose this maintenance burden. Some users have started configuring and sharing rules to tweak the appearance of the community forum according to their preferences.