There are quite a few communities that are entirely image posts so presenting them as a vertical list of thumbnails doesn’t really make the best of what is there.
To improve on that I’ve made use of the common web design pattern called ‘masonry’, where the images are arraigned like bricks in a wall. Check it out:
https://piefed.social/c/aww@lemmy.world
https://piefed.social/c/artporn@lemm.ee (wide tile – best on large monitors)
On each tile there is the title of the post at the bottom which can be clicked on to view the post and it’s comments. This footer area could be improved with voting buttons and perhaps the number of comments, in future.
This doesn’t work as well for meme communities as memes often contain a lot of text, which gets squished. Perhaps there needs to be a 2 or 3 column version with larger thumbnails.