Connect for Lemmy App

Before I get into my comments, I just want to ask that if you haven't bought the dev a coffee, please buy him a coffee. Personally, I have bought several with the intent of covering for those who cannot. Our dev has earned it.

I am just going to say that Connect is awesome. Even through early development, when there were huge issues, it progressed at a good pace. And yeah, it has gotten super stable and functions great as a simple and easy to use Lemmy client.

I would also like to make clear that I respect this app as the sole devs creation. He/She is 100% able to direct this project as they see fit. Period.

However. One person development teams can be a serious risk to the longevity and stability of an app. People get tired and burned out. People have actual lives outside of working on a single app. People can just vanish from dev work. That is all normal.

With the recent Lemmy instance updates and some subtle bugs that are showing, my concern is that it may become a much larger challenge to keep this app up to date. In my limited dev experience, core API changes (or API bugs) are a royal pain in the ass to deal with. A person could spend more time just keeping their app functional instead of developing new features or working on minor bugs.

I was hoping that people in this community that have experience with the development of large open source projects, can contribute ideas for our dev that may make it palatable to open this project up to additional contributors.

I think the biggest things I would like to call out is that if this project is opened, it may damage any revenue that is being generated by this app for the dev and I don't want to see that happen. (People gotta work and people gotta eat. )

What open source licenses are available that would keep full control of this app in the hands of the original dev? (Is that even a viable option?)

Quite simply, other than opening this app up fully, I don't quite know exactly what I am asking for. It would be nice to keep full control of this app in the hands of the dev, while also allowing community development.

Just to reiterate, this post is not meant to be rude or pushy. If anything I said came off that way, it was absolutely not the intent and offer a humble apology if it did.

Pretty much all posts linked to redgifs produce the same error, which messes with how the feed looks and loads. Incredibly grateful for all you've done with the app!

When using my home instance, lemm.ee, the user avatars and community images of all communities and users of other instances are not loading. Instead they show a infinity spinning icon.

Since the release of lemmy 0.19.4 images can be loaded via the new image proxy. Connect seems to append format=webp&thumbnail=64 to an image URL. However, when this is added to a proxy image URL, it it not working. These query parameters are only working for /pictrs images.

Example of url that fails: https://lemm.ee/api/v3/image_proxy?url=https%3A%2F%2Flemmy.world%2Fpictrs%2Fimage%2Fc6d6b005-8790-4d12-a11e-ef2cba2cb397.png?format=webp&thumbnail=64

Edit: as far as I can see in the json API, the icon/avatar url is delivered without the query parameters, and Connect is adding them. For users/communities on my home instance the url is always with /pictrs, so after adding the query parameters it still works. But for users/communities on another instance the url is with /image_proxy and then adding the query parameters leads to an error.

If you try to call up 196 it doesn't display - instead it seems to be lots of lemmit communities.

Instead of going to the Android community it goes to /c/all when I try to visit while logged into lemmy.ca. I tried logging out and back in to see if that would solve it.

Update: Not a Connect issue.

Strange. I don't see this as a pinned post on that community, but yet, there it is. Did an admin pin a post from another instance on .ca somehow or is this a bug with Connect? (Strange things are happening like this since the last Lemmy update. I can't tell if it's a Connect issue, or a Lemmy issue.)

I've been using this app for a few months and really enjoy it, but I haven't been able to find a way to change the default download folder for images and videos. Is there an option for this that im missing? I use the same folder for most other apps and this one being separate is a minor inconvenience.

I like to look at stuff inside the app, but rarely check the URL before clicking on a post. It's always irritating when the browser, or even worse, the YouTube app pops open.

It would be neat to have the option to get a prompt when leaving the app. Could be totally optional and activated only when selected in the settings.

Thanks, love the app anyway, just a small improvement.

When I click on a comment in the inbox, the thread appears beginning from the comment in the inbox, i.e. my comment, which is needed to establish context, is hidden/ not shown. Is this by design, or is it a bug?

Edit: an update fixed it! Thanks u/Veritrax!

That feed is not /c/cat on lemmy.world, it seems.

I just logged out and logged back in with no change. I'll clear my cache to see if that helps and will update this post if successful.

Edit: Clearing the cache did not help. Must be a Lemmy API issue?

Edit 2: NSFW communities are not hidden in the faux community feed either. Thankfully, they are blurred, but not hidden. Posting a comment with a picture from what was supposed to be lemmy.world/c/world. (Did I use "faux" correctly? I rarely use that word, so hopefully the intent shows.)

Edit 3: Ok, weird. cat on lemmy.world is broken from my account on .ca, but other communities are not, like business on lemmy.world. lemmy on lemmy.ml is also broken. The issue is more random than I thought.

Once I upvote a post, it would show me orange color that I have upvoted, but then as soon as I click on any post or change the page, I will come back home to find out that non of my upvotes were registered or stored.

This bug does not happen when I browse online then open the app. Only my upvotes through the app don't get registered.

Or is there a cross-post button when looking at a post? I haven't been able to find it yet.

I used boost for a while since I used to always use it for reddit. But connect finally won over and is my main browser, one thing I miss though, is in using the user tagging system, boost had a bright green tag on users you used this feature on. This allowed easy identification of your tags. Not saying comment needs to have it bright green but it would be nice to have the option so I can actually see which users are tagged at a glance

When I used Reddit is Fun, it really hogged up data unless thumbnails we're disabled. I've noticed that Connect is also using quite a lot of data, but there is no similar setting that I can find (there's an option to disable preloading images, but I'm not seeing what that changes).

Even if there was just an option to toggle thumbnails manually, it'd be much appreciated.

How does blocking work? I have blocked a few users and this seems to work but today I noticed that one of them replied to a comment that was made to my comment. So not directly to me but to the one who replied my comment. How should it work? Id assume that my comment and any child comments would be hidden to accounts that i have blocked.

I basically never want to watch a YouTube link. But I kinda mindlessly click the next item in the feed if it sounds interesting and I'm always angry when it's a 20 minute long video that could have been a quick 2 minute read. Is it possible to mark these so I can see which ones are videos and avoid them like the plague?

I've got some comments I'd like to delete, but due to them being in threads that were deleted, I am unable to remove them from my profile. Clicking on them in my profile (which is necessary to delete comments) leads to an error screen since the thread doesn't exist anymore.

Could we put a menu on comments in the profile page to delete without going to the thread?

For the curious, the comments are nothing inflammatory or inappropriate, but they remind me of the inflammatory or inappropriate threads they were in, and I'd like to move on.

It's there a way to share content, e.g. web page, directly to the app, instead of copy/paste Title and link? I can't see the app in the offered app list

Not sure if this is a connect problem or catbox problem, but often when clicking an image hosted on catbox, it'll flash the low res then show a broken image picture when it tries to load the high res version.

Unrelated issue but I've also noticed that occasionally when turning the screen on while viewing an external link in-app, the app will crash.

Hi,

Sometimes when using Connect, just browsing the feed, my phone hangs / freeze. In case of a freeze I can't do anything on the screen, I can't press home or previous, nor pull the notification panel.

I've noticed 2 types of freezes, the first type I can still press the power button to lock the screen, when I unlock the phone I get an android pop-up saying the System app is not responding, I click kill and the phone is now usable.

For the second type the power button doesn't even work, I have to long press it to reboot the phone.

I have a Samsung Galaxy S24 running the latest OS.

Does anyone have similar issues?

When browsing on lemmy.ca/c/all and I click through to a post, the local source instance and community for a post is shown as lemmy.world/c/hot. The source instance is something completely different and shown in the post info bar below the title.

This can get awkward when I think I am commenting on a post I think is on lemmy.world or lemmy.ca when it might actually be lemmy.ml.

Highlighting the source instance a little better would be super awesome.

This is easiest done by sorting by Top of 1 hour, so there are only a few posts to scroll past.

When you get all the way to the bottom where there are no more posts to load, try scrolling down.

While you do that, any NSFW image that currently has a blur over it will have the blur squished vertically towards the center, allowing you to see the top and bottom of the image unblurred.

I appreciate all the hard work you do, but this is a hard No for me. I can't use an app that forces me to view landscape gifs in portrait mode. Is a rotation button a feature you'd consider?

I see a couple hundred of these messages every day:

• Post hidden
• Refreshed
• Blocked user
• Blocked community
• Downvotes are disabled

These are good things to know, but if there's no way to make the snackbars disappear automatically after 1-3 seconds, can we PLEASE have an option to disable them?

If it were easy to manually swipe them away, maybe I could deal, but the proportion of the screen that works to dismiss them is comically small. I'm writing this whole post with a Refreshed snackbar just casually hanging out on my screen. I know trying to dismiss it would 99% likely back me out of this post form instead.

Is this happening to anyone else? I try to load comments, then I have to scroll back up and try to figure out where the new ones start.