this post was submitted on 02 Jun 2024
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Fediverse

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Lemmy community discoverability is not user-friendly and can be improved App side (self.fediverse)
submitted 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) by MrSoup to c/[email protected]
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I've introduced two of my friends (not into tech) to Lemmy. Since they're not into tech this is their first web forum.

I've explained the federation thru the usual email metaphore and that's ok, but to lookup for communities is not quite there on client side.

Let me explain.
He wanted to see all the communities on an instance because that instance is in his native language but he's registered on another instance. So to see all those communities you must go on instance.domain/communities, copy the name of the community you are interessed in and paste it inside the app/web client to look it up.

And to see all the communities all over the fediverse you must use lemmyverse.net which is a cool site, but still you got to copy paste back and forth to the app.

This could be implementend inside app itself by listing all communities and add ability to filter by things like instance.

Obviously open to discussion about the issue itself and how that could be improved.

Feel free to tag apps/clients devs to ear their opinion too.

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[–] [email protected] 56 points 6 months ago (3 children)

Non-techie here. It's true. I have no idea how !instance.domain/community works.

I understand that I'm on an island. Lemmy.World is a pretty big island, kinda like Austrailia, but it is still an island.

I can't just go to otherinstance.otherdomain/community and click subscribe. Or comment. Or anything. That instance should know I'm [email protected] just by the fact that I'm still logged into Lemmy.World, even if I'm on Lemmy.ml

So if I go to any other instance, I shouldn't have to do a thing.

As long as I'm not banned from Lemmy.ml, and as long as Lemmy.ml hasn't defederated from Lemmy.World, I should be able to log in on Lemmy.World, travel to Lemmy.ml, and immediately be able to comment, upvote, downvote, subscribe, whatever. And when I do these things, even though I'M on Lemmy.ml, my actions will have come from Lemmy.World

Lemmy/The Fediverse is a great idea. It has a lot of foundationally sound ideas that should be able to continue to thrive for decades. It just needs a userbase.

I remember in 2000 saying the same things about linux......and it never got that userbase until Android took all the techie sound ideas, and put them behind the curtain. When 16 year old blond valley girl Britney uses her Android phone, she doesn't know what a terminal is. She doesn't have to know. She doesn't have to think about it. She just opens her app drawer and plays spotify. And thats it.

I know the concept of a techie platform hiding the techie advancements sounds completely foreign to the idea of someone who spent 3 years learning how to techie, but thats what needs to happen.

Otherwise Britney will get about two sentences into you explaining the fediverse, before her brain turns off.

If Britney can't use it, this will have a userbase to reddit, in the same way that Linux has a userbase compared to Mac/Windows.

Lenny can grow. I feel like the ideas here are built to last. They just need to be more accessable to idiots. I have other issues I feel could be fixed, but I think this one is by far the biggest barrier to entry for most.

[–] [email protected] 23 points 6 months ago (4 children)

You make great points. I think this should be one of the top goals for frontend Lemmy devs. Most users are not super technical. The fediverse (lemmy included) should work with minimal friction to be accessible.

If you're open to it, I'd love to get your feedback on my Lemmy frontend's onboarding and overall user experience. I've been trying to make it simple, effective, and accessible. I can DM you!

[–] [email protected] 9 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) (3 children)

I'd argue the front ends should also provide users ways to see a more complete, instance-agnostic version of Lemmy. Like the first thing a user should see when they show up is just...Lemmy. not a page that suggests instances and all kinds of other things that they're not going to understand.

Part of what made Reddit work is that it was a shared site, a shared hub, and every user saw the same thing depending on what they were subscribed to. I get that certain instance admins have problems with other instances, and I get that they might defederate from some for legal or security reasons. I know they also might police their servers for content and comments they don't feel "fit", and that's their right.

But ultimately I don't believe the user's experience should suffer for that. If admins don't want to host certain content on their servers, fine. I think that's where the front ends and apps should come in.

Provide ways of unifying the experience of different user accounts on different instances into something more...well, unified. I don't believe I should have to care about what instance I'm looking at Lemmy "from", I should just be able to see the whole thing based on what I've subscribed to.

I know that's a very complicated suggestion, and it might involve a lot of redundancies and crossed wires, and how the moderation would look is definitely a discussion (maybe a drop down list "see this community as moderated by ______"?)

But genuinely I think if an app can achieve something like this, it would go a long way towards making the experience more universal and attractive for an audience looking to come from elsewhere. They do not care about decentralization or instances, and we can't make them care by lecturing them. So we do the next best thing and create a sort of facsimile of centralization.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago)

A lot of this doesn't work easily on the activitypub model, because accounts and posts and communities live on their host instances, and every interaction has to be relayed to them and updates have to be retrieved from them.

While you can set up mirrors with arbitrary additional moderation that can be seen from everywhere, you can't support submission of content from instances blocked by the host instance.

The bluesky model with content addressing can create that experience by allowing the creation of "roaming" communities where posts and comments can be collected by multiple hosts who each can apply their own filtering. Since posts are signed and comment trees use hashes of the parent you can't manipulate others' posts undetected.

Bluesky already has 3rd party moderation label services and 3rd party feed generators for its Twitter-like service, and a fork replicating a forum model could have 3rd party forum views and 3rd party moderation applied similarly.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 6 months ago

But how will you get a "universal" view of the fediverse? No single authoritative view exists.

You yourself acknowledge that this is complicated, but I honestly don't understand what appeal a hacked together fake centralized system would have for people if they don't care about decentralization in the first place. Any such solution is almost inevitably gonna end up being janky and hacked together just to present a façade of worse Reddit.

Lemmy's strength is its decentralization and federation. It's not a problem to be solved, it's a feature that's attractive in its own right. It doesn't need mass appeal, it's a niche project and probably always will be. I don't think papering over the fundamental design of the software will make it meaningfully more attractive to the non-technically minded.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 6 months ago

Agreed on all points. I also wish for a client that can seamlessly integrate with Pixelfed, Mastodon, etc. (a unified front end that has a public plugin repo with style info for any federated services)

[–] [email protected] 3 points 6 months ago

There's some things which Mastodon does you can copy, like the question about what your home instance is

https://slrpnk.net/comment/9042474

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[–] [email protected] 7 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago)

login to lemmy.world travel to lemmy.ml and be able to comment.

See, this is kind of impossible because of security reasons.

Imagine logging in on gmail, going to facebook (without any further action in between) and being able to read your emails. That would be convenient but catastrophic!

Yes, I know, FB and gmail are two different things, but the concept of auth is the same. A website saves a cookie in your browser and uses it to check whether you're authenticated or not. And that website can AND SHOULD only be able to read its own cookies.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 6 months ago

You must use your home instance as a proxy.

If you find a post elsewhere you have to take its URL and put it into your own instance's search function, and it will recognize it as a post on another lemmy instance and retrieve it for you.

You can also use search from your instance to go looking for things outside your instance which it already knows about.

Mastodon has made this easier by asking what your home instance is when you try to interact with a post on their domain without being logged in, and then it redirects you to a view of that same post from your own instance. Lemmy could do the same.

[–] [email protected] 34 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) (9 children)

I addressed most of that in Tesseract. It lets you browse other instances directly and one-click load / subscribe to communities.

Would love to see other 3rd party UIs incorporate something like this.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 6 months ago (2 children)

Amazing. One feature that is desperately needed on Lemmy is to open a post in another instance, not just a community or a user.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago)

If you can elaborate on that, I can probably add that as a feature. It already has that capability, but it's not exposed as a "view post on X instance" in any menus.

Edit: Added buttons in the post and comment action menus to "View [Post | Comment] on Home Instance". Thanks for the feature idea.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 6 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) (2 children)

Instance agnostic post and comment links need to be implemented as well, and would address the underlying challenge in "opening a post in another instance".

Edit: For now, Lemmy Universal Link Switcher is a great browser script which mostly simulates the functionality of instance agnostic post and comment links. It would be great if the equivalent functionality could be integrated natively into Lemmy though.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 6 months ago (1 children)

Without content addressing that's almost impossible

[–] [email protected] 2 points 6 months ago (1 children)

You can't have content addressing because it's mutable. On the other hand, UUIDs are made for that. There's even multiple types of UUIDs made for distributed computing with namespaces and such.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 6 months ago

Bluesky does strict content addressing with hashes plus post ID (unique per repository, this allows edits). So you can choose which version to refer to. If you need to archive or mirror stuff you can use the hash, and threads can have both methods so you can see which version of a comment somebody replied to, etc.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 6 months ago (1 children)

Clients can work around it by making a search on the home instance that filters by community id and submitter id. Something like this.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 5 months ago

Lemmy Universal Link Switcher also pretty good. It would be great if such functionality could be integrated natively into Lemmy though.

[–] MrSoup 5 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago)

Thanks for the heads up, didnt know it. Maybe something similar is available in other clients too and I just missed it.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 6 months ago (1 children)

That is a really sleek ui, just wanted to say nice work. Is there any way to change the default image size on the card view? I find the compact view's images too small for my liking and the card view too big. A good medium size might be ideal.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 6 months ago (1 children)

Thanks!

Yes, you can adjust the image size in card posts. It's under App Settings -> Feed -> Image Size

The default may be either "extra large" or possibly "full-width" (don't recall off the top of my head), but there are options for Small, Medium, and Large as well.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 6 months ago

Perfect, don't know how I missed it. Looks great now, thanks!

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[–] [email protected] 22 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) (3 children)

I built the Quiblr web app. I love the idea of being able to filter results for a given instance! I will see if I can push an update tonight

Edit: I pushed an update to implement Advanced Search options on the Communities Page. Given how the API works, community IDs are different between each Instance so you can't view the post feed on another Instance's community -but- I made a solution that lets you VIEW the communities on different instances (regardless of your home instance). If you are not signed in, you can change the instance with a single button push.

Hope your friend finds this feature helpful!

[–] [email protected] 9 points 6 months ago (1 children)

I love that you added a dyslexic font option. I'm gonna have to add that to Tes. It already has font options, but just a few standard ones.

What font are you using for that option? OpenDyslexic?

[–] [email protected] 4 points 6 months ago

Yes, OpenDyslexic! I've tried to build Quiblr with accessibility in mind

[–] [email protected] 3 points 6 months ago (1 children)

I clicked the star under your message......but I'm unclear what that does. Did I save your comment? I want to come back to it tomorrow.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 6 months ago (2 children)

Yes, you can go to your profile and click on "Saved" to see your starred posts/comments.

One annoying thing is that it's sorted by the original posting date, not the time you saved it, which might mean your most recently saved item isn't even on the first page of results.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 6 months ago (2 children)

One annoying thing is that it's sorted by the original posting date, not the time you saved it,

Sadly, an API limitation. When fetching saved posts, you only have the same sorting options as when you fetch posts for a community or the main feed, and those are based on publish date.

Same reason you can't search your saved items: saved_only isn't a flag you can pass to the search endpoint :(

[–] [email protected] 6 points 6 months ago

I was about to reply the same thing lol API is pretty limiting with what can be done. Gotta get creative!

[–] [email protected] 3 points 6 months ago (1 children)

Ah, so it's not even possible with a different front-end (unless it stores extra data).

[–] [email protected] 3 points 6 months ago

Basically, yeah. The app would have to basically fetch and store the posts and comments locally and search its own copy of them.

That's something ive been looking into since I'm also looking to provide offline support. Just not quite there yet lol.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 6 months ago

I thought I was going crazy, thanks for explaining how saved sorting works

[–] [email protected] 2 points 6 months ago (1 children)

I love masonry view. This is the first web app I have see, that is closers to Sync for Lemmy.

Thank you.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 6 months ago

I'm glad you enjoy Quiblr! Let me know if you have feedback

[–] [email protected] 16 points 6 months ago (1 children)

Thunder app has ability that can view all community that has federated with your instance.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago)

Latest version also has an instance explorer, that lets you open other instances in that same "view all" view.

Select "instances" in search, or long press a post from another instance>instance>visit instance.

@[email protected]

[–] [email protected] 12 points 6 months ago (1 children)

Relevant GitHub issues for this, put thumbs up reactions on them if you want them to be prioritized

https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/2951

https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy-ui/issues/1106

https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy-ui/issues/1896

[–] [email protected] 4 points 6 months ago

Thank you!

[–] [email protected] 10 points 6 months ago (1 children)

I highly recommend the Lemmy Universal Link Switcher user script, installed through Violentmonkey. It makes everything so much easier and more enjoyable. It basically rewrites every Lemmy link to a link that's specific to your home instance. I.e. it allows you to click any Lemmy link, and it will open up on your home instance. This also means that you can just go to some other instance, explore the communities and easily open them on your home instance to subscribe to them. It also works with posts, e.g. if you see a post that you want to comment on, it will redirect you to the same post but on your instance, so you can use your account and interact with it.
Btw lemmyverse.net also has an option to set a home instance, making it easier to subscribe to communities:

(This feature even works with Kbin/Mbin)

[–] [email protected] 3 points 4 months ago

Great recommendation. Link Switcher script was a game changer for me.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) (3 children)

I really miss having Liftoff work because it has been the only app I've used on android that actually had a functioning search feature that let you search individual posts, community names, instances, or users.

@[email protected]: pls come back 🥺

[–] [email protected] 8 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) (3 children)

Give Summit a try. It's got all those search options, and it seems to work well enough any time I use it.

If you liked RIF on Reddit, it's far and away the closest I've found.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago)

If you liked RIF on Reddit, it's far and away the closest I've found.

Sold.

Edit: Ooooh yeah... This is way better than Jerboa.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 6 months ago

I agree in that Summit is the most feature complete and polished Lemmy client for Android.

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[–] [email protected] 4 points 6 months ago

Test out Play Sync for Lemmy works great.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 6 months ago

It seems you've found an app already, but also check out Thunder or Raccoon.

I moved from Liftoff to Thunder and the search seems to work when I need it.

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