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.

  • Admiral PatrickEnglish
    34•6 months ago

    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.

    • Nato BoramEnglish
      8•6 months ago

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

      • Admiral PatrickEnglish
        6•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.

      • threelonmusketeersEnglish
        3•4 months ago

        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.

        • NatanaelEnglish
          2•6 months ago

          Without content addressing that’s almost impossible

          • Nato BoramEnglish
            2•6 months ago

            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.

            • NatanaelEnglish
              3•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.

        • Nato BoramEnglish
          2•6 months ago

          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]OPEnglish
      5•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]English
      4•6 months ago

      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.

      • Admiral PatrickEnglish
        2•6 months ago

        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.

    • deweydecibelEnglish
      1•6 months ago

      Can it be set up so you never have to worry about account switching? Unified feed from all accounts, then if I load up a Lemmy.world post, it defaults to the Lemmy.world account, but if I want to post to Dbzer0, can I set it to shift to that account automatically?

      • Admiral PatrickEnglish
        2•6 months ago

        Technically yes but it’d take some re-engineering to track which account/instance each post came from, deduplicate the posts from each, and automagically select the account to use.

        Not something ive considered though I can look into it. Most admins ive seen who run it lock it to their instance. I mainly use that feature to switch between my normal account and mod/admin account.

    • XNXEnglish
      1•6 months ago

      Is this an app or front end?