I migrated over to Lemmy from Reddit, and while I am excited to use a new platform and explore new and continuing communities from Reddit, using this app honestly confuses me. Part of the reason is app design. But I understand that many apps are newer and may be rough around the edges. Nevertheless, here are some things I’m confused about how to even do:

  • How do I visit communities of which explicit hyperlinks I know? Sometimes I can find them by typing in search, but why can’t I just go somewhere by typing in like an address bar or something?
  • I signed up at the VLemmy instance, but why are there menus everywhere for the lemmy.world instance everywhere that is practically useless to me? Can I make them go away?
  • How do I navigate through different communities? When I click a link that I expect to take me to a community my email app pops up instead and I don’t know how to get around. Do I have to type everything into search when I want to navigate to a new community that I’m not subscribed to?
  • Is there a way to re-hide NSFW posts once I’ve clicked them to make them visible?

Then there’s some design things I’m legitimately confused about why they’re like that. It’s entirely too cumbersome to reach saved posts. I have to go to my profile, then tap on the bookmark icon on the upper left. I feel like there should be a way to access that easier. There isn’t even an indication about where that is supposed to be so finding out that’s where saved posts are took awhile.

Sorry if it seems I’m too critical about this stuff. Coming over from Reddit does mean being a bit spoiled about this stuff since many Reddit apps have had longer to figure app design out. Still, hopefully some of these things are at least addressable towards making a more user friendly experience in the future.

  • @zachatrocityMEnglish
    10•1 year ago

    Hey there! Welcome to Lemmy, and thanks for trying Liftoff!

    Some context: Liftoff is a FOSS revival of a previously abandoned Lemmy app. Because of this we got a lot of great things already completed, but also some pain points like the one you mentioned above. One of the main focuses of the original was to provide a tailored experience for people with multiple accounts accross multiple instances. We’ve come a long way in 2 weeks but we’re still in beta testing and there will be bugs and user experience issues that we’re working on.

    To your points:

    1. Right now search or hyperlinks from posts are the only way to discover communities but we’re working on a community discovery tool.
    2. In order to provide an experience for people who don’t know Lemmy we add Lemmy.world as a default instance. That can be deleted from the account settings by pressing and holding on Lemmy.world.
    3. Currently if the links to communities aren’t formatted with the /c/ notation, there is a bug where the email app gets opened. The fix for this is in progress and should be in the next release.
    4. You can’t currently rehide NSFW posts but that’s good idea for us to implement.
    5. About the saved posts I agree this is hard to find and something we’re wanting to tweak. If you have multiple accounts across multiple instances then you have different saved posts depending on the account. That’s why it currently found on the account page.

    Thanks for trying the app and stay tuned as we’re fixing bugs and adding features daily!

    • @[email protected]OPEnglish
      1•1 year ago

      Hey! Thanks so much for your help!

      So on apps like Boost for Reddit saved posts were kept on a page that you could access from each logged in account’s subreddits or a tab on the profile page that you could swipe to. I think that’s a pretty good way to do it.

      I’m excited for what I can discover on this platform and app. Thanks for your hard work.