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.
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:
- Right now search or hyperlinks from posts are the only way to discover communities but we’re working on a community discovery tool.
- 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.
- 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.
- You can’t currently rehide NSFW posts but that’s good idea for us to implement.
- 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!
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.
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Subscribed: only shows a feed with Communities (subreddits) you’ve subscribed to
Local: Only shows a feed with Communities local to the Lemmy instance you’re on
All: Shows a feed with all federated Communities available
All contains posts from all communities on Lemmy your server is federating with(kind of connected in a sense), similar to reddit’s All. Each instance, in your case lemmy.world will host some communities whose posts are given in local. However, you may not be interested in all the communities and the local feed your instance offers, so you can custom subscribe communities both on your instance as well as other instances.This is exactly like Reddit’s subscribe feature, and you’ll get these posts in the Subscribed feed.
- You have to type them in the search, if the instance you are on (VLemmy for you) has not had a user subsribe to that community you will need to find it by searching the direct link, which can be found on the page for that community under the name.
- Can’t help with this one, I’m on lemmy.world so I don’t know what this problem is.
- Right now you have to search for it, I think the email thing is a bug, and will hopefully be sorted out at some point.
- I haven’t messed around with NSFW enough to answer this one
I guess he’s talking about the default lemmy.world option that is present in this app, even if you sign into a different instance. To remove lemmy.world, go to Settings, then Accounts, and long press lemmy.world and remove it.
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I find it easier finding communities through the native instance site (yours would be vlemmy.net). I use a PWA from chrome and subscribe to communities that way. Once I have that established, I use the apps (liftoff, jerboa, connect, thunder, wefwef) to browse my subbed communities. If communities you are looking for aren’t already subscribed to by someone from your instance, you may have a hard time finding them; however, you can use the search option from the vlemmy.net site to find them, sub to them, and then anyone on vlemmy.net after that should be able to find it more easily. (Remember, lots of new communities, new instances, new apps, and everything is still a work in progress).
I am unsure of your second question, re: lemmy.world instance. The instance itself is one of the largest ones currently and hosts a ton of communities. That may be the reason why you seem to be directed there. From the vlemmy.net instance, you can subscribe to those communities. If you don’t see the community on vlemmy.net that you are looking for, you can (if the instance allows) start a new one specifically for vlemmy.net. The thing about the fediverse is that, unless blocked, all users from all instances can access and participate in any community in any instance. You may (and will) find multiple communities of the same title/subject on different instances. You can participate/join any or all of those and the content is different depending on user participation.
The best way I found to navigate through communities is either sort by all to see everything available and then choose ones to subscribe to that you have interest in. Once you are tired of seeing all and have enough subbed communities you want to focus on, then switch your view to subscribed and browse that way.
Afaik, the main way to hide the NSFW posts is in your profile/settings, disable NSFW. As far as re-hiding NSFW content, I am unsure as I have not tried.
Don’t give up, there are a ton of helpful threads/users/communities on the fediverse. After a few days of playing around it should become clearer for you. I know it took a week or so for me to learn through trial and error.
Goodluck!
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That was not an issue with the app, rather an issue with the lemmy.world instance outage. Same thing happened on the webapp
I’m also a Reddit/Sync immigrant. Hi! I’m liking Liftoff a lot, but i do have a question:
Does liftoff notify you of replies to posts and/or comments you have made? If not, what’s the easiest way to see if anyone has replied to your comments?
Thanks for a great spp!
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You can subscribe to specific communities in specific instances then your subscribed becomes more of a for you page. Local is your chosen server only, and all is all posts from all severs, local and all may look similar if you are on a larger more popular server.
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