Lemmy community discoverability is not user-friendly and can be improved App side

MrSoup@lemmy.zip to Fediverse@lemmy.world – 286 points –

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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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!

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?

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

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.

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.

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 :(

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

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

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.

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

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

Thank you.

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