Wow… an off by one error while talking about software dev

what about just always showing the “open envelope” icon, both when the button is on and when it is off?

When the inbox counter doesn’t go down, it’s nice to quickly know which posts aren’t correctly marked. I don’t think displaying that way makes it more clear but I am about to rush to do something so I might not be thinking it through. I’ll think as I use the app and get back to you.

I think another issue is that the client gets out of sync with the server on the Inbox page. I think it only notifies that a refresh is needed when new items are added to the list.

And when the refresh banner shows up, if you pull down to reload instead of pressing the button in the banner then a load indicator shows and eventually clears but the banner doesn’t. I’m not sure if that’s because the load isn’t happening, if it’s the load is being thrown away, of if the banner state isn’t being updated.

If you put your finger on the bar and swipe to the left, it’ll show more options :)

🤦‍♂️ I even noticed the link button was greyed out but for some reason I thought it was a bug and displaying as disabled even though it was clickable. Swapping from scroll to a hamburger menu is one way to handle future user stupidity but I’m not sure if it’s better, or there are better alternatives.

So, on Mlem on an iPhone the inbox counter on the menu bar wasn’t going down when I opened things (and was -1 earlier today) so I updated the interaction bar to add the Mark Read action:

The indicator bar, everywhere, has indicators in the middle with buttons on the outside. The buttons look the same but slightly larger. If they are toggled on, then you can see them clearly as buttons. Making them look like buttons when they’re toggled off would help me parse the icon Mark Read is currently displaying, since it’s the action that will be applied not the current status of read/unread (how my brain is parsing it).

For uploading an image, the bar I see above my keyboard is this:

And I don’t see a place to change what’s in that bar.

As a side note, after opening the app and using it, I did a scan through settings and on the comments the interaction bar wasn’t quite what I’d want so I updated it and hit save. It offered for me to push the change to all interaction bars and I thought that of course I wanted the change pushed to all comment interaction bars. Anyway, I imagine the rest of my interaction bars are pretty custom now.

Oh, two things I’ve noticed:

• Voyager let you upload images for a comment. I’m not sure where they stored the images, but it would be nice to have the feature.
• It’s easy enough to reuse the link button to link to a remote picture, but it would be nice to have the button added to the row above the keyboard.
• The inbox icons for read, unread look like indicators and then they are backwards. They’re actually buttons indicating what will happen if you press them, but that doesn’t map immediately into my head. There might be a way to clean that up but I don’t have a good idea right now. Maybe you could add a light thin border with a radius around all the buttons in the row to indicate they’re buttons unlike the indicators and that might help.

Yeah, that example doesn’t work if the server is for thai people / topics but the community is something like scuba diving (and the sidebar doesn’t mention thailand). Then it wouldn’t show up in the search in Voyager.

It’s okay though, Mlem does all the things I wanted so I’ve switched to that. Thanks for taking so long to write out the flows for me.

Oh that is a nice app!!

Yep, solves all my needs, I’ll delete the other apps.

Thank you

Yeah, that’s where I started. But after setting up then I occasionally wondered if certain communities were around and couldn’t search how I want when I happened to be on an app.

It turns out that Mlem had all the features that I wanted.

I haven’t been around long enough to have a favourite client so this was more of an exploration.

It turns out that Mlem does everything I wanted so I’m going to switch to that.

Thanks for taking your time with me

Yeah, it turns out Mlem does everything I was requesting too so I’ll be using that. Thanks!

deleted by creator

Arctic was abandoned!?? I found it this morning while test different apps and I was really impressed. Well, besides loads being slow and timing out. And that seemed like a strange thing to be unique to specific client.

TLDR: yeah, I’ve used the terms interchangeably.

I somehow started off the day thinking a server was an instance, and that a community was a channel. I fixed the initial post but I’ve misused the terms a bit since. And I noticed I did again after proofreading one of my replies to you. I can guess why I’m incorrectly saying “instance” (ie a deployed server) but I’ve got no idea how I started using “channel”.

Sorry for the mixup and for the long-windedness. This post was a bit of a mess for me trying to ask what I thought was a simple question and then trying to clarify.

app allows for searching for communities on an instance-by-instance basis

Yeah, thanks for this. Any chance you know why? It’s pretty easy to do using a browser and I find myself wanting to do it a bit. I don’t notice a clickable target or menu item to open the website for the parent server (that would speed up doing things like this even if its not added to the app) and that also makes me think other people haven’t had much of a desire for this.

It makes me wonder if “I’m doing it wrong” or if people have grown into workarounds. Maybe people having alts on a few servers so they can see all communities and have a local feed? Or maybe the user base is so tech heavy that a lot of users are mostly on computers and are mostly pulling out their phones to scroll a feed or write a quick reply?

(And I only wrote the wrong terms three times this post. Sorry if I missed one.)

Are you trying to replace the words ‘community’ and ‘instance’ with ‘channel’ and ‘server’? Using non-standard terms makes it harder to understand what you’re asking for.

Can you point out where I did this in the section that I labelled as the edited post? (And it was edited quite a few hours before your comment.) Immediately following the correct terms I do call out some mistaken terms I used in the original post and some of the comments and start by apologising for using the wrong term. That seems like a reasonable thing to do.

I completely agree that I had somehow learned incorrect terms and used the incorrect terms in the original post and that it’s confusing. Your rationale here is a huge part of why I rewrote it. I kept the original post at the end, and put a title above it, so that the comments that already existed (that pointed out my mistakes) would read well and wouldn’t suddenly change to reflect poorly on the author’s.

What should I have done differently?

Exactly what I was after and one of my initial guesses in the post. Thanks.

It’s a shame, it would be useful

Actually, maybe not. For #3 I’m trying to search for keywords (that are commonly in the community name) on a given server that I’m not registered to. It would also be nice to search keywords in the text of a post that are in any post on a given server, that is not the one I’m registered to.

ie. keyword = “scuba”, server = ${known australia server}, match is one of community names or posts.

Edit note: Wow I have an issue with saying instance when I mean server and channel when I mean community

I’m a bit confused. I think you’re suggesting I add any community I want to find to that tool so it’s searchable. Isn’t that a chicken or the egg problem? If I have already found and subscribed to the channel, I don’t have a reason to be searching for it. It could help other users, but like I say in my other comment, I don’t think this is a sync issue, it seems to be an issue with the client / server implementation of the string matching.

Or I’m misunderstanding and then I’m sorry.

I think I get what you’re saying now and I don’t think it’s a syncing issue, I think it’s a string matching issue. I think I’ve explained why in another comment (in the list as #2), linked here so it’s faster to find:

https://mander.xyz/comment/22639657

1. Community sidebars are. But servers also have sidebars that sometimes include information that applies to the nested communities / users and I don’t know how to see those in the Voyager or Arctic iPhone apps.
2. I did mean community. Sorry. And I don’t think it’s that. I personally am subscribed to a number of lemmy.world communities so the should be synced to the server I’m on, but they only display in search if there is a text match, not a server / ID march:

Thanks for taking the time. I updated my question a little to clarify and finished just before you posted.

I mostly just want a way to find communities on other instances and I don’t think this reply helps unblock in-app solutions to that, but I did learn a lot so thanks. For example, if I learn of an australian server and want to see if there are any channels that would be worth scrolling / subscribing for an upcoming trip. I could search a bunch of terms and still not find an obvious community that I would find by loading the servers website and navigating to the community list and it would be nice to be able to do this inside the app, or have a clickable target that loads the server.

To be clear. I would like these three things:

1. To be able to see the different sidebars that are visible if you load these two sites (not only the instance I’m registered to):

• https://mander.xyz/
• https://lemmy.ml/

2. To be able to scroll each of these channels lists separately and independent of channels from other instances (not only the instance I’m registered to):

   • https://mander.xyz/communities
   • https://lemmy.ml/communities

3. To be able to search “ask lemmy.ml” filtered by channels and see “https://lemmy.ml/c/asklemmy” show up in some way.

I’m not sure your comment addresses that, or if it does, which one.