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this post was submitted on 25 Dec 2023
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I had thought that a number of subreddits took the repost thing a bit too seriously. I was a relatively heavy user, and I’d still be encountering content for the first time even though there were people complaining about reposts.
But on lemmy there’s not enough total content to begin with, and what there is gets fragmented across a fractal explosion of topics, so I end up having to browse /all sorted by new and just count on blocking communities rather than subscribing to tune my content.
I will still see the same article posted across multiple instances and topics in a row. I haven’t yet found a client that can make the UX as seamless as Apollo or even Alien Blue.
I have a similar strategy, and I don't mind the duplicate topics as it makes sense for how Lemmy works.
But this news was covered on this very community five days ago.
Voyager is basically a verbatim UX clone of Apollo.
And, if you really want to avoid dupes, it’s best to browse “local” or your subscribed communities. And don’t sub to similar communities on multiple instances. Then you’re going to see dupes.
This is the biggest problem with how the fediverse works IMO. By design it fosters fragmented, and to some extent isolated, small communities, which makes it harder to engage with content and find information. Or you have to wade through an abundance of dupes which gets incredibly frustrating really quickly.
I am using Voyager. It’s very far from a UX clone, unfortunately. When entering a link, for example, it simply creates the markdown for the link and leaves it to you to paste in the link on the text body, rather than popping up a text box and setting the body text itself. It frequently will lose the screen when scrolling down a list of posts, turning a solid black and requiring you to scroll back up to restore. When switching user accounts, rather than leaving you in the post you were reading, it drops you back into /all, which makes it difficult to impossible to juggle multiple accounts. I think k that’s also the one where the text you’re typing ends up underneath the visible part of the text box, making you have to scroll to see what you’re typing.
I’m also using Avelon, which has similar but not identical issues. I’m also using Memmy and Mlem, which get further away from a mature product, and I’ve tried Lemmios, Thunder, and that one whose icon was a rocket ship. Each one has bugs. No one has a great search function, no one lets you browse topics by instance (that I’ve been able to find), only a handful allow you to block instances and even blocking a topic takes three or four clicks in some clients. I also think there’s a performance falloff with the number of blocks in several of them.
And the reason I don’t just browse local or subscribed is that there’s simply not enough traffic.
I’m not slamming the devs here. Software is hard. I’ve been doing it for 30 years. UX can be very hard, especially if you’re letting the bar be set by AB and Apollo. One of them has a good text recovery tool that takes you back to the thread you were replying to, but others don’t even let you copy text from the post you’re replying to.
Honestly, I think Christian Selig should teach a master class on app development. Overcast is another one where a single developer writes a better app than most corporate teams (that’s still just the one person, right?). It can be done, and I’m sure it will be done. It’s just not quite there yet.