I’m using the v0.34+hotfix version of the Jerboa fork from here because of the Android 6/7 version backport (I’m on Android 7). Some comments after playing with the app for a couple hours follow. Some of them may be specific to the apk I’m using, and some are generic to Lemmy rather than being about Jerboa particularly. I’m fairly new to both Jerboa and Lemmy, but have spent a lot of time on Usenet and Reddit in the past. I usually browse reddit from old.reddit.com on desktop or RedReader on mobile. I like RedReader and would like if Jerboa resembled it more closely. For saving Reddit posts I use a self-made Reddit API client that Reddit will of course kill soon. I anticipate doing something similar for Lemmy.
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I’m not sure of this but I noticed soon after launching the app that some post titles were greyed out, and I think those were posts that I had previously read on another computer using a desktop web browser. So that made me think the server is retaining info about what posts that I’ve read. Some other people in other threads seemed to think that was to be expected, but I think it is a poor privacy practice. But, I have not yet confirmed this behaviour. I will try some explicit tests later, and/or look at the backend code.
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The default view showed comments on the instance mixed from a bunch of different communities, which I think is how Facebook works (idk, I don’t use FB). This is pretty awful and distracting imho. At minimum this shouldn’t be the default view, but maybe it would be better to eliminate it altogether, if it promotes a Facebook-like culture on Lemmy. I noticed afterwards that the same thing happens in the top level view of the instance in a web browser, at least for lemmy.world and lemmy.ml.
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The “Communities” screen shows only communities that I’m subscribed to, though the search box lets me find non-subscribed communities. To the right of the search box there is a symbol with three vertical dots (I’m not sure what that is called) that I’ll guess is supposed to let me select between subscribed/local/all, but in my installation it does nothing. Maybe a bug?
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There is inconsistent use of “X” vs left-arrow for the navigation symbol to return to the previous screen (I don’t remember specific examples but can look if anyone needs this). Also, the left-pointing Android triangle usually doesn’t work for this. It would be nice if it did.
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It would be nice if there was a “share” symbol (the two-branch rooted tree that Android uses), to facilitate sending someone a link to the current post, or that sort of thing.
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I didn’t see an option to open links in the phone’s default browser instead of in the Fennec embedded in the app. I use Fennec as my main browser and the embedded one is annoying by comparison.
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There is no preview to see where a link goes before actually clicking it, except through some machination where you can copy the link to a clipboard and then paste it into another application. Hovering might be good, or just turning the link into an info box like in RedReader.
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It would be good to show more text (thread titles etc) on the screen, instead of white space, thumbnail pictures, expanded metadata, etc. See news.ycombinator.com for my idea of a good layout that shows lots of info.
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There should similarly be a way to suppress the display of thumbnails and other images unless the user clicks something. Lemmy otherwise burns a ton of bandwidth, which on mobile can be expensive.
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There is no way to stop the display of full sized images in posts, afaict. It would be good to have options to convert them to thumbnails or text-only links. As a general matter I think of Lemmy as a Reddit replacement and Reddit as a de facto Usenet successor. Usenet was quite usable on 2400bps dialup (text only of course) so I wish Lemmy would be much less bloaty.
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Clicking comment text in a profile displays a badge showing the # of replies, but doesn’t show the actual replies. The badge should be shown without having to click, if feasible. Clicking maybe should show the replies, but I haven’t tried to carefully envision that.
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Hiding and restoring the app window refreshes the screen. It shouldn’t: restoring a hidden screen should show exactly what was on the screen when you hid it. Refresh should happen by pressing a button or swiping down or whatever.
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The app is quite slow and janky compared to RedReader or the Hacker News app, but I saw another post saying that is version specific, so maybe not an issue for here.
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Generally there seem to be way too many server queries. I see server traffic gizmo moving whenever I scroll past a few lines of posts, or when I go to and return from a sub-screen. It would be better to retrieve a big chunk of post titles and remember them, like gnus does.
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I hope that mainline will accept the backport patch to support Android 6 and 7 since some of us still use those versions. When I mentioned this elsewhere, people told me to buy a new phone, advice that I didn’t particularly welcome since I like the phone that I have.
I had a few other thoughts that I may try to write up later. The above are mostly things that I jotted down while trying the app.
I want to thank the devs for their work on this app even though I won’t necessarily agree with every decision made. This post is intended as something like a beta test report, not a whine or rant, so I hope it is taken in the spirit given.