It really isnt bad? Like easier navigation on a phone is always a welcome change.
Dms take a couple extra taps, and I wish we had the option still to swipe right to quickly see who is online.
But the search menu is VASTLY improved, and I like the design in general. I’m hoping we get a few tweaks and then it will be perfect
Imagine the earth does an update and swaps the US and Australia for “easier navigation”. Would you be happy?
Can someone Photoshop this to say Microsoft because that’s exactly how I feel at work.
I gotchu
Lemmy’s biggest competitor at this point isn’t reddit, it’s Discord, or rather, the monster it has become. It seems to me that instead of creating a subreddit nowadays, every project now wants to use a Discord server for everything.
The problem with that is:
- Asking messages in a big, open chatroom (over, say, 20 people) gets real messy, real quickly.
- Conversations on Discord are difficult to follow when multiple of them are going at once.
- The conversations containing solutions to problems in chat or threads are not search indexable, which is the reason why reddit became quietly dominant in search results, it is simply the biggest centralized repository of organized English language text conversations available.
So why do people insist on using Discord servers to build their community? Simple, it’s the network effect. If somebody wants tech support, it’s way easier to click a Discord invite on an account for group chat you already have than it is to sign up for yet another forum that you only use once. But Lemmy doesn’t suffer from that problem of traditional forums because of federation.
Which brings me to my point, if Lemmy is to grow, it’s better to sell Lemmy to disgruntled Discord admins and forum owners to move their community than it is to get people to move off reddit at this point, since people who wants to leave reddit has all done so at this point.
Discord sucks, but I’ve actually had a 100% successful help rate on it vs Reddit or Lemmy.
Typically Discord servers have specific tech support rooms, and you’ll get help pretty quickly. Only once I have had to ask my question a second time, because it was missed the first time.
Meanwhile Reddit threads just get downvoted, buried, and you’re never helped. Even when I try to search for threads that other people have posted, 90% of threads are just blank.
Lemmy is the worst. Doesn’t matter what you need, they’ll just call you stupid and tell you to use Linux and FOSS alternative, ignoring the fact you NEED to use what you’re asking help with.
A forum should work in tandem with a chatroom in an “ideal” online community, imo. Searchable Q&A with a communication for additional, nuanced interaction. They serve different purposes and can be more powerful when used together, than they could be on their own.
Lemmy does seem to have a bunch of old, crotchety internet nerds on here that like the “old ways” of the webs. But just tell 'em to “go fuck yourself”, if they’re being a dick; and than don’t reply to them again. It’s very freeing. They’re just butt sensitive about linux and foss, cause they were bullied on early internet forums and now act the same way, when expressing their loud-ass opinions. It’s like an unfortunate cycle of abuse that has existed on forums, but don’t let it discourage you from asking anyway… the question might help others
I’m a crotchety old internet nerd… tell me to “go fuck myself”, just for funsies! It’s empowering!
And also… fuck you buddy, get good!
Discord is really bad for preservation of information. I can still find forum posts from 10 years ago on a given topic all over, but discord links seem to expire and break all the damn time and it’s hard to search through. It sucks that discord has become the defacto choice for user community space.
Lenny does part of this yes. Fediverse is the bigger ticket item. From a single account I can federate to different networks and post questions or have other interactions in different formats.
I prefer it TBH. things are easier to reach and suit a phone better than what was essentially the desktop app squeezed onto a phone.
things are easier to reach
what exactly has become easier to reach?
One of the biggest issues for me is that you can’t use ‘in:#channel’ anymore in searches for some inexplicable reason. But only on the mobile app — it works fine on desktop! If you could do that it would be fine.
there are now two different search buttons, very intuitive i know, one is channel specific - the one you see when you’re chatting in a channel (basically a pre-set in:channel for dumb people), and a universal server wide one that’s at the very top of the channel list, you can still od in:channel in there, but by default it searches all channels
at least i hope that’s the case, if it’s not i’ll riot
Huh, go figure. Thanks for the info! I honestly never would have found that myself.
I still think it should be possible to use in:channel on the channel-specific search though. One less button press and it can’t be that confusing UX-wise since you have clear intent when doing it (if anything, the fact that the two searches work differently has to be more confusing UX-wise).
How the fuck do I see who’s online on a server now that I can’t open the drawer on the right anymore? I don’t use Discord much but I could figure it out.
Click the channel title
That is definitely not the place I would expect that to have been, thank you
There’s a chevron next to the channel name, indicating that you can get more details if you tap that. I get that it’s a significant design change but I don’t think it’s that unintuitive.
It’s not clear though, because if I reminder correctly, tapping channel names before this update would give you information related to the channel, didn’t it?
It’s a little unintuitive that it shows status of the people in the server and not something to so with that specific channel.
Not quite. It shows the online status for the people that are in that channel. Not all users are in all channels so, imo, it makes sense. The only complaint I can think of is that you can’t see the status for all of the people in a server.
To everyone complaining about the updates; it’s likely that after a week or so you will just get used to the new layout and won’t even think about it anymore.
Personally, I have no issues with the update. Took about 5 mins to understand the changes move on. I also welcome the true black theme. Will save a decent amount of battery on my phone.
I heavily disagree with you. People who get annoyed by certain ui changes always will, I still hate YouTube’s new layout multiple years later.
There are always people getting annoyed by changes, doesn’t matter what the changes are. Sometimes I get the impression that humans just need something to be annoyed about.
Old.reddit vs new…
Honestly great example.
I was in this same boat until I realized I can’t send images from mobile right now and looking around for others talking about it, there were complaints that images they sent were sent to the wrong people or chats. If true, that’s insanely incompetent for a business or their size.
Knowing how their desktop app works on Linux (or more specifically doesn’t and requires you to mingle with it if you want any degree of Wayland awareness) it doesn’t surprise me their app remake (because it’s not just a redesign) is total garbage. I hope they get around to fixing the performance and bugs; but as things are right now I’m staying on Vendetta and refuse to update.
Personally hate the change to the swipe. I get that on some huge servers people probably use the “reply” feature a lot, but I definitely don’t have so much use for it as to give up the nice, coherent and logical UX of “channel/server list is on the left, user list is on the right, just swipe to them”.
IMO, swiping should be for navigating UI, not interacting with individual items. Now there’s a useless thing on the swipe and I have to reach to the top of the screen if I want to check who’s online and in the channel. Annoying.
That and the new DM screen doesn’t use swipe right as navigation, it’s just a “back” button now. Can’t quickly look at the DM list and go back to your conversation by swiping right-left any more. Literal lazy design because this is an easier way to program that interaction.
Don’t care super much about the DM button moving, it’s more convenient to access but breaks the UI paradigm. Shrug.
Oh, and the “midnight” theme is not new, you could use it for years now in the old versions.
You hate the swipe to reply feature because you find it incoherent.
I hate it because I used to stim around with it.
We’re not the same. :P
Oh I absolutely used to stim with it :D
My fingers do random swipes all the time, so it’s annoying.
Looks fine to me. Some people just bitch about every ui change.
A good change imo. Never made sense to me, both in desktop and mobile that DMs are located right with the server list. I don’t use it as much, but when I use it, it’s precisely for DMs, so I think it’s a change for the better. Some people complaining like they change every single part of the UI should touch some grass, sometimes change isn’t a bad thing.
Agreed. It will take a second to unlearn the muscle memory but separating it was a good idea.
Community should fork & fix it⋯ oh
You know there is a fork on Android called Aliucord. It allows you to install pluggins like better discord.
Or vendroid
I can vouch for vendetta, it’s wonderful. I used to use aliucord as well
I don’t use Discord for security/privacy reasons, but none of these are listed on F-Droid
They’re mods of the proprietary Discord client, so yeah they don’t meet the criteria. But the mods themselves are open source which is nice.
they are more like revanced, but for discord.
so, they can’t be on f-droid.
Its not a fork it just injects some stuff into the app. And it uses a really old version as a base because they have a shortage of devs.
discord is my compromise platform, because the only other platform all my friends could agree on was whatsapp, and fuck meta
They agree on WhatsApp? All my friends want to stick to the horrible Facebook Messenger for some reason.
We’re a weird mix of nerds in our mid to late 30s, some care enough about privacy to not have Facebook, but had been on whatsapp since pre meta.
Some refuse to install new apps, because “ugh not another one”
Definitely a compromise
They want to appear to care about privacy, you mean.
Because all of those apps own (literally or is their property) every image text and other data you give it
So you chose tencent?
yes this is oversimplified blah blah
it was a difficult choice - I pushed for them all to join signal, but there were some holdouts.
Whatsapp was e2ee, which discord is not. Discord can run in a webbrowser or a sandboxed flatpak on my desktop. All messengers suck, what ya gonna do?
Been using Guilded, still needs a little work for the mobile app, but overall pretty good.
This is why everyone should disable auto updates
Granted, apps can lock you out if you don’t have a certain version, but by and large, you should be able to choose to update when there’s this drastic of a change
It’s web based, so the UI updated on older versions of the app too. I had to downgrade to 126.21 to avoid this shit ui
Mines on 195.0 (iOS, idk if android has a different version build) and I’m still on the older ui. Wonder where the threshold is.
I hate it. It takes longer to get to useful features and in place you can now access things you’ve never cared to use faster.
You don’t like excessive padding and useless information thrown into your face? The update is just to sell themes and shit on mobile, there was no UX consultation. Download version 205.15 to get the normal UI back.
Lol. The website doesn’t even let me log in because the form doesn’t recognize that I fucking passed the bot check.
I can’t fathom why everything is on discord nowadays. It’s garbage software.
it’s because the alternatives suck more
slack is paid, irc is a bodge on top of a bodge on top of a bodge, xmpp is rather similar, and matrix… would be nice if any of the clients except element supported any of the features, and also if message synchronization worked more than halfway
MAM & carbons is a solved issue with message synchronization on XMPP. Works great.
Tbh, I would not mind a proper chat standard built on activitypub, it’s obvious that this protocol works, now if only somebody built a secure messaging platform with it.
The creator of Pixelfed is making something
Looks very interesting, love to see how well it works (and interoperates between different fediverse platforms)
I really like this update, because it will force people to check better alternatives.
Go figure
Any recommendations that already have good size populations and work across multiple devices?
Getting people off Skype was a big ordeal. Let alone Discord.
An ejabberd instance can handle 2 million concurrent users. The free software XMPP server is used by the likes of League of Legends, Fortnite, Zoom. If it’s a good enough for them, it would easily handle you community big or small.
I use Matrix, which is filled with a bunch of Linuxheads and FOSSQueers, so it may not be to your liking. Other alternatives are Jami and Simplex.
I’m still mourning the loss of ICQ
But it looks like the app still exists? What happened?