Resolved since Mlem has all the features I wanted:

https://mander.xyz/comment/22644935

It also solved one I hinted at in a few of my comments, what are the server’s users actually like. That’s exposed in a tab on a pane summarising a server but you can see some of the information online, like the endorsements here for lemmy.ml:

https://gui.fediseer.com/instances/detail/lemmy.ml

Edit of original question

Is there an iPhone client that makes it possible to do these three things in the app:

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

  1. To be able to scroll these community (sorry not channel) lists separately and independent of channels from other servers (sorry not instances) (and not only the channels on server I’m registered to):

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

Original post

Maybe it’s just the iPhone clients, but they seem to have issues with use cases for other instances, for example:

  • If I’m interested in news from a certain country, and there is an instance focused on that country, I basically need to get on the web to search if there is a useful channel on that instance. If you use on of the iPhone clients to search for a channel and only use the instance name then nothing seems to match show up. You can find users from those channels, channels that happen to use that set of characters, or when people write a channel from that instance, but the search doesn’t seem to match channels on that instance.
  • Clients don’t seem to offer a way to navigate to an instance and see all its channels. This is basically the same use case as above, but with more exploration and less targeted. Again, I seem to need to use the web.
  • I can’t find a way to show the sidebar for an instance, besides the one I’ve registered for. For a lot of instance+channel combinations this really doesn’t matter. But when it matters, it tends to matter a lot. I had a few situations in [email protected] where people basically resorted to saying the instance was lemmy.ml and I had to go look up why that would matter by switching to a browser. (Yeah… a newbie problem, and now I wonder how I could have missed it.)

So, incase this comes across as just statements, here are some questions:

  • Am I missing an obvious client / some buttons to click?
  • Is this just how communities and users grew to use the echo system?
  • Are the iPhone clients all from similar codebases or copying UI layout?
  • Is there some technical issue with the exposed search APIs?
  • Zedstrian@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
    3·
    2 days ago

    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.

    In terms of searching for communities, no app allows for searching for communities on an instance-by-instance basis, unfortunately. As someone else noted, you could try submitting such a feature as a feature request for your preferred client.

    • porcoesphino@mander.xyzOP
      1·
      2 days ago

      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.)

      • Zedstrian@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
        3·
        2 days ago

        Most clients are the hobby project of a single developer who have limited amounts of spare time to implement a wide array of possible features.

        As I mentioned in my other reply, one such client was Arctic for iOS, which albeit no longer updated, has a community search tool that enables community searching filtered by instance (i.e. the search term ‘dbzer0’ excludes [email protected] and [email protected] and includes [email protected] and [email protected]). I’d suggest opening a feature request in the community of your preferred client, clearly explaining the rationale behind the suggestion and its potential benefits, and with enough support it could theoretically get implemented.

        • porcoesphino@mander.xyzOP
          2·
          22 hours ago

          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

    • porcoesphino@mander.xyzOP
      1·
      2 days ago

      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?

      • Zedstrian@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
        1·
        2 days ago

        To be able to scroll these community (sorry not channel) lists separately and independent of channels from other servers (sorry not instances) (and not only the channels on server I’m registered to):

        I was mostly referring to this paragraph in the ‘Edit’ section near the top; apologies if my comment came across as condescending. It seems like the terms are being used interchangeably?

        Edit: Also, reviewing the community search tool of the Arctic app for iOS, it does seem to sometimes be able to sort community names by instance if you enter the instance name as the search, such as ‘dbzer0’ only listing communities either on lemmy.dbzer0.com or other communities mentioning dbzer0 in their community description. Unfortunately Arctic has seemingly been abandoned, so hopefully other apps will eventually implement similar functionality.

        • porcoesphino@mander.xyzOP
          1·
          2 days ago

          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.

          • Zedstrian@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
            2·
            2 days ago

            I was on its TestFlight version until it was recently removed due to developer inactivity; unfortunate, because several of the features I had requested that were added weren’t on the App Store version. Arctic is still mostly working for now, but will probably break with the Lemmy 1.0 update, and thus I started looking for alternatives. Albeit not as good looking or customizable as Arctic, Mlem has the most features and best UI of the alternatives; I’m also trying Blorp now, which is a newer client with a developer open to feature suggestions at [email protected].

            Unlike Arctic, both also support using a Piefed account as an alternative to Lemmy.

        • porcoesphino@mander.xyzOP
          1·
          2 days ago

          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.