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?
  • porcoesphino@mander.xyzOP
    1·
    3 hours ago

    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.

    • Sjmarf@lemmy.ml
      2·
      3 hours ago

      Ah, I see! I get what you mean about the icons being confusing. Swapping them around might also be confusing, though… what about just always showing the “open envelope” icon, both when the button is on and when it is off? 🤔

      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).

      Sure, I’ll add a setting for this. If you’re on the TestFlight beta, it’ll probably be in this weekend’s update.

      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.

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

      • porcoesphino@mander.xyzOP
        1·
        3 hours ago

        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.

        • Sjmarf@lemmy.ml
          1·
          2 hours ago

          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.

          Thanks, I appreciate it :)

          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.

          I’ll look into these issues 👍

          🤦‍♂️ 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.

          Yeah, this is a common cause of confusion; we really need to improve it somehow. A hamburger menu is an interesting idea 🤔 Another option would be to add some sort of arrow indicator to show that it’s scrollable. I’ll think about it 👍