What are your top three features you'd like to see on your favorite Lemmy client?
For me it would be:
Monet icon and Material UI design.
Mark read post while scrolling.
A button to hide such read posts.
I know there are more critical functions which most of the apps are lacking like going straight to the comment from a reply, it wasn't a big deal before because there were not many comments, but now it is becoming harder to find the context!
So far only Jerboa and Thunder qualifies the first "needs" for me!
So far the app Lemming seems to be doing swipe gestures really well. I'm just waiting for a settings page and a proper light theme and I'll probably move to it. For now, I'm using wefwef.app, which behaves very similar to apollo and also has great gesture support. I highly recommend both.
Might be controversial, but I personally want the option to turn off swipe gestures for votes. I keep giving people downvotes on accident when I'm trying to go back to the previous screen. Every iOS app I've tried has this feature and it's inconvenient imo.
Allow you to set helper apps in Android to open specific links - i.e revanced instead of YouTube, Firefox instead of Chrome, imgurviewer instead of various image sites in a browser. Ads and bloat designed to drive engagement on mobile are frustrating.
Client-side blacklists for communities and instances so they aren't shown in all
-Community aggregation (multi-communities)
-Easy back and forth nav between the post scroll and threads
-occasional random substitution of a sports game score/summary instead of the thread I clicked to read.
Ok, not that last one, but I couldn’t think of a good third one off the top of my head.
Great battery life + interplay with android ecosystem
Information density
Customizability without being overwhelming
Works well with larger Lemmy, Threadiverse, & Fediverse communities
Upstream major improvements up to base Lemmy + ActivityPub platforms. Ideally there'd be some cooperation between open source apps to reuse existing tools and extract shared functionality to new libraries for further reuse, especially in terms of Lemmy API consumption, security, android/ios/etc platform quirks, emojis, etc.
Multiple accounts / platform access
Allow workflows to share between platforms. Kbin combining micro+forums is neat, but I think separating microblogging and link aggregation/forums makes more sense. It'd be neat to share things that I like find as microblogging posts. Vice versa sometimes I think masto posts would be great discussion items for communities and woudl like to create a post from there.
Open source
I know RIF wasn't, but ideally there'd at least be an open core (which fits in with my first point under #2)
Cooperates with other open platforms, preferably using web + other free standards where appropriate to make contributions easier.
If fully open, eventually backed/incorporated by larger FOSS players like Mozilla Foundation, Apache, or FSF.
I only briefly tried other apps. RIF was older (and hardened, so super performant + stable), and kept the information density high (less whitespace) similar to old.reddit. Lots of internal integrations with other sites so my reddit browsing didn't affect my feeds on other sites (particularly YouTube).
https://www.androidpolice.com/best-reddit-apps/ has a good comparison of the main apps.
Clear posts that I've already read, but be able to see them again with refresh. Not completely gone like with the settings option. This is what I miss the most of my old Reddit client.
Sorting, if I sort by new it's really really similar to hot right now, just one article or two different. In fact I get hot articles that are 8 mins old, something isn't right.
Link/image handleing is hit and miss right now, sometimes they don't expand when I "click" on them.
I'm using my tablet to browse Lemmy and haven't found an app yet that has all the posts on the left side and the content of a single post on the right.
The screenshot shows an example.
Also, mark a post as read when you have opened the media and ability to hide read posts.
The only thing that I find truly lacking in all clients at this point is a practical solution to viewing external communities by the multiple link methods in your own instance, to properly wait for the community to download if required, and to allow you to subscribe. The web frontend is the best at this but even with searching it outputs a result before the community pops up, likely because it's not downloaded yet, but it should make the search take longer and wait for it to download.
Ability to log in to accounts on multiple instances This one is common, but I'm specifying it for #2 & #3.
Optional sync community subscriptions between accounts I'm too locked-in to an instance after subscribing to many communities. Make it easy for me to migrate by keeping my subscriptions in sync between accounts.
Community folders (which I don't think Reddit had!) where you can group together your communities and order posts from those groups only and find communities quickly (like memes: c/memes - c/lemmyshitpost , creative: c/arttrade - c/weirdwheels - c/bonvoyage , mental: c/autism, c/adhd, c/neurodivergence etc)
I know some of you will hate this and I do too to an extend but in a later update, if the currency solves its current problems, "awarding" comments via XNO/Nano as a replacement for Reddit awards, maybe some XNO from that can be given to sysadmins for server costs?
An instance where the serverload is shared as IPFS and other decentralized means for testing purposes, I know servers here are loaded rn
Different fonts, disabling the sharing of images in comments, limited characters per comments and other settings for communities that can be set by the admins/mods
Custom CSS setting similar to old youtube or myspace profiles for communities (may make some third party apps panic)
Wasm things to show stuff like 3d models on comments and posts and small games, although that should come from safe places to avoid malicious attacks and serverload... (Wasm is fast and is supported in most major browsers, including mobile and shouldn't kill 3rd party software, hopefully- finding people whom would code with it is another story though but if done well can make Reddit look like plebbit lol) (WILL make some third party apps panic)
Using Liftoff right now and so far looks like the best. At the very least, the most mature.
With that said, a few things in mind:
Long pressing a comment suppresses it, but tapping does nothing. The tap action could be used to suppress (what long press does now) and long press should show action buttons for the comment (that should be hidden as default)
When searching for a community, sort by number of subscribers or active subscribers or number of posts. It seems to be random now, maybe? Maybe alphabetical order? Can't recall, but prioritizing larger/more active communities is a good thing and concentrates things a bit more. (For example, search for "movies" on Jerboa and you'll see the largest community that your account can see first and go from there. But on Liftoff, the first results aren't that relevant). Also, show number of users/posts as in other apps in the community search page.
"Go to post" button doesn't work. It fails to load (yours or anyone's)
When seeing your comments, you should be able to see the post it was made in and if you click the post name, you go directly to it (not your comment)
Pressing "back" button should open a popup to confirm if I want to exit the app instead of a banner asking to press again to exit. Just QOL.
Communities tab doesn't show my subscriptions correctly? Don't know if there's a problem in Lemmy itself, tho, but I'm subscribed to some communities that aren't showing up there and some that I'm subscribed to are duplicated. Looks to be a problem with communities with the same name, but in different instances. I can correctly see the communities if clicking them through "about", but not from "communities", as I'm taken to the same place, no matter which I click.