Asklemmy

My only problem with lemmy is the lack of a client. Right now, for me, memmy and voyager are the least worst, but they’re pretty bad.

I’m not even asking for an Apollo out of the gate. I’d settle for an Alien Blue. And I have no problem paying for it, either. I was an Apollo ne plus ultra user, or whatever it was called.

From an information architecture perspective, it really seems like reddit and lemmy might be close enough that a middle layer could be written that would make it easier to port user-facing apps from one api to the other. There’s obviously be some differences, but if feasible it might accelerate development of multiple client options at once.

For the record, I’ve tried memmy, voyager, mlem, lemmios, liftoff, and I am presently going to try bean. That’s approximately the order of how useable I’ve found them, but they each have their own annoyances. I don’t own an android device, but I hope the options are better over there.

In any case, I became a heavy reddit user only after Alien Blue came out. I became a very heavy user after Apollo came out. I left reddit the day external clients became unavailable.

I think lemmy has enormous potential, but the UX needs to be made easier if we’re to really make a dent in reddit usership and get the level of posts, comments, and active communities they have there.

I also suspect that the backend is going to need a better approach for handling the negative consequences of a large influx of users. I’m not talking about load - I’m talking about community management. Back in the day (by which I mean the early 90s) there was an email blacklist. Admins of important nodes in the email distribution network had a shared list of domains that had unsecured servers, and would update it based on where they saw the (then relatively recent phenomenon of) spam coming from.

I’m really interested in how the information flow network of the fediverse evolves, if it continues to grow. Are we going to find a network with community structure, with clumps of mutually federated instances that have few if any connections between them? If so, clients will have to have solid account creation and management, and the admin tools will need to be sophisticated.