Jerboa

Hi everyone! I just wanted to take a second out of my day to say how blown away I am by the incredible work being put into the Jerboa app, I just explored some of the logs and info available and everyone contributing (especially the people coding the revisions and fixes) are working so hard. It honestly gives me so much faith in humanity to see the efforts being put into making Jerboa keep up with the influx of people when you all have outside lives that you are also juggling! Even in the week or so of being on the app the user experience (coming from an absolute layperson, so I can't even fully appreciate what's going on technically) has been improving at a crazy fast rate. I hope you all take a breather when you can and know that you are incredibly appreciated :)

Does anyone else also have issues with backspace in Jerboa? Often when I use backspace to correct a spelling mistake, spaces further back are removed as well. Also, after moving the cursor to a new place, it sometimes randomly jumps to other places (removing words in the process).

I'm on Android, /e/ OS 1.11-s-20230510288098-stable-FP3 Fairphone (and I only have this in Jerboa).

Give that there are often multiple sublemmets(communities) for a subject/hobby, I am sorely missing the ability to group them together as desired.

I've noticed this quite often, such as in the center of this screenshot, incomplete Community names, this one should be modded Minecraft for example

I am on Android 13 and Jerboa 0.0.36. The scrolling is so jittery since the last update. It has been working fine before so I don't know what changed? I don't have this issue with any other app.

Hey so my partner has Liftoff to browse Lemmy, and I noticed his search engine allows search for comments, posts, communities etc where as Jerboa just lets me search communities.

It was a sole factor of me deciding to also put Liftoff on my phone cuz it felt like an important function to be missing, but am I just not seeing it?

As the title says, I can't change from All+Hot. I at best can go to specific communities, but can't filter to only subscribed or local (i really don't understand who wants local only, but whatever). On version 0.0.36 on Android

Under settings, for my profile it has it set to All+Active, and will not keep any changes saved. I can hit the save button, and the settings won't save it i back out of that settings section and come back

--Update So if I go under settings and change the default filtering, save, THEN force close, THEN it updates to my preferred filtering. But if I want to change it again, then I have to go to settings and force close

In Open by default settings for Jerboa in Android, there are 55 instances listed. It means that they will open in the app itself. Before, it used to open website in browser. Thanks for the great work! Hopefully other remaining instances are supported in future.

I would like to have

-open app, it directly links to subscribed, instead of local. -mark posts that I scrolled over as "read" meaning that they won't appear on pc -wordfilter blocklist

Would it be possible to implement this features?

I'm unable to reply to comments on Jerboa. Not sure if it has to do with the recent version updates.

Is it possible to force jerboa to use English instead of the localized version of the app?

The text overlaps the icons and there are some options that I don't understand in the localized version.

https://github.com/dessalines/jerboa/issues/891

If you downvote any post in jerboa 0.0.35 you actually upvote it. Seems like anything gets merged? If this goes on like this, there could be a lot of trouble

All the other viewing options such as subscribed or local seem to switch back to active. I am logged into my account and have subscriptions. Any ideas?

This would likely reduce the flood of redundant posts with question's, which have already been asked before.

On the web version of Lemmy I can choose different ways of sorting comments, but in Jerboa there are no options for this?

I'm sure many have that problem right now (e. g. feddit.de is on 0.17.4), and I understand the developer's choice not to support old server versions anymore, so when I choose to stay with Jerboa 0.0.34 for the time being, I'd at least like to see when my instance upgrades to 0.18. I can see it at the bottom of the Communities list in the desktop browser, but haven't found it in the app, yet.

I almost exclusively browse lemmy through the jerboa app. I love having the "all communities" tab so I can browse outside my instance. However, recently when I go to the All tab ans sort by "hot", I'm getting the same posts every day. They're now over a week old. When I sort by "new", it does grab new posts from everywhere, but since most of these are only a couple minutes old, there's not a lot of interaction on them.

Does anyone know why this is happening?

Now when I click on a post to view it, the app doesn't load, so I can't view any post in its entirety or interact with any comments

My account settings are set to Subscribed/New, but when I open the app I see Local/All and then have to change it.

Can you add text to speech to Jerboa? So that it will read the OP and all comments, be able to pause and play, forward past comments and lastly read with the screen off.

This would be the best. Thanks

Going to the search feature doesn't seem to yield any results when I search for things. Ex: I want to find Disney instances, but typing in 'Disney' in the search field provides no results.

I am on an instance that is at version 0.18.

Any help is appreciated!!

I'm using the v0.34+hotfix version of the Jerboa fork from here because of the Android 6/7 version backport (I'm on Android 7). Some comments after playing with the app for a couple hours follow. Some of them may be specific to the apk I'm using, and some are generic to Lemmy rather than being about Jerboa particularly. I'm fairly new to both Jerboa and Lemmy, but have spent a lot of time on Usenet and Reddit in the past. I usually browse reddit from old.reddit.com on desktop or RedReader on mobile. I like RedReader and would like if Jerboa resembled it more closely. For saving Reddit posts I use a self-made Reddit API client that Reddit will of course kill soon. I anticipate doing something similar for Lemmy.

1. I'm not sure of this but I noticed soon after launching the app that some post titles were greyed out, and I think those were posts that I had previously read on another computer using a desktop web browser. So that made me think the server is retaining info about what posts that I've read. Some other people in other threads seemed to think that was to be expected, but I think it is a poor privacy practice. But, I have not yet confirmed this behaviour. I will try some explicit tests later, and/or look at the backend code.

2. The default view showed comments on the instance mixed from a bunch of different communities, which I think is how Facebook works (idk, I don't use FB). This is pretty awful and distracting imho. At minimum this shouldn't be the default view, but maybe it would be better to eliminate it altogether, if it promotes a Facebook-like culture on Lemmy. I noticed afterwards that the same thing happens in the top level view of the instance in a web browser, at least for lemmy.world and lemmy.ml.

3. The "Communities" screen shows only communities that I'm subscribed to, though the search box lets me find non-subscribed communities. To the right of the search box there is a symbol with three vertical dots (I'm not sure what that is called) that I'll guess is supposed to let me select between subscribed/local/all, but in my installation it does nothing. Maybe a bug?

4. There is inconsistent use of "X" vs left-arrow for the navigation symbol to return to the previous screen (I don't remember specific examples but can look if anyone needs this). Also, the left-pointing Android triangle usually doesn't work for this. It would be nice if it did.

5. It would be nice if there was a "share" symbol (the two-branch rooted tree that Android uses), to facilitate sending someone a link to the current post, or that sort of thing.

6. I didn't see an option to open links in the phone's default browser instead of in the Fennec embedded in the app. I use Fennec as my main browser and the embedded one is annoying by comparison.

7. There is no preview to see where a link goes before actually clicking it, except through some machination where you can copy the link to a clipboard and then paste it into another application. Hovering might be good, or just turning the link into an info box like in RedReader.

8. It would be good to show more text (thread titles etc) on the screen, instead of white space, thumbnail pictures, expanded metadata, etc. See news.ycombinator.com for my idea of a good layout that shows lots of info.

9. There should similarly be a way to suppress the display of thumbnails and other images unless the user clicks something. Lemmy otherwise burns a ton of bandwidth, which on mobile can be expensive.

10. There is no way to stop the display of full sized images in posts, afaict. It would be good to have options to convert them to thumbnails or text-only links. As a general matter I think of Lemmy as a Reddit replacement and Reddit as a de facto Usenet successor. Usenet was quite usable on 2400bps dialup (text only of course) so I wish Lemmy would be much less bloaty.

11. Clicking comment text in a profile displays a badge showing the # of replies, but doesn't show the actual replies. The badge should be shown without having to click, if feasible. Clicking maybe should show the replies, but I haven't tried to carefully envision that.

12. Hiding and restoring the app window refreshes the screen. It shouldn't: restoring a hidden screen should show exactly what was on the screen when you hid it. Refresh should happen by pressing a button or swiping down or whatever.

13. The app is quite slow and janky compared to RedReader or the Hacker News app, but I saw another post saying that is version specific, so maybe not an issue for here.

14. Generally there seem to be way too many server queries. I see server traffic gizmo moving whenever I scroll past a few lines of posts, or when I go to and return from a sub-screen. It would be better to retrieve a big chunk of post titles and remember them, like gnus does.

15. I hope that mainline will accept the backport patch to support Android 6 and 7 since some of us still use those versions. When I mentioned this elsewhere, people told me to buy a new phone, advice that I didn't particularly welcome since I like the phone that I have.

I had a few other thoughts that I may try to write up later. The above are mostly things that I jotted down while trying the app.

I want to thank the devs for their work on this app even though I won't necessarily agree with every decision made. This post is intended as something like a beta test report, not a whine or rant, so I hope it is taken in the spirit given.

Either make the zones for those two options smaller or hide the options in a secondary menu. Thanks.