Hello there, I see v194 beta got pushed but with no changelog.

What is in this release?

Thanks for working on connect, it's great!

No offence, but, is it just me, or does anyone else find the Connect for Lemmy app to be incredibly laggy?

I've been experiencing some seriously frustrating performance problems that are making the app almost unusable.

Initially, I assumed it was my internet connection, and/or my mobile device causing the slowdown.

However, after thoroughly checking my network speeds and stability, as well as my phone, everything seems to be running perfectly fine.

Yet the app continues to crawl, with:

• Slow page/post loads
• Potential UI responsiveness issues
• Images not showing before I tap on them, and then, when I DO tap on them, they are all super pixelated.
• When I assign my profile image via the Web, no matter the image, when I tap on the image to expand it, in this app, it is always super pixelated and crunched up.
• When I tap on the Communities that I moderate via the sidebar, I keep getting told that there are no posts, no matter which moderated community it is. But if I check them via another app, they work perfectly fine.

Commenting, Upvoting, Posting seem to be perfectly fine.

I'm curious if this is a widespread problem or something specific to my device/setup.

Has anyone else encountered similar performance bottlenecks with the Connect for Lemmy app?

Would love to hear about your experiences and potential workarounds.

Summary

Potential Implementation of a dedicated chat platform for Connect for Lemmy users, either through Discord or Revolt Chat, to foster community engagement, facilitate feature requests, and provide a space for user discussions.

Detailed Description

As a user of Connect for Lemmy, I personally believe that implementing a community chat platform could GREATLY enhance user experience and community engagement.

This idea is inspired by similar implementations in other Lemmy clients, such as Sync for Lemmy's Discord server.

Two potential options for this feature:

1. Discord Server:

   • Create an official Discord server for Connect for Lemmy users.
   • Advantages: Widely used, feature-rich, and familiar to many users.

2. Revolt Chat (https://revolt.chat/):

   • Implement an open-source alternative to Discord.
   • Advantages: Aligns with open-source principles, potentially more privacy-focused.

Proposed Functionality

• Dedicated channels for:
  • Feature requests and suggestions
  • Bug reports
  • General discussion
  • App updates and announcements
• User roles (e.g., moderators, developers, regular users)
• Integration with GitHub for issue tracking (if applicable)
• Polls for community feedback on potential features

Benefits

1. Improved user engagement and community building
2. Direct line of communication between users and developers
3. Centralized platform for feature requests and bug reports
4. Faster dissemination of updates and announcements
5. Potential for community-driven development and testing

Implementation Considerations

• Moderation needs and policies
• Integration with existing support channels
• Resource allocation for managing the community platform
• Privacy and data handling considerations

I personally believe that this feature would SIGNIFICANTLY enhance the Connect for Lemmy experience and strengthen our user community.

Proposed Features:

1. Ability for Moderators to Edit Communities: It would be incredibly useful if moderators could perform administrative tasks for the communities they manage directly from the Connect for Lemmy app. This could include:
   • Editing community information (e.g., sidebar text, community rules, descriptions, etc.).
   • Managing community settings (visibility, posting rules, allowed content types, etc.).
   • Deleting or archiving a community if necessary.

Other third-party apps, such as Summit for Lemmy, have implemented similar functionality, and it would be great to see Connect for Lemmy adopt this feature as well. This would streamline the moderation process and eliminate the need to switch to a desktop or web browser for these administrative tasks, similar to when Reddit allowed Mods/users to manage their subreddits via the Reddit App.

2. Ability to Create Communities from the App: Adding the ability for users to create new communities directly from the app would make Connect for Lemmy even more versatile. Many users rely heavily on mobile apps for their Lemmy experience, and this feature would make community-building a seamless experience for mobile-first users.

Benefits of These Features:

• Convenience: Moderators and admins can manage their communities on the go without the need for a desktop or browser.
• Efficiency: Reduces friction for users who often switch between the app and the web interface to perform administrative tasks.
• Feature Parity: Bringing these features to Connect for Lemmy ensures it stays competitive with other third-party apps like Summit for Lemmy.

Potential Implementation:

• The app could use the Lemmy API to perform these tasks, which should already support community moderation and creation functions.
• A section in the app’s interface dedicated to “Admin”, "Moderator Management",“Community Management”, etc. for moderators could house these features and ensure a smooth user experience.

I personally believe that adding these community management tools would take the app to the next level and enhance the experience for moderators and creators alike.

So, every other month it seems I go and try to find a different app for Lemmy that generally performs better in terms of some issues I have with Connect. As usual today I have done this and realised I really like this app and others just fall flat for various different reasons as always happens.

So I guess this is a request to please update connect just to fix a few bugs and stop some frustrations in my day to day use. Anyone else that has reoccurring issues maybe please just add to this thread in the hopes of just ironning out a few issues that ruin the experience of what otherwise is a fucking great app!

My first major issue is the handling of images. This issue was introduced in the last update I believe. Image loading can be painfully slow sometimes which it never was prior but is something I can live with, what is more frustrating is when an image is present but blurry as a lot appear whilst "loading" but then upon completion it displays the following error page instead of the image -

If I download the image from this screen it will save the correct image so there is an issue somewhere with the image itself being displayed within app. I haven't seen this error with gifs however they will sometimes just never load showing a black screen with no error, I believe this is only with jpeg?

The other most frustrating thing to deal with is the app refreshing itself when you switch to another app on your phone. This does not happen all the time but does it often enough to be very frustrating. Even when I am in the middle of a reply to a comment or post, I switch to a browser or whatever to copy a link and switch back and the app will refresh itself to "frontpage: hot" feed. This is especially frustrating when trying to reply to ransom threads on /all as I then may never find what I wanted to reply to again or it takes an inordinate amount of time scrolling.

In a similar vein if you do post a reply to something, after that reply has been sent it will again default back to "frontpage: hot" so by responding to any threads you totally lose your place on a feed, as someone who browses all a lot this is incredibly frustrating! Again, it never did this in the past that I remember.

Moderator tools would also be amazing but I dont really care to much about this when compared to these issues above.

Eternity is the closest I've found to the experience I get here but the deal breaker there for me is it won't download anything unless it has notification permissions and nothing gets notification permissions!

It's been a while since I've seen any updates. Is this app still being maintained? If not, what's a good alternative?

Like the title says, I accidentally blocked someone. I tapped the three dots under someone's post and then accidentally tapped again as "block user" fell under my thumb. This user doesn't seem like someone I want to block, so I would like to unblock them. I found the "blocklist" under my profile, which says it lists blocked instances, communities and users; but (while I haven't blocked any instances), I only see communities. That said, it's not allowing me to scroll through the blocked list, so possibly the blocked user is lower in the list. If I navigate to the user in question, I see how to block them again, but no option to unblock them.

How do I find a blocked user and how do I unblock them? Thanks in advance.

Currently the 'Parent' button takes you to the top-level comment of the thread. Could it be split into two buttons, one of which takes you to the immediate parent comment?

My phone freezes once or twice a week when opening Connect, and only with that app. It's been this way for a couple months maybe. Just curious if anyone else has experienced this.

For reference, my phone is a Galaxy S21 Ultra.

When I post a comment in a long thread, submitting that comment causes the app to jump back to the top of the post. On long posts, it's a pain in the neck to scroll back to find where I was.

Is anyone else having this issue?

I was just making a post on another community, and after writing it out, I went to revise the title, and subsequently the post body disappeared. Might be related to including an image upload. Had to rewrite the post body and ended up shortening it quite a bit.

When I started using Connect, all the other apps I'd tried for Lemmy were so janky that I considered this too small an issue to ask about but after many versions I'd like to get to the bottom of it and see if it's just my phone.

In landscape mode, images will frequently not scale to fit the screen so you're essentially looking at a small section of the image greatly zoomed in. This would be frustrating at the best of times but it couples with another oddity of Connect, which is how it handles standard touchscreen ways of interacting with images. When the image is incorrectly scaled as I described you can't zoom out so you have to have this zoomed in view and try to pan around to view the image in sections but that can't really be done either because there's flow on effects to this glitch making that impossible. You simply can't move the image around enough to be able view the whole image when no matter how careful you are because there's some kind of imposed limit on the movement which is very small and if you exceed it, the image closes back to the comments again. Often though no always, if you zoom in by double tapping, you can't then zoom out again to where you were before and sometimes this also goes for pinch to zoom, if you try to move the image around to see at least a bit more of it, you have to do so very carefully because if you move by too much, or too quickly it closes the image and returns to the comments or posts view. Also if you single tap an image, it closes the image as well. It will also frequently kind of rubber band the image back to where you started if you didn't move it in just the right way.

If you view in portrait mode, things are a lot better, but still odd. You still have all the weird image navigation issues described above, but they are made worse because to adequately view most landscape images in portrait you're really going to have to zoom significantly but that means lots of extreme movement and if you're not very careful with this, you end up closing the image and also sometimes you'll zoom in on a feature and now it won't zoom out again and you need to reload the image. Also in portrait mode, the image loads at the very top of the screen under the UI 'x' in the corner for quitting the image which means to actually see that part of the image unobscured you have to move the image by a large amount which puts you at great risk of accidentally closing it. On phones with notches this is especially annoying because loading the image at the very top puts it below the notch as well.

Long pressing on a comment has always collapsed it unless you were replying to the comment, then you could long press to highlight a string of text to quote for a reply.
Now, long pressing closes the parent in reply mode and there is no way to highlight text to copy for quoting purposes.

Same problem as the original post linked. In the comments someone gave the solution but deleted the comment. I've tried to copy-paste to see what it was, but it says Permanently Deleted. Any help is greatly appreciated.

I've enjoyed using Connect but I've got no clue how it got this big.

Connect automatically hides every post I click on. It also, at least on my phone, often closes down and restarts when I switch apps or lock my phone which causes to me lose any comment I was in the middle of typing because, even with drafts ON, it would forever hide that post and there's no where for me to find it again. This has been the most frustrating app feature and nothing comes close to it.

Btw I tried to disable every 'hide post' option in settings, but Connect still hides every post I open once.

A history of visited or hidden posts will solve the issue.

I'd also like to thank the app devlopers for keeping the app light, fast, and ad-free at least for the time being.

Would be nice to have a user's instance displayed in the results on the user search page. I was glad to see the change for the feed and post page and it would be helpful to be able to distinguish who's who at a glance. Particularly when you're trying to find a specific user and there's multiple accounts across instances with the same nickname.

Is this a Connect issue or a Catbox issue?

When an inline video is present, Lemmy Connect doesn't display it - just a blank space.

Eg. This post, number 10: https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/28135123

On the web interface it works, so it ought to work in Connect too.

Hey, connect Caches several gigabytes of data and occasionally crashes because of that. i don't think thats how it should be. Though i might report it.

Lemmy Connect attempts to add ?format=webp to the image URL when loading .gif image, this makes many Lemmy servers return an error. When opening the post in the web browser, without the extra addition to the image URL, the image loads correctly.

Post where the bug is present: https://lemmy.world/post/19556846

I'm upset that a meme I tried to remake with Unicode box drawing characters lines up terribly in apps: https://lemmy.ca/post/28490027 Shouldn't code blocks render in monospace?

On Lemmy's web frontend it's perfect:

On Connect it looks like this:

On Jerboa it's basically the same:

Eternity does use monospace but the box drawing characters seem to be too wide.

All I can find about it here is one post from a year ago: https://lemmy.ca/post/1492857

Hey, I saw the link to this community in my settings today and just wanted to say thanks for the app. I use it every day.