this post was submitted on 25 Dec 2023
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I am using Voyager. It’s very far from a UX clone, unfortunately. When entering a link, for example, it simply creates the markdown for the link and leaves it to you to paste in the link on the text body, rather than popping up a text box and setting the body text itself. It frequently will lose the screen when scrolling down a list of posts, turning a solid black and requiring you to scroll back up to restore. When switching user accounts, rather than leaving you in the post you were reading, it drops you back into /all, which makes it difficult to impossible to juggle multiple accounts. I think k that’s also the one where the text you’re typing ends up underneath the visible part of the text box, making you have to scroll to see what you’re typing.
I’m also using Avelon, which has similar but not identical issues. I’m also using Memmy and Mlem, which get further away from a mature product, and I’ve tried Lemmios, Thunder, and that one whose icon was a rocket ship. Each one has bugs. No one has a great search function, no one lets you browse topics by instance (that I’ve been able to find), only a handful allow you to block instances and even blocking a topic takes three or four clicks in some clients. I also think there’s a performance falloff with the number of blocks in several of them.
And the reason I don’t just browse local or subscribed is that there’s simply not enough traffic.
I’m not slamming the devs here. Software is hard. I’ve been doing it for 30 years. UX can be very hard, especially if you’re letting the bar be set by AB and Apollo. One of them has a good text recovery tool that takes you back to the thread you were replying to, but others don’t even let you copy text from the post you’re replying to.
Honestly, I think Christian Selig should teach a master class on app development. Overcast is another one where a single developer writes a better app than most corporate teams (that’s still just the one person, right?). It can be done, and I’m sure it will be done. It’s just not quite there yet.