this post was submitted on 31 Jul 2024
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Updated! Updates are shown in quote text like this. Some scores are updated following app updates.

An Apps Experiment

Cross-posted from https://lemmy.world/post/18159531

Introduction

This is an experiment I performed out of curiosity, and I have a few big disclaimers at the bottom. Basically, I've seen a lot of comments recently about one app or another not displaying something right. Lemmy has been around for a while now and can no longer be considered an experimental platform.

Lemmy and the apps that people use to access the platform have become an important part of people’s lives. Whether you are checking the app weekly or daily, and whether you use it to stay up on the news or to stay connected to your hobby, it’s important that it works. I hope that this helps people to see the extent of the challenge, and encourages developers to improve their apps, too.

How I did it

I wanted to investigate objectively how accurately each app displays text of posts and comments using the standard Lemmy markdown. Markdown is a standard part of the Lemmy platform, but not all apps handle it the same. It is basically what gives text useful formatting.

I used the latest release of each app, but did not include pre-releases. I only included apps that have released an update in the last 6 months, which should include most apps in active development. ~~I was unable to test iOS-exclusive apps, so they are not included either. In all, 16 apps met the inclusion criteria.~~

I also added Eternity, which is in active development, although it has not had a recent update. I was able to include several iOS apps thanks to testing from @[email protected] – Thanks, Jordan! This made for 20 apps that were tested.

Each app was rated in 5 categories: Text, Format, Spoilers, Links, and Images. I chose these mostly based on the wonderful Markdown Guide from @[email protected], which was posted about a year ago in [email protected] (here).

I checked whether each app correctly displayed each category, then took the overall average. Each category was weighted equally. Text includes italic, bold, strong, strikethrough, superscript, and subscript. Format includes block quotes, lists, code (block and inline), tables, and dividers. Spoilers includes display of hidden, expandable spoilers. Links includes external links, username links, and community links. Images included embedded images, image references, and inline images.

Thanks to input from others, I also added a test to see if lemmy hyperlinks opened in-app. There was a problem with using the SFFA Community Guide that caused some apps to be essentially penalized twice because there was formatting inside formatting, so I created this TEST POST to more clearly and fairly measure each app.

In each case, I checked whether the display was correct based on the rules for Lemmy Markdown, and consistent with the author’s intent. In cases where the app recognized the tag correctly but did not display it accurately, that was treated as a fail.

Results

Out of a possible perfect 10, 6 apps displayed all markdown correctly:

Alexandrite - 10.0

Connect - 10.0

Jerboa (Official Android client) - 10.0

Photon - 10.0

Summit - 10.0

Voyager - 10.0

Quiblr - 9.5

Arctic - 9.3

Interstellar - 9.1

Lemmuy-UI - 9.0

Thunder - 8.9

Tesseract - 8.6

mlmym - 8.0

Racoon - 7.6

Boost - 7.3

Eternity - 7.0

Lemmios - 6.9

Sync - 6.9

Lemmynade - 6.1

Avelon - 5.7

More details of testing here

Disclaimers

Disclaimers

I Love Lemmy Apps (and their devs)

Lemmy apps devs work very hard, and invest a lot in the platform. Lemmy is better because they are doing the work that they do. Like, a LOT better. Everyone who uses the platform has to access it through one app or another. Apps are the face of the entire platform. Whether an app is a FOSS passion project, underwritten by a grant, or generating income through sales or ads, no one is getting rich by making their app. It is for the benefit of the community.

This is not meant to be a rating of the quality or functionality of any app. An app may have a high rating here but be missing other features that users want, or users may love an app that has a lower rating. This is just about how well apps handle markdown.

This is pretty unscientific

You’ll see my methodology above. I’m not a scientist. There is probably a much better way to do this, and I probably have biases in terms of how I went about it. I think it’s interesting and probably has some valuable information. If you think it’s interesting, let me know. If you think of a better way, PM me and I’d be happy to share what I have so you don’t have to start from scratch.

My only goal is to help the community

I do think that accurately displaying markdown should be a standard expectation of a finished app. I hope that devs use this as an opportunity to shore up the areas that are lagging, and that they have a set of standards to aim for.

~~I don’t have any Apple things~~

~~Sorry. This is just Android and Web review. If someone would like to see how iOS apps are doing, please reach out and I’ll share how we can work together to include them.~~

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[–] [email protected] 8 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (1 children)

If you're getting that granular then you must've had to record the data somewhere. Did I miss where the OP is sharing their data set?

[–] gedaliyah 4 points 3 months ago (1 children)

Sure, you can DM me somewhere to share a spreadsheet. Just please keep in mind that DM in Lemmy is not encrypted.

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[–] jordanlund 8 points 3 months ago (10 children)

@[email protected]

I have an iOS device and am happy to repeat your methodology! Did you have a test thread or something with all the markdowns?

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[–] [email protected] 8 points 3 months ago (2 children)

I’ve been using Mlem since week 2 and I have no idea if I’m missing anything or not. I’ve never visited any instance on anything but Mlem.

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[–] [email protected] 8 points 3 months ago

Btw I just found out that lemmy-ui supports markdown citations.

It’s not documented AFAIK though.

[–] Lightsong 7 points 3 months ago (1 children)

Ouch, I use Boost and paid for ads free. Pls bring it up to 10.0.

[–] tacosplease 6 points 3 months ago

Sync only got 6.9 but I have no complaints about the app

[–] [email protected] 7 points 3 months ago (3 children)

cross-posted

Minor nit pick, but did you know that Lemmy has actual cross posting functionality?

Either way, interesting study. This is the type of content that I ~~Red~~ er… Lemmy for, so thanks for posting. I use Voyager myself, being an Apollo refugee.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 3 months ago (5 children)

Ya I've only been able to cross post on the web UI. I've seen apps like Jerboa and Voyager at least show cross posting correctly, I just wish they made it easier to cross-post in app.

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[–] [email protected] 6 points 3 months ago (1 children)

I might consider eternity abandonware now

1 year no updates

[–] gedaliyah 7 points 3 months ago

Eternity is in active development. It was sleeping for a while, but @[email protected] has confirmed that it will see a new release soon.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 3 months ago (1 children)

What's the score on Eternity?

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[–] [email protected] 5 points 3 months ago (2 children)

I started on jerboa, but ended up moving to connect because of the bugs.

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[–] [email protected] 5 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago)

~test~ ~test~

The above feels wrong but idk if Lemmy has a formal markdown spec. I haven't had time to dig into it. This is what it looks like in Jerboa. If it wasn't 6 AM I'd try to file a big report.

[–] Squorlple 4 points 3 months ago

There are a lot of image/gif(?) posts that I haven’t been able to view either on the Memmy (Apple) app or in-browser with either Safari (Apple) or Google Chrome. I imagine it comes down to the file types as well as the lack of native hosting to standardize posts of different media types, but I’m not the techiest person to consult on that. One downside of the fediverse is the lack of standards for file hosting/conversion/displaying to ensure that all media can be accessed regardless of the browser/app (or, alternatively, the lack of an all-encompassing app for all devices [Jerboa sounds like the closest to this to me but it is not available for iOS yet]), as well as the self-funded nature of the instances commonly not having the budget to natively host multimedia content such as videos.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 3 months ago (1 children)

I'm looking at this in eternity and seems only spoilers don't work from the post you linked.
User and community links work properly.

[–] gedaliyah 6 points 3 months ago (10 children)

I'm very excited to see a new update from eternity. It's always been a solid app and is likely to be my daily driver again. Right now I'm using raccoon mostly, although I was pretty disappointed to see the low score on markdown

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