What are your top three features you'd like to see on your favorite Lemmy client?
For me it would be:
Monet icon and Material UI design.
Mark read post while scrolling.
A button to hide such read posts.
I know there are more critical functions which most of the apps are lacking like going straight to the comment from a reply, it wasn't a big deal before because there were not many comments, but now it is becoming harder to find the context!
So far only Jerboa and Thunder qualifies the first "needs" for me!
I'm using my tablet to browse Lemmy and haven't found an app yet that has all the posts on the left side and the content of a single post on the right.
The screenshot shows an example.
Also, mark a post as read when you have opened the media and ability to hide read posts.
Ability to log in to accounts on multiple instances This one is common, but I'm specifying it for #2 & #3.
Optional sync community subscriptions between accounts I'm too locked-in to an instance after subscribing to many communities. Make it easy for me to migrate by keeping my subscriptions in sync between accounts.
-Community aggregation (multi-communities)
-Easy back and forth nav between the post scroll and threads
-occasional random substitution of a sports game score/summary instead of the thread I clicked to read.
Ok, not that last one, but I couldn’t think of a good third one off the top of my head.
Might be controversial, but I personally want the option to turn off swipe gestures for votes. I keep giving people downvotes on accident when I'm trying to go back to the previous screen. Every iOS app I've tried has this feature and it's inconvenient imo.
The only thing that I find truly lacking in all clients at this point is a practical solution to viewing external communities by the multiple link methods in your own instance, to properly wait for the community to download if required, and to allow you to subscribe. The web frontend is the best at this but even with searching it outputs a result before the community pops up, likely because it's not downloaded yet, but it should make the search take longer and wait for it to download.
Allow you to set helper apps in Android to open specific links - i.e revanced instead of YouTube, Firefox instead of Chrome, imgurviewer instead of various image sites in a browser. Ads and bloat designed to drive engagement on mobile are frustrating.
Client-side blacklists for communities and instances so they aren't shown in all
Using Liftoff right now and so far looks like the best. At the very least, the most mature.
With that said, a few things in mind:
Long pressing a comment suppresses it, but tapping does nothing. The tap action could be used to suppress (what long press does now) and long press should show action buttons for the comment (that should be hidden as default)
When searching for a community, sort by number of subscribers or active subscribers or number of posts. It seems to be random now, maybe? Maybe alphabetical order? Can't recall, but prioritizing larger/more active communities is a good thing and concentrates things a bit more. (For example, search for "movies" on Jerboa and you'll see the largest community that your account can see first and go from there. But on Liftoff, the first results aren't that relevant). Also, show number of users/posts as in other apps in the community search page.
"Go to post" button doesn't work. It fails to load (yours or anyone's)
Pressing "back" button should open a popup to confirm if I want to exit the app instead of a banner asking to press again to exit. Just QOL.
Communities tab doesn't show my subscriptions correctly? Don't know if there's a problem in Lemmy itself, tho, but I'm subscribed to some communities that aren't showing up there and some that I'm subscribed to are duplicated. Looks to be a problem with communities with the same name, but in different instances. I can correctly see the communities if clicking them through "about", but not from "communities", as I'm taken to the same place, no matter which I click.
Great battery life + interplay with android ecosystem
Information density
Customizability without being overwhelming
Works well with larger Lemmy, Threadiverse, & Fediverse communities
Upstream major improvements up to base Lemmy + ActivityPub platforms. Ideally there'd be some cooperation between open source apps to reuse existing tools and extract shared functionality to new libraries for further reuse, especially in terms of Lemmy API consumption, security, android/ios/etc platform quirks, emojis, etc.
Multiple accounts / platform access
Allow workflows to share between platforms. Kbin combining micro+forums is neat, but I think separating microblogging and link aggregation/forums makes more sense. It'd be neat to share things that I like find as microblogging posts. Vice versa sometimes I think masto posts would be great discussion items for communities and woudl like to create a post from there.
Open source
I know RIF wasn't, but ideally there'd at least be an open core (which fits in with my first point under #2)
Cooperates with other open platforms, preferably using web + other free standards where appropriate to make contributions easier.
If fully open, eventually backed/incorporated by larger FOSS players like Mozilla Foundation, Apache, or FSF.
Clear posts that I've already read, but be able to see them again with refresh. Not completely gone like with the settings option. This is what I miss the most of my old Reddit client.
Sorting, if I sort by new it's really really similar to hot right now, just one article or two different. In fact I get hot articles that are 8 mins old, something isn't right.
Link/image handleing is hit and miss right now, sometimes they don't expand when I "click" on them.