I'm new here, fleeing reddit and it's war on anonymity. Happy to be here!

I created my account on Lemmy.world, and yesterday learned how to subscribe to communities on other servers.

I was adding a few from Lemmy.ml, but hit a snag with a couple, using the 'Privacy' community as my example: when I hit 'subscribe' and enter 'Lemmy.world' as the instance to follow from, I just get a white page with 'Server error'.

I left it 24hrs and tried again, and its still the same.

Any hints?

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[–] 1 point 10 hours ago* (last edited 10 hours ago)

It's been months so I don't recall specifically in terms of things that are more unique to Summit that are not also shared with other third-party apps like Voyager, but one thing that all third-party apps seem to share is a difficulty writing a message when you also want to browse the Threadiverse looking for information to put into it. You can't really easily keep pausing and resuming a draft, unlike in a browser setting where you simply open up a new tab and you are good to go.

Also to copy things that you can clearly see on the screen seems somehow impossible. So once more, back to the browser it is to perform the most basic of functions. Same with searching, like through an extremely long post or through the set of possibly hundreds of comments looking for specific text or whatever. One "trick" I did find for Voyager is that while you cannot select and copy text from a post or comment innately, you can do so in the reply window, so you can pretend to reply, copy the text, and then cancel that (it's still obviously a major impediment if you wanted to paste that into a message draft that you were writing).

And sometimes text does not fully display, like a very long username@instancename combination goes too long for the space allocation for it, especially deeper into the replies where the space allocation gets smaller and smaller sliding off to the right to represent indentation, so if I really really need to see that information it takes clicking and time and interrupting the flow to find out, or again popping back into the browser. And sometimes usernames are different than what is displayed, making it harder to reconcile what you see vs. being able to tag someone with their actual rather than display name. The same goes with community names as well.

In Voyager specifically and I don't recall about Summit, searching for communities has less information and filters than the browser version.

Although conversely, trying to write a long comment in the browser on a Lemmy instance is insanely difficult as, at least for me (Firefox on Android) once the replay reaches a certain length threshold, after that every single key press would cause almost the entire screen to jump and skip and move as the text window got updated.

So on a more daily basis third-party apps can offer a superior experience than the basic Lemmy UI, but not fully 100% of the time. And so it is good to know your way around using the basic web browser interface, for those situations. You might say that the web browser UI is the most fully featured of them all, even though ironically sometimes the most basic feature of all, writing comments, does not work very well. Although better than one approach vs. the other is to have both options at your fingertips for when what you want done is within its set of capabilities, and then the ability to quickly hop into the more basic and foundational web browser UI at a moment's notice (e.g. via "sharing" the post to accomplish the rest of whatever you want done).

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