Love the native swift app as well as the Apollo-like look and feel. However, I still feel that a lot of these lemmy apps (including this one), still seem modeled on a monolithic backend. Which isn’t the case with the fediverse.
For example, if a kbin or lemmy.world instance is down then I get a singular networking error (“Error sending request, please check your internet”; or something like that). If there was a way to show an instance as offline and gracefully communicate that to the user, that would improve the experience quite a bit!
And its also difficult to check which community I should check more often then others. For example, I’m subscribed to at least two games communities. But one has 51 people online with 1200 posts and the other has 250 online with 460 posts. Checking whose online is probably not the best way to gauge community health, but Memmy does that and its better then nothing. “Nothing” being the word for what it is right now.
So it would be nice to move the UI away from a monolithic reddit like client and more into a fediverse multi-serviced backend. Starting with these two issues I’ve noticed.
It isn’t the case for server-to-server communication, but as users we interact with one instance.
This is similar to email. For example, you connect to a mail server (via SMTP) to send email. That server then relays the message onwards through the “fediverse” of mail. A regular mail client does not connect to all possible SMTP servers. Does that make sense?
That makes sense. But sounds like the lemmy or fediverse standard itself needs some enhancements. For your email example, usually when you send an email and it doesn’t exist you get an error back usually saying the email doesn’t exist or was not delivered or something. Which is different than “please check your internet” or something.
I just feel things of this nature could be handled better. Though I’m not sure exactly where in the stack the enhancement lies.