I’m a big fan of the app, and I think it does stand out. However, there’s a couple of areas that I think really do need to be addressed, especially if it’s going to become the Apollo of lemmy.

First, using the link widget should at the very least autopopulate with the highlighted text, and if the paste buffer contains a url, probably autopopulate with that as well. It’s beyond frustrating to select a block of text to turn into a link, only to have to go back, copy the text into the buffer, then recopy the link into the buffer, and then paste it in. All of the data are already available via the api.

The second is that switching user accounts should not reset the current post view back to the list of posts view. In Apollo, a user could switch accounts (say, to a mod or other dedicated account) while looking at a post/thread and still continue with the current view. One could even do this in the course of writing a reply, so that if (for example) an author had a professional account for their books and a separate account for general interactions, they could switch over if it was appropriate to apply to someone as a published SF author as opposed to the account where they posted cat memes. I recognize that the architecture of lemmy might make that inapplicable in some cases (eg if the switched account is on an instance that doesn’t have that particular post for whatever reason), but I think that should be an edge case rather than having the reset apply across the board.

The last one is a feature that I don’t think even Apollo got right but which one of the other lemmy apps is very close to nailing. Having a reply interrupted, either because the app crashed or got backgrounded or was interrupted by the user, shouldn’t erase the possibility of resuming. The typed response, along with the comment it’s responding to, should be saved out. Apollo only saved the text of the comment, while the other lemmy app lets you jump right back into it with both the response and the target. I’d love to see this at least at the single comment level, if not queuing up several independently across accounts. The storage space is trivial and the context is ( I imagine) available.

That all said, this is a remarkable and mature app, especially given how new it is, and I love it.

Texas and I believe a few other states have passed anti-abortion laws that attempt to cover people leaving their states to seek safe and legal abortions. The ones I’m familiar with (as I recall) applied to things like traveling on state-owned roads to seek an abortion out of state.

Let’s lay aside the question of constitutional and federal restrictions governing interstate commerce laws for now. I started wondering if these laws would govern transportation via airlines or Amtrak. They could (I assume) make the argument that they pulled you over on the way to the transportation facility, but if you didn’t buy the tickets until you get there, I think it’d complicate the state’s case. I did some thinking along those lines.

My real question now is whether the defendant could state that they were traveling for reasons of a medical consultation regarding their pregnancy but had not yet decided whether they would be having an abortion performed. As far as I know, these laws necessarily target intent. If the patient states they were traveling to a state where they would be more likely to receive competent medical advice (which is a truism - abortion-restricting states also limit what MDs can say to a patient), would the state need to prove their intent? Absent something like a text message stating “I’m going to California to get an abortion,” does the prosecution have any line of attack there?

Abortion resources:

California abortion resources by the state government

Planned Parenthood

Abortion Defense Network

LGBTQ abortion info

As I watch The Internet look like it’s starting to adopt a new phase (let’s call it federation writ large), I’m watching for signs of both success and struggle. I have some strong opinions of features and functionality lacking in the current suite of UIs that might help adoption, but thing I’ve been thinking about more recently is the effects of premature fragmentation.

Like so many things, it boils down to a problem of discovery. By discovery, I mean the user’s ability to find posts and topics that they want to read and engage with.

If lemmy had 10 users, we would not need separate topics. It’d probably be a few posts a day, tops, and it’d be easy enough to just scan through and see if anything of interest was being discussed. That could probably scale up a bit - let’s call it 100 users just for discussion. 100 users, 10-15 posts per day. Somewhere beyond that, you’d probably want to start some kind of classification. It would need to be at a fairly high level, like tech and politics. I’m thinking of things like 90s era slashdot. The point I’m making is that 1000 users would be too few to fragment the tech topic/tag into separate operating systems, much less specific flavors or versions of Linux.

My point is this: picture a growth curve. From biology and general network theory we would expect the growth curve of a successful service or community to grow exponentially. In the early part of growth, the exponential curve can appear linear - it can take time for the network effect to really kick in. Things like the Reddit exit can create a brief non-linearity, but until you hit the hockey stick part it’s just steady growth. Let’s call this function U(t) for users as a function of time.

Now let’s think about growth in the number of communities. From the above, and using discoverability as our fitness function, we’d expect them to grow as a function of the number of users. As the number of users goes up, both the number of and diversity in the posts go up, meaning we need additional metadata to find “our” content easily. Let’s call this one C(t) for communities as a function of time.

My thought right now is that a fitness function would discover that U(t) >> C(t). I’m not going to get a lot more specific because it’s just a thought but I suspect that there’s be some relationship between inter-topic and intra-topic diversity (and the overall information diversity of the service).

What I’m getting to is that it may be that one of the strengths of a service like lemmy, which allows for an almost unlimited expansion of communities including duplications, is not applying the concept of a fitness function, and actually can make things harder to discover and thus the service harder to use, reducing the ability to recruit and retain users. It reduces the average number of posts per topic and increases noise both in search and in the feed. I’ve ended up defaulting my clients to basically showing /all and sorting by recent just to make sure I’m not missing anything interesting, then blocking communities one by one. That’s not sustainable or friendly to more casual users. It’s definitely not the Apollo-on-Reddit kind of UX.

I’m not sure what can or should be done, given both the architecture and philosophy. I’m just thinking about how things like network theory can inform how this sort of thing can be optimized.