Fwiw, the Tesseract front-end for Lemmy (e.g. on dubvee.org), Mbin (needs an extra button press iirc), and PieFed all do native YouTube embeds, for posts using that as their URL.
OpenStars
joined 1 month ago
I think people can handle a simple series of instructions, like (1) download the Voyager for Lemmy app, (2) click the middle button, then click...
What they likely get confused about is the plethora of choices, especially when they aren't even sure that they want to join yet.
At the risk of bringing up unwanted drama, 100% of the time whenever I mention Lemmy to someone, they have admonished me for having done so. But putting myself into their shoes one day, I did a Google search (🤮) for "Lemmy", and aside from the singer, the top hit to an actual instance is... surprisingly to me, lemmy.ml. Next I note that the default search method there is "Local", not "All". NO WONDER they were telling me how politically "extremist" it (Lemmy) is! They see NONE of the posts from Lemmy.World, sh.itjust.works, etc., unless they are submitted to a community on lemmy.ml. Instead, what someone would see by default is "death to landlords" and all the other posts promoting the violent upheaval of Western society, as ofc capitalism is to blame for literally everything (well I mean...), except somehow only the Western variant is in the wrong and everything done by the likes of Russia or China or North Korea is absolutely fine.
Here's an old example I just happened to have handy:
(setting aside truth or falsehood, it definitely has a bias to it, as in both sides were equal, and yes this was prior to the USA election)
The #2 search result by DuckDuckGo btw is Lemmy.World (the #1 is ofc the musician:-), probably bc it has ~80% of all Lemmy users on it, so that is appropriate.
We need to put ourselves into their shoes, not our own as if we were ourselves on the other side of that conversation, but appreciate how they will approach the issues. And the methods used by more mainstream people differ from ours.
Either that, or accept that we are strictly another forum community used chiefly by Linux users, and that we will never be more than that.
Your dedication is impressive all on its own:-). I cannot begin to imagine how difficult it must be to balance all of those types of design decisions, but as you say, you have a long list of things that you want to work through already, and keeping it "intuitive" is merely one among many other tasks, made all the more expensive by all the changes over time.
I was also pleased to hear that you would switch to Sublinks when that became available. Unfortunately it looks like that project is stalled a bit, but I hope that when PieFed comes out with an API that Tesseract would also be another way to interact with that backend as well. (But if not, it's understandable - Sublinks was designed to be intercompatible with Lemmy, while PieFed is a whole other thing - so I'm not even "pushing" in the slightest, just expressing a naive hope based on no knowledge whatsoever of what various factors are involved!)
Thanks for the insight here, and for your friendliness in keeping the Fediverse running, making it a bit less hostile than it would otherwise feel without all of your contributions:-).
PieFed also offers pre-built categories of communities, although if I'm understanding correctly that an individual, non-admin user of Tesseract can make their own, then I much prefer that approach! (PieFed seems controlled only at the admin level, so I've seen different categories on different instances, but an individual non-admin user cannot engage with such directly)
Does Tesseract start off with an initial set of pre-built categories? Is that those "other... communities" list, and who makes those - the admin to start but then capable of being modified by the user? PieFed does allow you to unsubscribe from individual communities within the categories, and you can subscribe to communities not in categories, but the latter will be in a generic category rather than one that you choose.
Tesseract seems not intuitive to me (so has a learning curve), but otherwise every single thing I've ever heard about it is so damn impressive!:-)
I have nothing to do with PieFed, beyond liking it and so I joined the flagship instance as a regular user, which gives me only small insight into the day-to-day usage experience:-).
That said, the main developer has given several talks - e.g. this one and see also Rimu's YouTube channel.
All good points. I also don't know how much is cacheable, but regardless, how much of that actually is cached, vs. being sent again and again?
Separately from the per-page considerations, from what people are saying it seems like a great deal of unnecessary info is sent along with each and every post that could be delayed until the user decides that they actually do want the additional info to make it worthwhile to pull in from the backend.
Yes some apps may also be lightweight, and perhaps PieFed could do a comparison with them as well, but to some degree that's an apples to oranges comparison (hehe, yet both are different kinds of fruits! and one may indeed find themselves in a position needing to choose between them at a grocery/market:-), seeing as how a web based UI needs to run in multiple browsers yet conversely runs from any OS.
If leptos also ends up being lightweight then it could be compared to PieFed at that time in that regard. Though atm all that PieFed can compare itself against are things available to be tested. And perhaps leptos will borrow a few tricks from PieFed by that time, or even if providing an entirely independent execution, could solve some of the same issues. Do you know if leptos is supposed to share that feature of being lightweight, or were you just saying that it will exist at some point?
Haha I think it is fully proper to ask every valid question like this - and in particular, like we see happen with PieFed all the time, and also Tesseract, someone could legitimately modify their particular instance in unusual ways that aren't committed to the common codebase yet (awaiting review, or potentially confusing, or cause trouble integrating with new upcoming features also trying to be committed?:-).
And I wasn't sure if my answer was appropriate or not - like if you saw it and knew already but you meant something totally different but then I completely missed, so thank you for your honesty bc it does make me feel better that I wasn't being a complete dolt here.
As for missing that feature... hehe I did as well, and this despite my first experiences with the Fediverse having been Kbin for MONTHS until it imploded:-(. It really does look very much like a broken image icon, and that's just a poor design decision on the part of Kbin's creator, imho. That said it's quite a useful feature, and I used it quite often - many times per day and even per hour. And still forgot all about it!?!?!:-P (it just looks that much like the broken image icon!!!! we don't even question it, OF COURSE that's what it is - what else could it possibly be‼️⁉️)
So yeah, thanks for your bravery (in like not merely deleting your prior comment, or you probably really could have brow-beat me into submission here with technical jargon) - it only makes me respect you more you know. As for others who choose to feel the opposite, that's on them:-D.
I used the raw data from this table, which is the 3rd entry in this post. It's been a minute since I did the calculation but I think I did something like take the >4Mb of data for 20 posts that Lemmy does and compare to PieFed which:
The PieFed home page, showing 5x more posts than Lemmy, weighs between 700 and 930 KB, depending on which posts are shown. In low bandwidth mode, the home page is only 220 KB due to not having any thumbnails.
So despite showing 5x more posts, it still requires <1/5th the data? That's >25 more data required per post by Lemmy than PieFed, i.e. the latter is a much more "lightweight" client.
Edit: but if you think there is a mistake here, I'd love to hear it?
Interesting, yes I see that too.
Going to https://moist.catsweat.com/m/world@lemmy.world and searching for this post, I don't even have to go into the post, but as usual clicking on the embed link (double window icon) expands the content just below the post. And as you say it immediately starts playing, not waiting to be asked to do so with another button press as is usually the case.
So I should edit my OP about Mbin.
And the same goes for communities too. Unlike Reddit, people here (like me:-) continually browse by "All", and will find posts as they come out, plus there are communities literally dedicated to letting people know what communities are out there.
Counterpoint: mods here are doing heroic work by holding up all of Lemmy, even though (reportedly? I am not a mod here myself) the mod tools here suck ass, especially across instances. It can't be an easy job.
It's also unpaid labor, and exposes them to things like CSAM or other nastiness that I for one would not want to have to wade through. Sure, nobody is perfect, yet if OP wants to volunteer then let them, but why the shade at these unpaid volunteers donating their time to keep us all happy?
(1) it works in Mbin though. I would expect it to work also in Tesseract, though the comment string still has not federated yet - perhaps the user is blocked for some reason, or all these numerous federation issues by most non-LW instances have prevented it.
Yes admittedly the Mbin embed is a bit strange, that looks vaguely somewhat like the "broken link" icon that shows up in Lemmy or PieFed, but it's actually not - that double-window looking icon is a signal for content that you can play directly inside of Mbin without having to leave it to go to a 3rd-party site. So click it, and it will bring up the entire YouTube video right there in-line.
That double-icon is also accessible while still browsing posts, so really you don't even have to go inside the full post in order to see it, e.g. you can see the double-window icon somewhat to the bottom left (though to the right of the preview area) of the page at https://fedia.io/search?q=Silent+Hill+2%3A+Enhanced+Edition+-+THE+FINAL+UPDATE+-+Update+Video+%2310+-+YouTube, just to the left of "Comments Boost More", down below the username "chloyster". Clicking it expands the preview just below the listing of the post.
(2) Here is a positive example where a YouTube embed works on PieFed. Based on my test here, it does not seem to work in comments, but it does for posts?
And here is another one that works on dubvee.org: https://dubvee.org/post/dubvee.org/1873840.
Due to federation weirdness, the former post is not available on dubvee.org, and the latter one is not available on piefed, but anyway you can see that individually, those two platforms both are able to embed YouTube videos. At least, for posts, again not comments.
I believe this post describes when it was added to Tesseract, so somewhat recently (one month).
And Mbin works too - you have to click the double-window icon to get it to show, but when you do, it reveals the preview and you can play the YouTube video right there without having to leave the site. Here is the former example, and here is the latter example.
These features may have to go through extra hoops as you are saying, yet they "just work" so that the user can enjoy that extra functionality without having to sweat the details.:-)
Oh no!
That link that you sent me, are you still able to see that post? For me it shows an error, like what happens when a post is deleted by the OP, but I wonder if that is what happened or if lemmy.cafe has switched its main announcement community to be local-only, and if that requires a lemmy.cafe account to read, b/c otherwise I don't even know what their main announcement community would even be. It might have gotten deleted entirely and/or merged into graybeard, or statecraft, but both have not had posts for a long time (unless they did and whatever problem is affecting the database lately has messed up new posts in it as well).
Well that's sad.
If I were you I would ask feddit.org to switch their default sort behavior from "Local" to "All" so that it will be a more welcoming experience for the wider Fediverse looking to see memes and such from the likes of Lemmy.World etc. and not just itself.
It at least defederates from 2 of the big 3, though it also defederates from lemmynsfw.com, which I don't know why so many people (from Reddit in particular) insist on having that in their same account but I bet some people will be resistant to it, but oh well.
May I ask though: why not use lemmy.ca as the default recommendation? It has 4.5x the userbase as feddit.org (the same MAU, just 4.5x more accounts total, so I guess a bunch of lurkers or inactive accounts, but it is at least the same size), 5 admins, already has its default sort set to All, doesn't defederate from lemmynsfw.com, and seems to take user feedback e.g. this recent thread questioning whether to refederate with hexbear.net but based on user feedback deciding overwhelmingly to not. And especially if people in Reddit tend to be from the USA, it would be geographically closer and not confusing to e.g. first describe things in German, then in English.
Hopefully the issues with lemmy.cafe are temporary, but on the other hand communication about such matters is just as important as not causing them in the first place, plus if it's been a whole week and it's still that way... that does not bode well for the future.