Okay here is a follow-up answer with receipts.

Visit this link and notice how difficult it is to get to the comment. (I didn’t even pay attention at all to the content of this discussion, the only thing that matters here is the format structure). https://piefed.social/post/2284255#comment_12507777

First, it should take you to the comment, but notice how it does not scroll to it? (Who would guess that given a direct link to a COMMENT, that someone might want to… oh, I dunno, view that COMMENT, maybe?:-P) Now if you begin scrolling on your own, it loads ALL the comments - why? I have no idea, the link was to a specific one, but whatever. Next, it begins to scroll… though at least for me, it never makes it to its goal. Usually it’s just kinda down there around the area, but if you scroll up several to many tens of comment replies, you might see it, or more likely realize that you chose the wrong direction and thus need to go back to wherever it took you earlier and start over, now scrolling the opposite direction.

Notice also the lack of button to take you to the next/previous top-level comment - that would have been really helpful here.

Instead there’s a kind of highlighting, except it doesn’t seem to highlight the correct thing in particular, and just kinda highlights everything on the screen, then goes away, doing nothing whatsoever to help guide you to wherever you are supposed to be lead.

Now contrast that experience with this one: https://piefed.social/post/2284255/comment/12584179. I see that the link has a different format yet both links were arrived at by clicking the time (bc as we all know, the TIME that a comment was submitted should yield a URL that points directly to it… YES, somehow we ALL knew that, capiche!:-P), so while I see THAT their structure differs, WHY they differ I do not know. Anyway, notice how following this link does nearly zero of the things that happen above. This time, you ARE taken directly to the comment, except it does NOT scroll down for you, which neither did the one above at FIRST, but then later it DOES, but this one does NOT do that (not even later, after you begin to scroll). Nor does it do the highlighting thing either.

Arguably the second link is far superior, bc at least it takes you directly to where you need to go. But the first link does not do that (although you can see that it at least tried to?), plus the experience is extremely inconsistent between the two - the second link REQUIRES you to scroll, while the first link ALSO REQUIRES you to scroll, but then if you continue to scroll it will mess up the loading, and then when it finishes loading (which seems to have nearly 100% inaccuracy for some reason?), you are again REQUIRED to scroll further (in some direction that you must guess at). Keep in mind that when receiving notifications, or clicking on the time, I cannot control which format of link I am given for it. So even though the second format is superior, I only get whatever it offers me.

So from this we can see that one thing that would be cool would be to use a better method to copy a URL - something akin to the rainbow Fediverse button that Lemmy has. Maybe ask Dessalines and Nutomic if it would be cool to do identically for the sake of consistency? If not then do differently, but if they would be cool with it then… why not?

Another thing to learn is that trying to get to a specific comment can be quite difficult, to say the least! If you want to wait for Rimu to fix it, then that’s cool, I am only pointing out things that are currently borkne (sic). I didn’t bother Rimu with an issue request here bc it’s been mentioned many times before, and seems to remain an active area of effort, yet Rimu has said that he hates working on front-end matters, so need to rub it in, you know? But clicking on these links, you can see for yourself… this is the opposite of “polished”.

And a third thing is of course how inconsistent things are - whenever people get trained into doing one activity, like if they should scroll, or should not scroll, or whichever it is, then don’t elsewhere require them to do the exact opposite of that. There should be one consistent workflow that works across all modes of connection with the software. In the above scenario, it seems like an easy fix to just make all comment links be of the second format, when clicking on the time text? Whether the other way is somehow “better-er-est” or not, I would argue that it is better yet still to have just one way that WORKS than to have two that are working at odds against one another, as is happening here? (And in various forms, PieFed comments have always been this way - again it got significantly better but then when this ability to load comments later and separately from a post was released, it got significantly worse again, and has only improved slightly since - so these changes that I mention here, these are AFTER so many other issues have already been fixed!!!)

I should add that it’s a super hard job. Rimu isn’t perfect - nor am I - and while I wrote this in a very silly way, I mean no actual disrespect. It’s FOSS, and he works on whatever he wants to. So genuinely my respect is enormous. But this is a gap that could be worked on, as he himself has mentioned on more than one occasion previously (not wanting to deal with UI/UX issues, preferring to leave those to 3rd-party apps - except that the default web browser experience is what people who do not have accounts are likely to first see, when recommended to try out the Threadiverse? plus many/most 3rd-party apps lack some of the more advanced PieFed features - e.g. Voyager’s support for PieFed is only nominal atm).

Edit: oh, and another issue like this is when you try to respond to someone, and instead of that happening in-line as Lemmy does, PieFed takes you to a different page for some reason. You can press the back button, and then again to get to the original page, except then when it begins loading all the comments, you lose your place. So if there was more than one comment that you had wanted to respond to nearby one another… it’s quite a lot of effort to find your place again to find that other one. That could be fixed by making the ability to write comments in-line, which I thought sometimes might work, but other times maybe not? Again it’s that inconsistency thing. Also, sorry, I forget some of the details in this respect about what works vs. where it may not work, so if it’s all fixed now then ignore this! 😉