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! 😉

Searching for one, though that’s a big project. I typically abandon PieFed for Lemmy every time I need to do a search.

Oh and speaking of, a feature that’s probably significantly easier would be to either search through comments, or else expand them all at once - to allow a browser search to work.

Otherwise it’s mainly UI things not being polished rather than back-end. I’ve been trying out 3rd-party apps for the last month so there’s a slight possibility that it’s fixed by now (I had made a codeberg request a long time ago related to it, but I can’t log into PieFed’s codeberg right now, and it seems to not allow anonymous read-only access. One thing that has been hella annoying for more than a year in various forms has been that a goodly number of links from the notifications menu don’t take you to what it is trying to point at. When the conversations get longer, when things happen to cause a comment to be collapsed (bc of being too deep in the chain), and especially when there is a large number of comments, the post page typically begins to load, then doesn’t always indicate that you should wait (causing you to get hella lost if you start scrolling, which you would normally do, except in this case it’s the worst possible decision), then finally loads the large number of comments, and finally takes you to the place that it is attempting to notify you about - when someone tagged or responded to you - except that it doesn’t. And then the hunt begins, like maybe you have to click to expand a comment first, or scroll way back up, or perhaps down.

It works a helluva lot better now than it did a year and a half ago - I used to have to abandon PieFed and go back to Lemmy just to be able to find the comment, by searching for my username and seeing if there were any replies I had missed. It got way better, but the method of loading comments after loading the page broke it again - which is just poor design philosophy, like if I click a link to a COMMENT (from a notification), then yes maybe I want the page to load the COMMENTS, perchance/mayhaps, hrm?

PieFed was initially being built up to work for the most usual and basic scenario. Being able to handle >100 comments where some are nested >10 deep I understand was less of a priority. But sometimes those are where the absolute BEST conversations are!!

Also, the post/comment preview function keeps randomly disappearing. I mean with regards to a particular PieFed version it will either always be available or not available at all, but between version updates it kept disappearing like it would work for posts but not comments, or more rarely might not be available for either. I guess I’m ranting here but this is the kind of stuff that I find hella annoying and I’m not sure what’s easy to fix vs. hard. Greater stability of this feature, maybe?

Lemmy may have significantly fewer features but in many ways it comes across as being significantly more polished. Until you try to write a long comment that is (in my Firefox on Android the screen keeps jumping around like it’s drunk! 🥴), and then you really appreciate how PieFed’s features work better, some of the times, while for general browsing and readability (like for lurkers) Lemmy can be better - e.g. its search tools. Another example: having the votes be above comments rather than below them is very helpful to me sometimes, bc they can become exceedingly long (like the one I am writing right now!) and sometimes at least (like when modding) it helps to know how well it was received by a community before reading through it all, so not having to scroll down to the bottom and then scroll back up to the top is helpful.

I think PieFed tried to reinvent the wheel and just be different from Lemmy for the sake of being different, even if the way was not actually any better?

I don’t know if I am helping at all here but wanted to get back to you quickly so hopefully these ramblings can at least spark something within you.

Obviously, you should spend your efforts working on something that gives you joy to do so!!

PieFed, and now PyLova, and also Lemmy (and Mbin etc.) are so fantastic! We may never fully replace Reddit but who cares if we can at least have something worthwhile here.

Name them please, I’m desperate for ideas here.

One thing that still makes me hesitate with discourse when suggesting a forum is that discourse has this thing whera post can be turned into a wiki. Everyone can edit it, add/update informations. It’s much better than a wiki “hidden” in another part of the community, here it’s part of the flow of posts, you can comment, etc…

Name them please, I’m desperate for ideas here.

Not sure if these are already addressed in PyLova, but some of my PieFed pain points are the notification page UI (namely the collapsed content previews and unintuitive mark as read buttons), and the lack of proper support for emoji (no shortcode suggestions like Lemmy/GitHub/etc. has, and the manual picker is unsearchable and missing many newer ones).

Minor suggestion: have a way to indicate the language of posts and comments? At the moment you can select the language, but it will not be indicated anywhere (contrary to Lemmy which has a small label)

I know those used to be a pain in the past for Lemmy ([email protected]) , but now that this is mostly stable for all platforms (Lemmy, Mbin, Piefed, Pylova) it might be worth adding them, to give more visibility