Great job jabronis - attached picture is what the site looks like on an old phone. All the buttons are broken and do nothing, except for the Modlog which somehow is still accessible. Tried different browsers on the phone, tried clearing all the cookies and cache, still doesn't work.
EDIT: This came off a bit hot and aggro - it just sucks since pre-migration the site worked fine on my dinosaur phone, so I'm pretty frustrated. Makes me appreciate communist web-design (like marxists.org and redsails.org) even more.
I think a big part of the problem is that the Lemmy UI (and by extension, the Hexbear UI) doesn't work properly with Javascript disabled. There are some people who would have the same issue as OP because they deliberately turned off JS even on a device that can support it.
Making the UI work without JS will be a lot of work, but also worth it.
JS is really the only way live updates can work. Like getting pinged with a notification instead of refreshing the page and seeing one pop up.
Having a barebones fallback UI that doesn't require JS would be good though.
tbh I really don't see the need for live updates on a Reddit-style website. I don't need to instantly respond to a comment or reply, and I don't normally stay on the same page long enough that updates would be significantly delayed anyway.
I'm just explaining how the current frontend works, I think building a script less alternative interface is actually in the cards. There's just more important things to work on right now
The main obstacles are that there's suddenly a bunch of other issues being brought up for the UI since the reddit exodus. There's also plans to rewrite the frontend in a different UI framework because infernoJS is a pain in the ass. The rewrite is just close enough to consider but far away and vague enough to not have a solid idea of when to shift to that.
Well, at least we have Hexbear's old react frontend lying around that we can cannibalize if we want to shift towards a more mainstream framework.
Funnily enough, the framework the maintainers have in mind is (currently) less mainstream: Leptos. Dessalines and Nutomic seem to be more comfortable working in rust, so I think that's a big factor in the decision.