cross-posted from: https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/1681502
I think #lemmy has been around a few years now. Searching packages.debian.org yields no results for a lemmy client. Anyone know if there are any projects underway to produce a lemmy desktop client (text-based in particular), even outside of the Debian framework?
I have had no choice but to try Firefox because (for years) #Lemmy has been wholly broken on Ungoogled Chromium. And for me the FF-Lemmy UX is terrible.
Younger generations have no baseline for comparison because they were raised in GUI browsers. My baseline is IRC, gopher, usenet, emacs, lynx, mutt, bitlbee, toot (TUI + CLI), gnu screen, & piles of scripts on 15+ y.o. hardware, etc. So [bart simpson’s grandpa’s voice] all you young whipper-snappers chained to your GUIs with JavaScript, mice, labor-intensive clicking around have a very different reality and baseline of what’s good. Us older folks struggle to find tools that don’t rely on a mouse & which avoid all the #darkPatterns & bugginess of the modern day web.
(edit) and wtf there are apparently several phone apps for the fedi. I just don’t get how people can like the small screens, small keyboards, and speech-to-text that causes embarrassments.
The bigger problem is not even the mouse-dependent UI.. it’s that browser clients have no practical HDD access apart from cookie storage. Rightly so, but I should have a local copy of things I write because my hard drive has better uptime & availability than any cloud service could have. When censorship strikes msgs are destroyed without backups. And (at least in the case of Mastodon), even the admins cannot recover posts they’ve deleted even if they want to. Wholly trusting a server to keep your records is a bad idea. So a browser can never by suitable for blogging/microblogging, at least certainly not without an archive download option that can be triggered by a cron job.
There is an emacs client for lemmy called lem.el, although I haven't used it and it doesn't seem to be far in development.
I mean I don't mind a good console app, but it's not like lemmy is mouse dependent by design, it's just that there hasn't been major demand for a console or desktop GUI with local storage. The APIs are wide open and pretty simple, so it wouldn't be hard to make one. Personally I don't think my post history is worth backing up locally, but I don't make a lot of big effort-posts I suppose, others who do would do well to back those things up (though lemmy does differ from mastodon somewhat in this regard I think).
Even Slack (I hate it but it's mandatory for work) barely has a functional terminal client, I had to modify the source code to get the one I found working without admin approval. Personally I'll take a desktop app with good keyboard compatibility over a text-only app generally, but this is largely because so many console apps lack functionality that their GUI counterparts have or are no longer maintained.
Times are changing. There's good and bad to it, smartphones are a really highly refined way of interacting with a huge variety of services, but that refined-ness also is part of what makes them addictive. Small screens and keyboards are relative, with the size of the average smartphone these days most people seem plenty happy with the screen sizes. And things like swipe typing make it quite quick for basic conversation, if a bit slower when you try to type a word the autocorrect doesn't know, etc.
Edit: I wonder if you could make a self-contained lemmy stack that acted as a single-user homeserver and client... That sounds like what you want, really. I don't know how well lemmy federation would tolerate it, and you'd probably have issues with images down the line since your local PC presumably doesn't have comparable uptime to a server, but it could be made to work, and with a reverse proxy it wouldn't be horribly unsafe privacy wise I don't thiiiink. if you just didn't accept image posts and used a cloud service for them or something it could be pretty slick/simple
I think the only lemmy clients at the moment are web based or mobile apps.
I don't see any native desktop app there.
But I am pleasantly surprised how many apps are there.
I just use web browser on desktop, works pretty good!
There might be some clients available as flatpaks, which is generally better for installing GUI desktop apps imo.
If you want native packages for everything, I suggest you switch to arch and spend hours puzzling over broken AUR builds.
This is more of a support question related to how to use Lemmy, removing per rule #3. For future requests, please check the sidebar for suggestions on where to find support.
