this post was submitted on 02 Aug 2023
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Jerboa
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Jerboa is a native-android client for Lemmy, built using the native android framework, Jetpack Compose.
Warning: You can submit issues, but between Lemmy and lemmy-ui, I probably won't have too much time to work on them. Learn jetpack compose like I did if you want to help make this app better.
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Jerboa is made by Lemmy's developers, and is free, open-source software, meaning no advertising, monetizing, or venture capital, ever. Your donations directly support full-time development of the project.
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Fwiw, it's straightforward to do this on lemmyverse.net, which works well on mobile. The way federation of new communities works means that it's a relatively big job to create a usable community browser within Lemmy right now. I wouldn't expect rapid progress in this area, and would consider adapting your community browsing habits to rely on lemmyverse rather than in-app browsing.
Are you sure you're talking about the same thing as the OP? The feature request (which I wholeheartedly support) is just listing the communities of a specific instance, something that's hopefully quite forward (since you'll just have to ask an instance which communities it knows, no central directory required).
The idiomatic way to query communities in Lemmy is to interrogate your instance, not to interrogate the instance hosting the community. I think there are some sensible reasons for this:
All of which is to say that while there is an approach that involves directly querying a specific instance... it's a partial solution that doesn't build toward a comprehensive one. I don't expect the devs to move this direction, but rather to focus on fixing the community browser in lemmy and exposing those capabilities through jerboa. This is the larger job I was referring to, and although there is a shorter path to OP's specific request, I don't think it's a likely one to be followed in Jerboa.
Thank you for the well thought out reply! I understand now that its not the way Lemmy devs envision this particular part of the fediverse to develop. It doesn't completely agree with what I see in the current federation landscape though: Most communities cluster around shared interest, be they language, nsfw vs non-nsfw or ideology. Following that, there is a clustering effect regarding the communities on each instance: If I find an instance with a community I care about I'm pretty likely to be interested in the other communities on there too. My guess is: A popular app will implement this feature and it will become mandatory for everyone else who wants downloads. But I get the "idiomatic" argument and understand why Jerboa devs are unlikely to want this feature.
All fair enough. I'm not real convinced about this though:
I suspect some app does do this already, some definitely have ways to interact with specific instances while logged out of them. I have 6 lemmy apps or PWAs installed just to keep up with new developments there... but I couldn't tell you the differences in community discovery between them because the federation and instance discovery problems make it unrelentingly terrible on all of them when compared to lemmyverse.net, which already supports browsing communities by instance.
While I would love for in-app discovery to be good, the journey from where we are to where lemmyverse.net is is long enough that I don't really see any intermediate hacks as being app-defining.