Great post, but here are some questions those graphics raise, that I couldn't find an answer to, and which have only my experience with email, usenet and irc for reference (all of which are federated, easy to abuse, had a host of problems, and have slowly migrated to centralized versions to solve these issues):
- how do you ban someone?
- what stops him from spinning 100 amazon ecc instances, federating 100 servers and spamming his thing 100 times from 100 different instances?
- how do you even block an instance?
- what happens with the federated content once the source instance goes down?
- say lemmy.ml and memes goes down, how do you post a new reply in [email protected]? does it even work?
- i haven't found any info for syncing accounts across instances (to prevent this loss) or if this is even possible at low level
- what happens with comments and pictures once a federated instance goes down? say, if i selfhost and i crash without backups, does my content and posts disappear?
- can i pull it back?
- what kind of capacity planning would I need to selfhost say, a decade worth of reddit browsing? assuming I only care about my posts and what I save, would they be accessible for me?
Some bugs I found
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in the login window, backspacing in the server url removes textbox focus. pretty annoying, when you want to backspace multiple letters
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downloading an image from the top right icon seems to crash on about half the posts
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selecting a file to upload and cancelling instantly crashes when returning from the intent
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when servers time out, i get a "Unable to parse JSON from..." toast. Probably might be improved by checking http response code.
The app itself feels very non-android and more like a patched-up solution on a fad of a framework. This is fine and I get it needs to be devved fast, but it feels very alien.
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buttons sometimes expand a "div" downward downward
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as a textbox expands, if you move the cursor to edit the previous line and start typing, there's some wonkiness going on. I can only describe it as: the text is not inserted where I expect it to be inserted on a native textbox
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scrolling. I know you placed a bounty on it, and it mostly seems fixed, but it still doesn't feel native, in a way I cannot describe. Jagged, lacking "weight" and sometimes doing something else than what you expect. And definitely ignoring system wide animation settings.
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there's also a lot of flashing on the right side where the scrollbar is and it resizes in a deliciously epilepsy inducing manner. Perhaps the scrollbar can be made optional.
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the app isn't resized correctly when popping up the keyboard. Pretty horrible when editing a post.
But the abolute worst bug is that when scrolling a sub, your scroll position is not maintained after reading a post. You are always scrolled up regardless of using back, the gesture, or the top left button - but only if you open the link or the image.
The more you dive into a community, the harder it gets to go deeper.
Is returning from a thread to a sub supposed to scroll you up?
I can't figure if it's a bug, design choice, user error, but it's quite odd to keep scrolling down every time after returning from a thread.