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.
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.
In the end input devices don’t matter. If they did we’d all use Dvorak. You quickly learn to communicate with what you use.
It’s not a matter of quick learning. If that were the case, GUI is a clear winner. It takes more time to learn a text-driven UI. But the learning curve pays off. You invest more time learning but the reward is reaching a point where you’re much faster than a mouse allows. I started off using gnusocial from a browser then transitioned to #bitlbee, after which I could search, read, and react faster than in the GUI. Same for Mastdon. Sometimes I’m forced into the Mastodon GUI because of something being unimplemented, in which case the loss of speed is apparent. Just like in the 90s, the keyboard is still faster than the mouse.
BTW, I used a DVORAK keyboard for years. I never measured my speed difference but I think it slowed me down overall because there were moments where the brain would drift into QWERTY mode (and vice versa on a QWERTY keyboard), and the speed difference w/out drifting seemed negligible so I ultimately settled back on a QWERTY keyboard.