Lemmy's biggest competitor at this point isn't reddit, it's Discord, or rather, the monster it has become. It seems to me that instead of creating a subreddit nowadays, every project now wants to use a Discord server for everything.
The problem with that is:
Asking messages in a big, open chatroom (over, say, 20 people) gets real messy, real quickly.
Conversations on Discord are difficult to follow when multiple of them are going at once.
The conversations containing solutions to problems in chat or threads are not search indexable, which is the reason why reddit became quietly dominant in search results, it is simply the biggest centralized repository of organized English language text conversations available.
So why do people insist on using Discord servers to build their community? Simple, it's the network effect. If somebody wants tech support, it's way easier to click a Discord invite on an account for group chat you already have than it is to sign up for yet another forum that you only use once. But Lemmy doesn't suffer from that problem of traditional forums because of federation.
Which brings me to my point, if Lemmy is to grow, it's better to sell Lemmy to disgruntled Discord admins and forum owners to move their community than it is to get people to move off reddit at this point, since people who wants to leave reddit has all done so at this point.
To everyone complaining about the updates; it's likely that after a week or so you will just get used to the new layout and won't even think about it anymore.
Personally, I have no issues with the update. Took about 5 mins to understand the changes move on. I also welcome the true black theme. Will save a decent amount of battery on my phone.
Personally hate the change to the swipe. I get that on some huge servers people probably use the "reply" feature a lot, but I definitely don't have so much use for it as to give up the nice, coherent and logical UX of "channel/server list is on the left, user list is on the right, just swipe to them".
IMO, swiping should be for navigating UI, not interacting with individual items. Now there's a useless thing on the swipe and I have to reach to the top of the screen if I want to check who's online and in the channel. Annoying.
That and the new DM screen doesn't use swipe right as navigation, it's just a "back" button now. Can't quickly look at the DM list and go back to your conversation by swiping right-left any more. Literal lazy design because this is an easier way to program that interaction.
Don't care super much about the DM button moving, it's more convenient to access but breaks the UI paradigm. Shrug.
Oh, and the "midnight" theme is not new, you could use it for years now in the old versions.
not being able to swipe from dm to dm list is a problem
performance is a MUCH BIGGER problem than either of these, my galaxy s9+ should NOT be on its knees begging for for forgiveness by using a fucking chat app.
the prior two can be easily fixed, but the performance is really concerning. ill be using aliucord until they sort that stuff out anyway, new app is pretty but unfortunately flawed
How the fuck do I see who's online on a server now that I can't open the drawer on the right anymore? I don't use Discord much but I could figure it out.
A good change imo. Never made sense to me, both in desktop and mobile that DMs are located right with the server list. I don't use it as much, but when I use it, it's precisely for DMs, so I think it's a change for the better. Some people complaining like they change every single part of the UI should touch some grass, sometimes change isn't a bad thing.
Can someone explain the update to me . I mostly just use it for one discord server that a smaller streamer that I know personally and haven't really noticed anything 🤷
Granted, apps can lock you out if you don't have a certain version, but by and large, you should be able to choose to update when there's this drastic of a change
I stopped updating Discord's app once they did the shitty port of the iOS version to Android. Rolled back to 126.21 and haven't updated since. Sure some things are bugged, like the new usernames (shows Username#0000 for unique names now but who cares) and the nitro profile animation things. Once that version stops working, I stop using Discord.
I have only used the new version on my phone a little and it felt much smoother than before. The mobile app was always ass, so if the redesign stops it from crashing all the time on my tablet it's a net win in my book
I hate the new layout. Why are DMs separate from servers? It makes no sense, and it means extra back button presses/swipes to change between them. Why not just have everything in one sidebar which I feel is way more logically consistent and convenient? This update is trash and Discord should feel bad.
Have they finally allowed you to set the alert sound in IOS? My problem with mobile discord is the feeble little ding they deem you are allowed to hear is so quiet even with the phone turned up I don't hear alerts. There are several complaints in their bugtracker about this going back 7+ years, they seem to want people to miss alerts for some marketing/profit reason.
On other platforms you can overwrite the sound file in the package with a proper alert, but not with the "we're apple, fu and enjoy it" IOS stuff.
I like the new call interface and the animations the calls have. I hate the fact pinned messages are under the “Settings” button for no reason and the fact the threads icon looks odd as hell.
I don't like the new layout... But you can swap back???? There's a button, I think I must've been apart of an early roll out because mine switched a couple months ago. But there's a setting to use old layout
I don't understand why they went with a UI that is even less intuitive and far clunkier to use, when I already had various problems accessing features that I can access on desktop just fine. Such as changing my screen name on a server, would you have to do a lot when like me you run a transformation based roleplay server