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8-13-23 www.thefarside.com
  • Pith: To sever or destroy the spinal cord of, usually by inserting a needle into the vertebral canal.

    Performed on frogs in order to do a vivisection of them in science classes.

  • One-time payment for ad-free is live in Beta 25. It's $19.99 USD. Update your app if you don't see it.
  • I've got some more.

    • You can long-press (and hold) a thumbnail to peek at the full image it came from without loading the link in the browser. Sometimes I see an interesting pic like some recipe, and I just want a closer look without loading the entire recipe site. Also works great to see YouTube thumbnails in detail.
    • You can change the default feed from Local, Everything, Subscriptions, or even a single community (and have it be different per account).

    Here's a partial screenshot of the image peeking:

  • What is an item below 100 bucks that everyone should own?
  • Get a 12V inverter and a normal 120V AC fast charging adapter. It seems silly to turn DC into AC then back into DC, but it's totally worth it when you need a lot of charge fast.

    There are 12V inverters that plug into cigarette lighter ports. Some use a wire, and some just stick out of the port.

    You can also get "fast" charging USB ports that stick in your cigarette lighter, but they are never as good as a proper charging adapter. Maybe nowadays you can find a real fast charging one now that USB-C fast charging standards are a thing. I haven't shopped for one in a long time.

  • One-time payment for ad-free is live in Beta 25. It's $19.99 USD. Update your app if you don't see it.
    • A comment and post draft system. You can save drafts to restore them later. It's really nice when writing an "effort comment" (kinda like this one) and you want to resume it later.
    • When submitting something, it saves a temporary draft in case the submission fails. Several times I wrote a long comment in another Lemmy app and then lost the entire thing when the submission failed.
    • A ton of customizations, so many options and view modes. Customizable actions menu. Excellent contextual button.
    • Cleanest interface of any app I've used.
    • Biometric lock for opening the app or changing accounts.
    • Masked usernames in the account switcher for privacy when showing the app to someone.
    • Can pin favorite communities at the top of the subscriptions panel.
    • Separate settings per account. (Kind of a drawback sometimes. It really needs an easier way to sync settings between accounts.)
    • Backup all your settings to a file. (Which can be used to sync settings between accounts.)
    • Can submit a comment as a different account than the one you're browsing with. (Useful for a quick reply which you don't want to make as your official account. I like to keep stuff like politics out of my account that's associated with my real-person online presence.)
    • Long-pressing any setting in the app copies a link to that setting to the clipboard. When pasted in a comment or post, other Sync users can tap the link to go straight to that setting. Useful because there are so many settings!
    • All replies to a top-level comment can be collapsed by default with an option. This is great because the top-level replies are the most important, and then you get to choose which conversations to open.
    • Each comment has a button to jump to the patent comment, and long-pressing that button jumps to the top-level comment of that thread. This is excellent when a comment thread has hundreds of replies and you're done with it and just want to collapse the entire thread and read the next top-level comment.
    • Speaking of comment navigation, the reddit version had a handy, optional comment navigator UI. Not sure if it's here yet. It's there!
    • You can search settings. Really nice to find A specific setting fast, or all settings related to "comments", etc. I just used it to determine that the comment navigator does exist in the version and I just turned it on.

    I could probably think of more if I spent more time on it.

    Liftoff was the best alternative app I used, but it's not as customizable. It also had a confusing account switcher. In fact, you didn't switch accounts at all. You switched instances and had a default account per instance. Switching accounts on one instance required you to open the settings and change your default user for that instance and then switch to that instance. It was even more confusing because you were allowed to change users when viewing the Inbox, but that had no effect on who was actually logged in. I made several comments under the wrong account while using the app because it was so confusing.

  • One-time payment for ad-free is live in Beta 25. It's $19.99 USD. Update your app if you don't see it.
  • I've used 5 of them. Not a single one is what I would call "fully featured" compared to the million features I loved in Sync for Reddit. Sync for Lemmy promises to be as good, but for Lemmy. That's worth money to me. If that doesn't describe you, or most people, then OK.

  • Appreciation post for Liftoff not collecting user data or injecting ads.
  • All code should be free! No one should ever make a living writing code. It makes no damn sense. Writing code is the easiest thing on the planet. Asking money for it is pure greed.

    I guess I should have added "/s". I really didn't think it was needed. 😅

  • One-time payment for ad-free is live in Beta 25. It's $19.99 USD. Update your app if you don't see it.

    Tap the account switcher in the top left corner and you should see the option.

    See my comment for a screenshot. I don't know why I can't seem to post a screenshot in the body of post. Every time I try it gets removed.

    278
    Subscription list isn't working

    I've tried force closing the app and clearing cache. No help. The problem happens on every instance.

    7
    Thumbnails rarely loading in any app. (Have not checked website.)

    Liftoff shows a "bad" request. Connect shows a broken image icon. Once in a while a thumbnail actually shows.

    !

    3
    Questions about user accounts and finding communities by name in Liftoff

    Two questions.

    1. How do I switch users? (Answered by me below)
    2. How do I search for or directly open a specific community on a specific instance?

    How do I switch users?

    Well, I did a bunch of trial and error to figure out how it works.

    1. Each instance you add to the app can have one or more users. If you have multiple users on an instance, you can select one user to be your default user there. You do this by long pressing the account name in Settings and selecting "Set as default". Then when you switch instances using the drop-down list on the main screen, you are logging into the default account for that instance.
    2. Before hitting reply to either a post or comment, you can open the respective three-dot menu and tap "View on another instance" to go to that post or comment on that instance which also logs you into your default account on that instance. Even though that instance chooser lets you choose a specific user from that instance, it will still log you in as your default user. This seems like a bug to me.

    I still wish there were a way to see which user/instance was active before you make a post or reply. The compose message screen should show that somewhere.

    #How do I search for or directly open a specific community on a specific instance?

    When I use the search feature, I can choose an instance, and put in a community name, but then when I hit Search and tap the "Communities" tab, it shows me communities all over the fediverse. I just want to open a specific community of which I know the name.

    I've read that to find a community on a Lemmy website to search !community@instance.name, but trying that in Liftoff yields no results at all.

    Is there some simple way to open a specific community?

    EDIT: In Connect for Lemmy, starting a search with ! changes the UI to "Go to community". That's really nice and clear. I addition, I tried entering just !liftoff, and even though I was on sh.itjust.works, it still brought me directly here. Maybe because it knew it was the only community with that name (if that's even the case). I don't yet know what happens if I enter a name that exists on multiple instances.

    4
    How do forwarded pictures send so fast?

    How does it work that I send 11 high quality photos to one person and it takes 5 minutes to send because I have a weak cell signal, but when I forward that message to another user it's nearly instantaneous?

    I thought no messages were saved on the server, so how can it be so fast to forward them? Doesn't it have to upload the photos all over again?

    0
    Deleted comments can still be read by apps

    I understand that very few (or no) websites actually delete anything. They just mark them as "deleted". But this usually means that once something is deleted, users have no ability to see the deleted data. This doesn't seem to be the case with Lemmy.

    I've been trying out the Android app called Connect for Lemmy, and it shows the contents of all deleted comments with a "DELETED" word on them. See the uploaded screenshot.

    This seems bad to me. Users expect that deleted comments are no longer viewable, and won't be returned by Lemmy's API. Lemmy still shows the username of the deleted comments, which was bad enough, but now I'm seeing that it doesn't prevent apps from seeing the deleted comments.

    What are your thoughts on this?

    9
    Cant view !zelda@lemmy.ml. It no longer even appears on my subscriptions.

    If I enter it manually on the website in my browser as /c/!zelda@lemmy.ml, then it comes up with the error page in the screenshot in my comment. I could be doing it wrong, though.

    I was doing it wrong. I didn't need the !. When I got it to work, I was able to re-subscribe. I don't know how I got usubscribed over night without me doing anything, though.

    The "Connect for Lemmy" app apparently caches my subscription list, and if I click it there, I get shown posts from "Humanities". See the attached screenshot. (Not sure which instance that community is on.)

    Lemmy.ml still federates with sh.itjust.works. I checked their list.

    What's going on?

    0
    "language_not_allowed" error when trying to submit a comment using Jerboa.

    I was trying to reply to a Taco Tuesday post and no matter what I replied, I got a popup which said, "language_not_allowed".

    Looks like placeholder text that was never filled in. What is that error trying to say?

    I initially posted this:

    > Fish tacos are my favorite. Crunchy coleslaw, beer battered cod, a big ol' scoop of sambal oelek, and I'm in heaven.

    I removed the "sambal olek" because it's a foreign language, but I got the same error. It persisted even when trying to post "just testing".

    Any ideas?

    0
    InitialsDiceBearhttps://github.com/dicebear/dicebearhttps://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/„Initials” (https://github.com/dicebear/dicebear) by „DiceBear”, licensed under „CC0 1.0” (https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/)FL
    FlagonOfMe @sh.itjust.works
    Posts 8
    Comments 84