2d ago

Why are so many lemmy clients channel focused?

This was better placed in c/lemmyapps@lemmy.world and I can delete this post if it's expected:

Maybe it's just the iPhone clients, but they seem to have issues with use cases for other instances, for example:

If I'm interested in news from a certain country, and there is an instance focused on that country, I basically need to get on the web to search if there is a useful channel on that instance. If you use on of the iPhone clients to search for a channel and only use the instance name then nothing seems to match show up. You can find users from those channels, channels that happen to use that set of characters, or when people write a channel from that instance, but the search doesn't seem to match channels on that instance.
Clients don't seem to offer a way to navigate to an instance and see all its channels. This is basically the same use case as above, but with more exploration and less targeted. Again, I seem to need to use the web.
I can't find a way to show the sidebar for an instance, besides the one I've registered for. For a lot of instance+channel combinations this really doesn't matter. But when it matters, it tends to matter a lot. I had a few situations in asklemmy@lemmy.ml where people basically resorted to saying the instance was lemmy.ml and I had to go look up why that would matter by switching to a browser. (Yeah... a newbie problem, and now I wonder how I could have missed it.)

So, incase this comes across as just statements, here are some questions:

Is this just how communities and users grew to use the echo system? Am I missing an obvious client / some buttons to click? Are the iPhone clients all just from the same codebase? Is there some technical issue with the exposed search APIs?

Sorry if this is in the wrong community... hesitant tone it's an exploration issue? /hesitant tone