5mo ago

UPDATE! Now 30% of Lemmy Apps display posts accurately

Updated! Updates are shown in quote text like this. Some scores are updated following app updates.

An Apps Experiment

Cross-posted from https://lemmy.world/post/18159531

Introduction

This is an experiment I performed out of curiosity, and I have a few big disclaimers at the bottom. Basically, I've seen a lot of comments recently about one app or another not displaying something right. Lemmy has been around for a while now and can no longer be considered an experimental platform.

Lemmy and the apps that people use to access the platform have become an important part of people’s lives. Whether you are checking the app weekly or daily, and whether you use it to stay up on the news or to stay connected to your hobby, it’s important that it works. I hope that this helps people to see the extent of the challenge, and encourages developers to improve their apps, too.

How I did it

I wanted to investigate objectively how accurately each app displays text of posts and comments using the standard Lemmy markdown. Markdown is a standard part of the Lemmy platform, but not all apps handle it the same. It is basically what gives text useful formatting.

I used the latest release of each app, but did not include pre-releases. I only included apps that have released an update in the last 6 months, which should include most apps in active development. ~~I was unable to test iOS-exclusive apps, so they are not included either. In all, 16 apps met the inclusion criteria.~~

I also added Eternity, which is in active development, although it has not had a recent update. I was able to include several iOS apps thanks to testing from @jordanlund@lemmy.world – Thanks, Jordan! This made for 20 apps that were tested.

Each app was rated in 5 categories: Text, Format, Spoilers, Links, and Images. I chose these mostly based on the wonderful Markdown Guide from @marvin@sffa.community, which was posted about a year ago in !meta@sffa.community (here).

I checked whether each app correctly displayed each category, then took the overall average. Each category was weighted equally. Text includes italic, bold, strong, strikethrough, superscript, and subscript. Format includes block quotes, lists, code (block and inline), tables, and dividers. Spoilers includes display of hidden, expandable spoilers. Links includes external links, username links, and community links. Images included embedded images, image references, and inline images.

Thanks to input from others, I also added a test to see if lemmy hyperlinks opened in-app. There was a problem with using the SFFA Community Guide that caused some apps to be essentially penalized twice because there was formatting inside formatting, so I created this TEST POST to more clearly and fairly measure each app.

In each case, I checked whether the display was correct based on the rules for Lemmy Markdown, and consistent with the author’s intent. In cases where the app recognized the tag correctly but did not display it accurately, that was treated as a fail.

Results

Out of a possible perfect 10, 6 apps displayed all markdown correctly:

Alexandrite - 10.0

Connect - 10.0

Jerboa (Official Android client) - 10.0

Photon - 10.0

Summit - 10.0

Voyager - 10.0

Quiblr - 9.5

Arctic - 9.3

Interstellar - 9.1

Lemmuy-UI - 9.0

Thunder - 8.9

Tesseract - 8.6

mlmym - 8.0

Racoon - 7.6

Boost - 7.3

Eternity - 7.0

Lemmios - 6.9

Sync - 6.9

Lemmynade - 6.1

Avelon - 5.7

More details of testing here

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213 comments

Interesting to see that even Lemmy-UI does not display markdown completely correctly
- if you want to get fancy
  
  you can even use undocumented tables
  
  This surprisingly works on boost.
  
  Works on Voyager.
  
  Did I pass? lol
  
  just as great as lemmy-ui
  
  Works on Thunder.
  
  Confirmed here on android
  
  Footnotes^[Hello world!] are also undocumented.
  
  Tables are a very common markdown extension most(?) popular markdown parsers support them
  
  for sure, but they're neither mentioned on https://join-lemmy.org/docs/users/02-media.html nor on the linked CommonMark tutorial.
  
  Which is funny because the main part of that documentation is a Markdown table
- I wasn't sure if Lemmuy-UI in the results list was a typo or an alternative interface. Now I know. 😄
- For some reason, Lemmy-UI does not convert usernames to links: @gedaliyah@lemmy.world
  
  it does, but only if you use the autocomplete feature. it's also a bit delayed without any indicator that it's loading.
  if you type @gedal and wait a moment it'll load @gedaliyah@lemmy.world to be selected:
  
  Yes, I'm not sure if that is meant to be a placeholder or a substitute for native user links. What it actually does is generate markup that converts the username into a web link, which is fine for most circumstances, but not ideal. A plaintext username should automatically link to the user. This creates an inconsistent behavior between posts depending on where (and when) they were typed.
  In other words, it's a very helpful feature, but it is not recognizing and linking usernames.
  
  Actually that behaviour is very annoying to other platforms. Mbin for example can only link to the lemmy server this user is on and no longer the local profile of that user. Example: @ user @ lemmy.instance gets converted to [@ user @ lemmy.instance](https:// lemmy.instance/u/user so on mbin this does not open the profile of the user on the local server, but instead links the lemmy instance, so you leave your instance to view the profile.
  (spaces included so this won't get converted to mentions, etc)
  
  Are those not two different users though? Joe at Hotmail and Joe at Gmail are different.
  
  Yes they are, but you have my profile on your server and you do not need to leave the server to view my profile... @ user @ lemmy.instance should link to https:// mbin.instance/u/@user@lemmy.instance and not to https:// lemmy.instance/u/user
  
  I'll have to try on desktop, in the app it isn't very clear what exactly it's looking at to see profiles.
  
  It's weird that community names are automatically rendered as links, but usernames aren't. Isn't it pretty much the same thing?
  
  yeah exactly. On mbin it works this way and lemmy inserting the link breaks that. But it does it for communities in the community description sometime as well, though I don't know if it is just a user "error" or a lemmy error
  
  Yeah, it's rather inconsistent. I opened an issue for it a while ago.
  
  I hope they fix it soon. It would make tagging users way smoother and less clunky.
  
  Compare the source of your comment to the one you're replying to. Those are two different things. I'd argue it's a workaround of anything.
  
  What happens if you press tab or click on the suggested item at the point in your screenshot?
  For me, it inserts the link at the cursor position, but doesn't replace the bit you've already typed, resulting in @gedal[@gedaliyah@lemmy.world](URL).
  Anyone else have this issue?
  
  on firefox, if i type @gedal and click or press tab once it replaces the text with [@gedaliyah@lemmy.world](https://lemmy.world/u/gedaliyah) . the behavior is the same whether i hit tab, enter or click the text.
  
  if i type @gedal and click or press tab once it replaces the text with [@gedaliyah@lemmy.world](https://lemmy.world/u/gedaliyah)
  Ah, you are correct. It turns out that the issue I was encountering was a little more subtle.
  If I type all the way to @gedaliyah@ and click or press tab once it replaces only the second '@', resulting in @gedaliyah[@gedaliyah@lemmy.world](https://lemmy.world/u/gedaliyah).
  
  It's not even just that. It seems that the extra @ acts as a separator, so you can't even autocomplete e.g. @threelonmusketeers@sh as that'll try to autocomplete @sh instead of taking the instance domain as part of the mention.
  I've raised a GitHub issue for this now: https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy-ui/issues/2652
  
  Thanks for investigating and opening a GitHub issue!
  I hope they fix it soon, or else just fix the underlying issue to render @user@instance as markdown in the first place.
- Dunno ... I went to the linked page in the top post and everything seemed fine to me (using Lemmy-UI)
- It doesn't display headings, I know that much.
  #Heading
  
  I'm not sure #heading is valid markdown (see, eg, Daring Fireball's "original" syntax page) ... and I've never seen it. I've always understood that the space was necessary, which I think makes sense for a number of reasons TBH
  So ...
  #This does not work
  This does work
  
  I know that it works on some sites (reddit for example). Generally, it is not preferred.
  
  Didn't know it worked on reddit. Generally it seems necessary to require the space as it disambiguates headings from hashtags, and also makes the raw text more readable.
  
  In doing this I learned that there are "correct" but also "preferred" ways to use markdown. A heading should have a space after the # even though it is correct either way.
  ##Heading
  Heading
  These lines may be the same or different in different apps.
  
  The thing of it is, if you just highlight some text and hit the heading button in the GUI, it doesn't include the space.
  
  Interesting. I never noticed that. As I said, it's technically correct but not preferred. I'll see if I can post a link about this later.
  
  Heading