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Blorp
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Bl🪐rp – a Threadiverse client for Lemmy and PieFed.
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[Bug][Feature Request][Question]
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founded 3 months ago
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Hi there everyone,
I am trying out Blorp on both desktop browser and in app and everything for the most part is going swimmingly aside from this. I browse all usually in the hopes of finding new stuff but this often results in needing to block users(reposting something across 20 communities or bots), communities(foreign language or something I don't need, like politics or porn) or instances(again, usually foreign language or something like political or troll instances) and in normal piefed UI and my other piefed/lemmy apps, this is usually very easy, all found in a central dropdown.
I'm having problems figuring out if I'm just not doing it right or whether Blorp has spaced these three things out in completely different menus and dropdowns. I, in fact, still haven't found out how to block an instance while using the app.
Is there a central menu to handle a block like this when looking at any page, like front sorting page, community or post page or is it really different(or seemingly missing) when viewing different pages?
I'm liking the UI otherwise but I really can't use it if this part is as unintuitive as it seems as I need the feature often.
So this isn't as ambiguous as I'm making it, this is the type of consolidation of managing all three elements(user/community/instance) I'm talking about in the default UI:
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A feature that some Lemmy apps have (including Mlem and Arctic) are swipe options that allow up to four actions to be taken via short and long horizontal swipes.
As illustrated in the Arctic and Mlem screenshots below, the typical actions are upvote and downvote for the short and long left swipes, and reply and save for the short and long right swipes. Ideally, users would have the option to remap actions to these swipe options, along with having the option to disable them individually; alternative actions users could choose to remap include Block User, Block Community, Hide Post, Share, Crosspost, and Report Post, among others.
In contrast to hard-to-tap buttons, I think swipe actions would make interacting with posts on Blorp easier.
Short Left Swipe
Long Left Swipe
Short Right Swipe
Long Right Swipe
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In using Arctic today, I found another feature Blorp seems to be lacking: the automatic labeling of bot-created posts. While some users like communities with such posts for replicating the scope of content available on the corresponding subreddit, I personally prefer blocking them in favor of original Lemmy content, and thus need a way to readily distinguish them. For users who don't feel the need to distinguish between bot and non-bot posts, perhaps an option to toggle the label off would also be useful.
For illustrative purposes, here's one such community displayed on Arctic, Mlem, and Blorp. While Mlem also seems to mark such posts with a miniature terminal icon, I think an icon closer in size to that used by Arctic would be more clearly distinguishable; in going by Mlem's approach though, the icon could be placed next to the existing Blorp new user icon.
(Arctic)
(Mlem)
(Blorp)
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Having employed Lemmy's community blocking feature to block thousands of communities to minimize my need to scroll past uninteresting All feed content, it seems that having so many communities blocked causes the app to start behaving erratically after tapping the 'Manage Blocks' tab. Even before the page loads, the rest of the app becomes unresponsive, and once the page loads, I can't readily return to the settings page. Only several of the blocked communities load at a time, and after thirty seconds or so the list is sometimes cleared.
(when the page loads)
(when the page clears itself)
I'm not sure at which point the average user would encounter this glitch, but as I am able to load the list in the Arctic app, hopefully it's something that can be fixed for Blorp? Also, while I haven't blocked users to the same degree as I have communities, I presume the same effect would occur should someone opt to block users at that scale too.
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As development on Arctic seems to have halted, Blorp seems like a promising alternative for its Piefed support, but could use additional quality of life features. Among the most important of these from Arctic is additional granularity in post filtering, ensuring that posts one doesn't want to see can be excluded without impacting the visibility of other posts.
Beyond just filtering keywords, options to apply distinct keyword filtering for post titles, content, URL, OP username, and community name would allow users to preemptively exclude content they aren't interested in. Furthermore, via regex expressions, terms can be combined to increase efficiency and maximize the scope of the filters.
Here's an example of how Arctic handles it, with several of my own regex filters.
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