In reviewing the Fedipact page, I noticed the message about Threads having moved to threads.com nearly a year ago. In reviewing the federation status of various Lemmy instances with the Federation Checker tool, I noticed that threads.com doesn't appear to have been added to their defederation lists. Is Threads able to federate with other Fediverse instances using its new domain, including those that have defederated from threads.net?

If a segment of text is formatted in bold, italics or strikethrough, that formatting remains if it is subsequently also turned into a hyperlink. If that hyperlink is then selected and updated to a different link, however, the non-hyperlink formatting disappears.

If the bold, italicize, or strikethrough formatting options above the keyboard are selected, they only toggle on once the next character is typed. If that character is then erased, the formatting still remains.

Similarly, if the options are tapped again to disable them, they are not visually disabled until the next character is typed.

There are several issues with posting that could be improved:

1. An untitled post is listed as Untitiled rather than Untitled in the draft menu.
2. After creating a post, a new draft is automatically created rather than taking the user back to the draft menu. Perhaps this behavior could be a toggle.
3. Similarly to 2, if there isn't an untitled draft when the Post button is tapped for the first time after the app is opened, a new draft is automatically created. If that draft is then deleted, this behavior does not reoccur until the app is closed and opened again. Some users may prefer to always open the page to a draft rather than the draft list, so perhaps this could also be a toggle.

Crossposted from https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/62330948

The masked burglar broke into the closed Virginia liquor store early on Saturday and hit the bottom shelf, where the scotch and whisky were stored. The bandit was something of a nocturnal menace: bottles were smashed, a ceiling tile collapsed and alcohol pooled on the floor.

The suspect acted like an animal because, in fact, he’s a raccoon.

On Saturday morning, an employee at the Ashland, Virginia-area liquor store found the trash panda passed out on the bathroom floor at the end of his drunken escapade.

The highest number of attempts at the practical test before passing last year was 21

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

The article itself is from August, but after seeing Flock cameras at a local Lowe's store that were missing from the DeFlock map, I thought it'd be worth bringing increased attention to such companies contributing to the propagation of Flock cameras. If there's a Home Depot or Lowe's near you that's not on the DeFlock map already, it might just not have been added yet.

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)

While Blorp has the ability to mark post and comment replies as read or unread, it doesn't appear to be able to mark all unread replies as read simultaneously, a potentially useful feature for those simply looking to clear their backlog.

It would also be useful to extend the ability to mark replies as read or unread to DMs as well.

Currently, if someone links to another threadiverse post in their post, it is seemingly handled as any other URL is and opened using the in-app browser. Instead, I suggest that such links be opened as posts directly, with the user having the option to tap the back button at the top left to return to the original post.

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.

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.

If you use the Android or Desktop version of Firefox, there are several archival add-ons that you might find useful.

Note that not all of the following add-ons have official Android support, despite likely functioning without issue. To solve this issue for any given add-on for Firefox on Android, a good solution I've found is to switch to Iceraven, a fork that re-enables xpi add-on support.

Web Archives

Useful for viewing the archived version of a page from several archival sources, including the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine.

Wayback Machine

The official Wayback Machine add-on, providing several Wayback Machine utilities for the current browser page, along with context menu integration.

Users specifically interested in page archival may want to use the archive-webextension add-on in addition to or instead of it, as it provides additional archival options, such as keyboard shortcut support. A similar extension for archiving pages to archive.today instead is Archive Page.

Internet Archive Downloader

Haven't tried this extension myself, but it seems useful for retaining access to rented books beyond the limited time period the Internet Archive provides.

It seems to output books in PDF format, with epub conversions not being effective according to a user review. That's likely due to many of the reference materials on the Internet Archive simply being scans of variable quality, and therefore—even with the automatic OCR the Internet Archive does to enable book searches—text accuracy for epub conversions likely varies from book to book.

In using the 'Controversial' sorting option for my All feed, I found that it was consistently only able to load a limited number of posts before erroring out.

Edit: After testing in Safari via the regular Lemmy client, the same behavior occurring seems to indicate that it's a bug with Lemmy itself, rather than Arctic specifically.

Edit: Confirmed with the Lemmy developers that it had indeed been a bug in the backend, but has already been resolved in a development version of the software testable on voyager.lemmy.ml.

While I've made use of title and domain filters for a few weeks now to filter out unwanted posts from communities I otherwise don't want to block, I noticed today that if you press the 'Add Filter' button for Title, Domain, Community Name, or Username filters, but leave the filter blank, all posts will be hidden.

In the case of Domain filters, oddly up to three recent non-URL posts seem to be able to appear when a Domain filter is blanked out, but not all non-URL posts in general.

For some reason, the same problem doesn't seem to occur when blanking out a Content filter, as far as I can tell.

Here's is a demonstration of the glitch, using a blank Community Name filter: