I’m not opposed to a name change. I’m not really great at marketing tbh. Here’s the thing, I kinda hate the Lemmy branding. The technology is wonderful, but I find the logo kinda off putting. I really wanted to build an app that felt cool to use. Naming things is hard, and I’m not claiming that I did better than Lemmy. I also understand most people here probably either like or have no problem with the name.

When I set out to build Blorp, my goal was to appeal to a broader audience. I would love to help bring in new users to Lemmy. ~8 months later, here I am and I think if shifted focus a little to making current Lemmy users want to use my app. I would still love to bring in new users, but that poses the challenge of helping them understand federated social media.

I’m kinda rambling now, but there’s some context. But if someone wanted to build out some alternative branding including a logo, I’d be open to the idea. But it would take time to switch things over and really don’t want to sacrifice the limited time I have to solve bugs.

What I really need if we want to scale this project up is some help. That could be submitting bugs, helping organize GutHub issues, researching out to existing Blorp users to collect feedback, writing code, help marketing to new users. Any of those would be helpful.

Ok, I ran a very not scientific poll. Of 55 Android users, 33 said they use F-Droid to get their Lemmy app of choice, and 22 said they use Google Play.

I would still say Google Play is significant enough that I want to distribute there, but I’m genuinely surprised F-Droid is so popular here. I stand corrected, and there’s a good chance you’re right that F-Droid is more popular here than Google Play.

I’m going to keep an eye on the poll as more votes roll in, but it seems to be moving at a fairly consistent ratio of 3:2 F-Droid to Play Store.

Not yet, but you’re not the first person to ask. I’m also not a fan of the Google Group thing. Unfortunately Google requires I conduct a few weeks of closed testing before I get access to the play store. The only way to run closed tests it to add people by email or via Google Group. Once access is unlocked, then you can install via Play Store like normal.

I’m still operating under the assumption that more Android Lemmy users install via Play Store than other Android stores, but I could totally be wrong. I imagine it skews by community, For example, I’m sure if you ask one of the privacy communities they would tend to avoid mainstream stores.

It would be interesting to pick a more general purpose community (maybe ask lemmy community) and ask people what platforms they use. I also imagine some of the other apps like Voyager may have a better idea since they have a substantial amount of users across multiple platforms.

But I guess my TL;DR is what you’re saying makes sense, but it’s always better to conduct some research than assume you understand how someone uses your app. Genuinely I would be curious what a larger pull of Lemmy users would reveal.

I fully agree with your distaste for big tech. That’s why I’m here and not Reddit. However, if I launch an app on mainstream stores, I might get a couple hundred users relatively easily. If I push to the more niche stores/distribution methods, I might get a couple or maybe a dozen users. It’s not that I don’t want to distribute on the niche stores, but I need to prioritize what will get real users. But my goal is to find a distribution method that makes everyone happy. For example, I have plans to distribute the web version of my app via Docker, but I know I’ll have a hard time getting people to pull a docker image. So I’ve deprioritized that for now. Same goes for PWA. I know I want to improve the PWA installation experience, but I know less people install a PWA on their home screen than app via App Store and Play Store.

That being said, the more people I have asking for a specific distribution method, the more likely I am to prioritize that. Unfortunately, every distribution method I add increase the friction for me to push new releases. I really want to be able to iterate quickly until Blorp matures, then as I find updates aren’t as frequent I will build out to more distribution methods.

All of this could change, especially if I found more people willing to contribute to the source code.

A big thing stopping me is I don’t really moderate any communities actively, so I’m not confident I know how mods use the site. But if you’re interested in testing and giving feedback, I’ll DM you when I start working on this.

!blorp@lemmy.ml

https://github.com/christianjuth/blorp

One step at a time, but I love the idea! I only have so many hours so my plan is to get in on the app stores, then build out from there by supporting some of these more niche distribution methods.

Yeah I gotta fix that. I’ll probably look at the layout voyager uses for inspiration, but feel free to attach screenshots of other apps if there are any designs you like specifically.

I also want to improve the saved page. Saved should be searchable imo.

No, but you’re the second person to ask that. I’ll work on adding one

Out of curiosity, what lemmy client did you use to add the strikethough? Or did you hand type it. As far as I know, Lemmy only supports strike throughs using ~~

Like this

Asking because I made a conscious decision to not support HTML within markdown, but I’m curious if other clients do. I mostly use the official Lemmy UI and Voyager to compare against.

Great catch! I have a fix, but it might take me a couple days to cut a new release. Cutting a new release takes a bit of time, so it’s easier to batch a bunch of bug fixes all at once. Let me know if you see any other bugs and I’ll see if I can sneak them all into a release.

Btw, follow !blorp@lemmy.ml if you want to stay up to date

That should be easy to fix. Though I’m looking at it, and I would guess sort and search would be a harder to hit target since they seem smaller.

Thank you! That’s is honestly what sent me on this mission. Let me know if you have any feature requests! Either on GitHub, comment, or DM

Not really yet. Maybe if you could make a list of which ones you want the most I can start there. Can’t make any promises as far as timeline, but my plan is to build a full featured client that runs cross platform.

Thanks for the feedback! Could you both share some screenshots demonstating what you are thinking? Or even a napkin sketch. Just something to help me visualize. Either here or on GitHub issues.

PieFed unfortunately is going to take me a bit of time. But pretty high on my priorities rn.

My goal is to launch a unified Lemmy experience across web, desktop, mobile and tablet. I’m also pretty confident my multi account switching experience is better than most Lemmy clients. Though I don’t have time to test every single one.

My time is limited, but I would love to get it everywhere including a Linux desktop app. I’m happy to look into fDroid. It’s really that if I have an hour to spend coding, I have to prioritize the task that will benefit the most users. Right now I’m very deep into solving Lemmy V1 support and PieFed support. That will likely take a couple months.

Feedback from frequent users makes a big difference. If someone that uses my app every day asks for a feature consistently, it’s much easier for me to justify the time spent working on that feature.

Also, in addition to FOSS, there is no data collected at all. The only communication the app has is with the lemmy server you select, or the default instance (Lemmy.zip) when you launch the app for the first time. MacOS will also ping GitHub releases for updates.