This is a quality post. I enjoy the attention and repetition of making sure that each user internalizes their autonomy of needing to make a deliberate choice and calling out that force of habit is a difficult thing to break. I needed to move Apollo clear from its location on my phone and replace it with the Lemmy PWA to ensure I would stop going back to reddit even if accidentally.

Whether it’s on Lemmy, or Kbin, or any other fediverse app I hope that users take a look at their values for their presence on the web and begin taking steps to take back their choice of what that looks like. A lot of us still have facebook or use some other app because it’s is basically the only way to keep interacting with their close friends and family. I wouldn’t begrudge anyone for that, I do it too. But we can do our best to chose for ourselves where to spend the bulk of our own time.

Just going off of a quick stroll through the iOS app store (as of time of this post)

• Apollo is the highest rated 3rd party reddit app at #11 in the News category (for comparison, the next highest was Narwhal at #75 within this same category)
• Apollo does not however breach the top 200 apps app-store-wide. The official reddit app does at #52 overall. and enjoys the company of other ubiquitous apps like Hulu, Duolingo, Google Drive, and Disney+, all within 10 ranks of it on the overall list.
• It does seem that reddit has crunched their numbers and gambled that 3rd party app users and the uproar they are in is a calculable loss against the groundswell of desktop and official reddit app users.

I saw someone attempt to invoke a !remindme bot in some other thread. I don’t know if that’s actually something that exists already, but that would probably be useful for people who use it.

A few low hanging fruit I wanted to tackle involve

• trimming leading/trailing spaces in the search when pasting a cross instance community. If you have a space it will default to a local instance text search
• adding some feedback for users who have a pending application to join an instance. Currently if you have a pending app waiting approval it just hangs there instead of performing a successful login. It’d be nice to have a message along the lines of

Your user profile is still pending approval from the administrators of this instance. Don’t want to wait? Try hosting your own! <Link to docs>

• figuring out a better way to block quote when line breaks are present in the quoted text. You can see an example of what I mean in this quote block. I had to break up the lines in their own > because putting the lines right after another removed the intended break and instead continues the next line directly following the last character in the previous block. Not sure I’m explaining this right, I’m a little fried today. Maybe I’m just dumb and didn’t do it correctly.

I may have been a little… overzealous when I wrote my beehaw application but I echo this point when I submitted

My last comment on reddit was 6 years ago. I was afraid of what it and the internet at large was becoming. Afraid to be a human online because the trolls and the dox and the swats. The mission statements in the side bar, the long and insightful posts that hope to bridge new people to the culture of beehaw that speak of being nice and compassionate, of working together to build a community of varied interests and peoples let me dare to dream that there exists a place where I can be a human on the internet again.

It’s going to take a lot of deconditioning to not be a lurker!