Fedi client app developers need to design fedi client apps in a holistic way to include a custom server (as with Mammoth’s moth.social) or create an account for the user on one of a curated selection of other servers, without forcing the user to choose one.

It’s a severe problem with trying to grow fedi that general users are expected to understand how servers work and make an informed decision about which one to join. General users don’t care about this topic and will quickly turn away when it is forced upon them. That’s why the client app needs to handle this for the user without making a fuss about it.

These apps also need good discovery features and feeds with posts that are trending generally and for specific topics. Then devs need to make money with those apps somehow, then they need to market those apps (at this point, it goes beyond just “devs” and expands into an organization with a marketing department, etc.).

Then, hopefully fedi’s inherent advantages of interoperability and resilience will naturally cause people to choose these user-friendly, effectively marketed fedi client apps over things like Instagram, Tiktok, etc. After all, if it can’t compete on its own merits with all other factors being equal, there’s no point to it for most people.

It’s a hard user experience design problem to create an interface that presents all possible types of posts, content and interactions in a sensible way. This “kitchen sink” approach is kind of what Facebook does and as a result its interface is messy and cluttered. That’s not to say it’s impossible or wrong to do things that way, just difficult and unpopular.

On the technical side, it’s really hard to make a client app that works with multiple server softwares, because they all have different sets of features.

In the current world of fedi software development, it would be a single dev or a small, likely unpaid team that would have to make the equivalent of several different client apps combined into one. I don’t anticipate such a large and complicated project being completed until the devs can make a decent living doing the work.

That’s funny, my phone is kinda small so I had to scroll that horizontal menu with the download button, over to the right to access that button 😆 Thanks for the screenshot

I also ran into that issue the other day. Did you file a feature request for that? If you didn’t I will. In general though I really like Moshidon. The video player functionality I want is not available in any mastodon client app except for Fedilab technically, but its implementation is still very primitive for now.

That’s awesome, nice work! I just tried out Tesseract and it seems to work quite well. Feel free to leave some links where people can try it or contribute to the project, if you like.

True. A lot of things could be improved with the design, this is really just to visualize the core concept. I was also thinking a play/pause button on the pinned player would be good.

Getting fancier, maybe double tap on the right of the pinned player to skip forward 15 seconds would be sweet for skipping ad spots, and when you go the original post, the video could be fixed to the top of the page while you scroll into the replies.