Downloaded - great work so far!

I really enjoy the choice of font & font size and the general layout. It’s modern.
The gestures to vote/reply feel great! The way the comments are stacked, indented with the orange/yellow colored line look wonderful. There’s a lot of potential here.

There’s certain things here that are ahead of Mlem with their beta, for example I like that my login is defaulted and later changed in the settings rather than being a sort of home page.

Suggestions:

1. Night mode. 2 Versions: Dark Grey Standard and ‘True Black’. Waaaay easier on the eyes, and easier on the battery life. Also the light won’t bother my wife when I’m fiddling on my phone from bed.

2. Under “Feeds” where it says “Hot” at the top, that seems to be where the user filters by communities. That word should be “Communities”, not “Hot” so it’s clear to the user that’s where you select them. The ‘Fire’ icon on the right already indicates hot, new, top, etc.

3. Alternatively to #2, I might explore a “Communities” module (is that the term?) alongside ‘Settings’ and ‘Feed’. A person can select which communities they wish to appear in their feed as a checkbox.

For example, I might be subscribed to 20 communities but only want “Games”, “Technology” and “Memes” in my feed regularly. The ability to just select only those would be great.

4. If you need testers, a Discord or Matrix.org room would be necessary for feedback. And a link in your community’s sidebar.

5. I’m sure a whole lot of other stuff is in the works like being able to customize your feed screen (post previews, website images/icons turned on/off, etc), ability to browse unsubbed communities (including other instances) and viewing/responding to notifications.

6. I’ve mentioned this in some other Lemmy discussions - the ideal app should be as simple to use as possible and assumes the user will only be discouraged by tech jargon like “server”, “instance” and “federation”. So you did a good thing and kept this fairly simple.

Something to consider in the future would be “create an account” screen if they don’t yet have one. Perhaps an option for “Easy” and “Advanced”. “Easy” would randomize which instance they’re signed up for, whereas “Advanced” let’s the user choose. If your community-search module looks at all communities, then it should never matter to the user where their starting point is.

As it stands, a new user cannot sign into any app without first creating an account on a website. For what it’s worth, that’s a barrier to entry.

For new users that want to understand how all this works, a little blurb (ELI5 style) in the “about” section of your settings would be really helpful.

I hope some of this is useful in helping inform your development choices going forward. I’m happy to keep beta testing this and letting you know how things are going from the user-side of things.