Updated! Updates are shown in quote text like this. Some scores are updated following app updates.
An Apps Experiment
Introduction
This is an experiment I performed out of curiosity, and I have a few big disclaimers at the bottom. Basically, I’ve seen a lot of comments recently about one app or another not displaying something right. Lemmy has been around for a while now and can no longer be considered an experimental platform.
Lemmy and the apps that people use to access the platform have become an important part of people’s lives. Whether you are checking the app weekly or daily, and whether you use it to stay up on the news or to stay connected to your hobby, it’s important that it works. I hope that this helps people to see the extent of the challenge, and encourages developers to improve their apps, too.
How I did it
I wanted to investigate objectively how accurately each app displays text of posts and comments using the standard Lemmy markdown. Markdown is a standard part of the Lemmy platform, but not all apps handle it the same. It is basically what gives text useful formatting.
I used the latest release of each app, but did not include pre-releases. I only included apps that have released an update in the last 6 months, which should include most apps in active development. I was unable to test iOS-exclusive apps, so they are not included either. In all, 16 apps met the inclusion criteria.
I also added Eternity, which is in active development, although it has not had a recent update. I was able to include several iOS apps thanks to testing from @jordanlund@lemmy.world – Thanks, Jordan! This made for 20 apps that were tested.
Each app was rated in 5 categories: Text, Format, Spoilers, Links, and Images. I chose these mostly based on the wonderful Markdown Guide from @marvin@sffa.community, which was posted about a year ago in !meta@sffa.community (here).
I checked whether each app correctly displayed each category, then took the overall average. Each category was weighted equally. Text includes italic, bold, strong, strikethrough, superscript, and subscript. Format includes block quotes, lists, code (block and inline), tables, and dividers. Spoilers includes display of hidden, expandable spoilers. Links includes external links, username links, and community links. Images included embedded images, image references, and inline images.
Thanks to input from others, I also added a test to see if lemmy hyperlinks opened in-app. There was a problem with using the SFFA Community Guide that caused some apps to be essentially penalized twice because there was formatting inside formatting, so I created this TEST POST to more clearly and fairly measure each app.
In each case, I checked whether the display was correct based on the rules for Lemmy Markdown, and consistent with the author’s intent. In cases where the app recognized the tag correctly but did not display it accurately, that was treated as a fail.
Results
Out of a possible perfect 10, 7 apps displayed all markdown correctly:
Alexandrite - 10.0
Connect - 10.0
Jerboa (Official Android client) - 10.0
Photon - 10.0
Quiblr - 10.0
Summit - 10.0
Voyager - 10.0
Arctic - 9.3
Interstellar - 9.1
Lemmuy-UI - 9.0
Thunder - 8.9
Tesseract - 8.6
mlmym - 8.0
Racoon - 7.6
Boost - 7.3
Eternity - 7.0
Lemmios - 6.9
Sync - 6.9
Lemmynade - 6.1
Avelon - 5.7
Disclaimers
Disclaimers
I Love Lemmy Apps (and their devs)
Lemmy apps devs work very hard, and invest a lot in the platform. Lemmy is better because they are doing the work that they do. Like, a LOT better. Everyone who uses the platform has to access it through one app or another. Apps are the face of the entire platform. Whether an app is a FOSS passion project, underwritten by a grant, or generating income through sales or ads, no one is getting rich by making their app. It is for the benefit of the community.
This is not meant to be a rating of the quality or functionality of any app. An app may have a high rating here but be missing other features that users want, or users may love an app that has a lower rating. This is just about how well apps handle markdown.
This is pretty unscientific
You’ll see my methodology above. I’m not a scientist. There is probably a much better way to do this, and I probably have biases in terms of how I went about it. I think it’s interesting and probably has some valuable information. If you think it’s interesting, let me know. If you think of a better way, PM me and I’d be happy to share what I have so you don’t have to start from scratch.
My only goal is to help the community
I do think that accurately displaying markdown should be a standard expectation of a finished app. I hope that devs use this as an opportunity to shore up the areas that are lagging, and that they have a set of standards to aim for.
I don’t have any Apple things
Sorry. This is just Android and Web review. If someone would like to see how iOS apps are doing, please reach out and I’ll share how we can work together to include them.
Do you have more info on how you calculated your scores?
Interesting that you rank the official Lemmy website as not displaying correctly. I would have thought this would be the baseline. Did you use Jerboa as the baseline?
I describe the specific things I looked at in the post. It is based on the standard of CommonMark.org, with the lemmy-specific changes: expandable spoilers, user links, and community links. the Lemmy-UI does not link usernames for some reason. It does detect when you are typing a username and auto-format it into a link through a dialogue: @gedaliyah@lemmy.world but it does not detect and link usernames typed in plain text: @gedaliyah@lemmy.world
Hmm that site seems down at the moment but I was asking more for specific things that led to specific scores for each.
Interesting that it gets a mark down for the username thing. But there must be more. Summit gets a 9.7 and you said each category was weighted the same.
I’m curious if users get notified if you tag them without the full link. That would be a back end action not handled by the app/UI.
If not, you could argue that Lemmy-UI is more correct since apps that do the link might give the impression the user has been properly tagged and notified.
Each category is weighted the same (20%), but not all categories include the same number of tests. Like I said, it’s not very scientific. I did try to ensure areas that are more important were counted separately. So not handling spoilers might have a larger overall effect than handling superscript. Spoilers are used all over, especially in community info/rules, but superscript is less essential (or less disruptive anyway).
Ah I see, thanks for the explanation.