Updated! Updates are shown in quote text like this. Some scores are updated following app updates.

An Apps Experiment

Cross-posted from https://lemmy.world/post/18159531

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, 6 apps displayed all markdown correctly:

Alexandrite - 10.0

Connect - 10.0

Jerboa (Official Android client) - 10.0

Photon - 10.0

Summit - 10.0

Voyager - 10.0

Quiblr - 9.5

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

More details of testing here

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.

      • PrettyFlyForAFatGuy@feddit.ukEnglish
        2·
        5 months ago

        This was over a year ago now Jerboa may well be in a better state now. I can’t remember specific bugs but they were frequent and serious enough to frustrate me, a professional software tester, enough to move to a different app.

  • randint@lemmy.frozeninferno.xyzEnglish
    22·
    5 months ago

    I don’t understand why there isn’t a “markdown library” of some sort that software developers can just use in their app. I haven’t looked too deep into this, but it has always seemed to me that every app must individually implement markdown display. Why?

    • Echo Dot@feddit.ukEnglish
      40·
      5 months ago

      Because markdown has committed the worst of old programming sins. It has no standard.

      However I’m pretty sure that Lemmy has a standard so there’s not really much excuse.

      • gedaliyah@lemmy.worldOPEnglish
        11·
        5 months ago

        Lemmy documentation references CommonMark so I’m assuming that is the accepted standard, plus a few Lemmy specific things.

      • Croquette@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
        3·
        5 months ago

        Isn’t the base markdown standardized?

        It’s just that so many flavors advertise themselves as markdown+ flavor?

        • brian@programming.devEnglish
          8·
          5 months ago

          only sort of.

          this is the original document defining markdown, and you’ll notice it doesn’t really specify a lot of the things that have compatibility issues across different markdown processors, along with allowing arbitrary html which really depends on where you’re showing it. There’s a list of ambiguous syntax here.

          CommonMark is as close to a standard as we have.

          • Croquette@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
            1·
            5 months ago

            Thanks for the info. I thought that markdownguide.org was the standard as explained in your link from the creator.

            By using what is described in markdownguide, I’ve never encountered any issue with any markdown compatible text editor.

    • JackbyDev@programming.devEnglish
      14·
      5 months ago

      There are Markdown libraries. Many have small differences and many apps have their own custom additions though.

    • Huschke@lemmy.worldEnglish
      10·
      5 months ago

      The problem isn’t that there are no libraries out there that parse Markdown. There are, in fact, plenty for all different languages. The issue is that every site has its own flavor of it. Lemmy does it one way, GitHub another, and something else does it completely differently yet again.

      It is, unfortunately, kind of a mess.

    • micahmo@programming.devEnglish
      2·
      4 months ago

      As one of the Thunder devs, I can say there are markdown libraries. Thunder is written in Dart/Flutter and there is a great library that we use.

      https://pub.dev/packages/flutter_markdown

      That said, and as others have mentioned, markdown is not as well standardized and it seems like just about every site renders it differently, so there are a lot of edge cases to handle. Lemmy also has several unique implementations of things, such as spoilers, superscript/subscript, and the ability to tag users/communities without a hyperlink.

      In fact, one of the things Thunder failed on (table alignment) is a known bug in the markdown library we use. :-)

      https://github.com/flutter/flutter/issues/109487

  • pe1uca@lemmy.pe1uca.devEnglish
    3·
    5 months ago

    I’m looking at this in eternity and seems only spoilers don’t work from the post you linked.
    User and community links work properly.

  • Gointhefridge@lemm.eeEnglish
    8·
    5 months ago

    I’ve been using Mlem since week 2 and I have no idea if I’m missing anything or not. I’ve never visited any instance on anything but Mlem.

  • Aurelius@lemmy.worldEnglish
    4·
    5 months ago

    Left this comment in the other thread too, but posting here for visibility:

    Quiblr should now have each of the markdown criteria fixed. Huge thanks for the feedback and for all this analysis. Consistent markdown is important for a great and consistent user experience across the lemmy ecosystem

    • gedaliyah@lemmy.worldOPEnglish
      1·
      5 months ago

      Great! Thank you for the gorgeous app. I really love the style, and I think the personalized feed is brilliant.

      On my device, the lemmy hyperlink in the test post is still opening outside the app. I’m not sure how other web apps handle this but it would be the only additional change that would make it a perfect score.

      As an aside, I would love to see it as a PWA or standalone app. I don’t know if that’s on your roadmap but I think it would be neat.

      • Aurelius@lemmy.worldEnglish
        1·
        4 months ago

        Thanks for the Quiblr compliments! And Post and Comment links should now open in-app. I think that covers everything

        And Quiblr is a PWA. Native apps are in the works

  • maegul (he/they)@lemmy.mlEnglish
    2·
    5 months ago

    So what’s the technological story here? I’m guessing lemmy itself uses a particular markdown parser that could probably be extracted and used in other contexts as it’s likely written in rust and should therefore be pretty portable without too much effort.

    Are other apps just using whatever markdown parser is convenient to them? Is this something that the lemmy and threadiverse community could converge on? Even the fediverse as a whole where just about every platform other than mastodon supports writing in some for of markdown … feels like a pandoc like utility could go far.

    • gedaliyah@lemmy.worldOPEnglish
      3·
      5 months ago

      I’m probably not the person to ask, to be honest. Lemmy as I understand it is the protocol that exchanges the information about posts, etc. The post content is stored and shared as plaintext, but Lemmy also has instructions about how a UI should interpret the text and serve it to the user.

      Ideally, the same text should appear consistent across any UI. Obviously, some apps will use different fonts and colors and may interpret the style of an element differently.

      • maegul (he/they)@lemmy.mlEnglish
        1·
        5 months ago

        Ideally, the same text should appear consistent across any UI. Obviously, some apps will use different fonts and colors and may interpret the style of an element differently.

        Oh yea styling isn’t the issue here … it’s whether the markdown is correctly interpreted and rendered. AFAIU, lemmy doesn’t have any instructions about how to interpret the text, just some standard that they’ve chosen to use, along with their open source software for doing so (as they’ve built too clients, the default web UI and Jerboa).

  • nocturne@sopuli.xyzEnglish
    12·
    5 months ago

    Is there a list of what each app failed? It would be nice for the devs to be able to see. I use Mlem, and there is about to be a new release rebuilding it from the ground up. Hopefully it will rate higher once that happens.

      • nocturne@sopuli.xyzEnglish
        5·
        5 months ago

        Thanks. Interesting how the apps, even those that have lower scores, perform better than a web browser. Using Safari and Firefox (on a laptop) and both open your links in Lemmy.world instead of that thread on my instance. Neither recognize the user as anything other than text.

  • Squorlple@lemmy.worldEnglish
    4·
    5 months ago

    There are a lot of image/gif(?) posts that I haven’t been able to view either on the Memmy (Apple) app or in-browser with either Safari (Apple) or Google Chrome. I imagine it comes down to the file types as well as the lack of native hosting to standardize posts of different media types, but I’m not the techiest person to consult on that. One downside of the fediverse is the lack of standards for file hosting/conversion/displaying to ensure that all media can be accessed regardless of the browser/app (or, alternatively, the lack of an all-encompassing app for all devices [Jerboa sounds like the closest to this to me but it is not available for iOS yet]), as well as the self-funded nature of the instances commonly not having the budget to natively host multimedia content such as videos.

    • gedaliyah@lemmy.worldOPEnglish
      7·
      5 months ago

      Eternity is in active development. It was sleeping for a while, but @bazsalanszky@lemmy.toldi.eu has confirmed that it will see a new release soon.

  • yo_scottie_oh@lemmy.mlEnglish
    7·
    5 months ago

    cross-posted

    Minor nit pick, but did you know that Lemmy has actual cross posting functionality?

    Either way, interesting study. This is the type of content that I Red er… Lemmy for, so thanks for posting. I use Voyager myself, being an Apollo refugee.

    • WanderingVentra@lemm.eeEnglish
      3·
      5 months ago

      Ya I’ve only been able to cross post on the web UI. I’ve seen apps like Jerboa and Voyager at least show cross posting correctly, I just wish they made it easier to cross-post in app.

      • micahmo@programming.devEnglish
        2·
        4 months ago

        Thunder allows cross-posting! It should follow the web UI implementation (where the body of the new post has a link to the original, plus the original contents in a quote block).

        • WanderingVentra@lemm.eeEnglish
          2·
          4 months ago

          Oh nice! That’s the one I’ve probably tried the least so I’ll have to give that one another go. (Not for any particular reason, I just got used to the UI of the first couple other apps I tried). Thanks for the good news!

      • Microw@lemm.eeEnglish
        2·
        5 months ago

        Boost has a very easy-to-handle implementation of crossposting

    • gedaliyah@lemmy.worldOPEnglish
      111·
      5 months ago

      Yeah, cross posting is another quirky Lemmy thing. AFAIK it just generates a new post with the same content, and also maybe varies by app. That could be wrong though: I’m not sure.

  • Jimbo@yiffit.netEnglish
    8·
    5 months ago

    One note on Jerboa, at least for me gifs don’t seem to play when embedded in comments. Otherwise 10/10 for me.