Someone made a pretty imo unfairly negative post about Blorp:
I just wanted to take a moment to than you all for your amazing support. I feel very lucky that I’ve made it over a year with very little negativity from my users. Everyone is overwhelmingly polite and patient.
If you have the time, I would love some comments on that post from real users. Even if the comment is politely critical of my app.
There are still many people who haven’t heard of “Blorp” and I would hate for them to get a bad first impression.
I should probably not engage with the haters. Clearly I need a marketing person lol. Maybe I’ll delete this.
Edit: my original reason for making this post was kinda dumb, but I really appreciate all the support in the comments so I don’t delete it
I don’t use blorp, but the way they made that post is definitely not the way to provide feedback. Feedback should be respectful and helpful. You aren’t even getting paid for this (not that that makes a difference in how they should treat you), you are donating your own time and energy to make blorp happen. You have no obligation to them at all.
One of the issues they mentioned (about Cloudflare) isn’t even related to your app and could just as easily happen on mine or any others. I received a negative review at some point that was related to a server issue and was completely out of my hands, and it’s frustrating (even after it was fixed server-side, the user never updated their review). I could go on, and I’m sure you could as well.
It’s best not to dwell on it though. You’ve made a great app, that honestly, I could take so inspiration from!
Yeah I shouldn’t dwell, but honestly it was nice to hear the perspective of other maintainers like yourself. Keep up the good work on Interstellar!
Blorp is amazing dude, keep on going!
Entitled dickheads come with the territory, I’m afraid. It means you’re doing something people have noticed, which is a sign of success ;-)
I’ve always found you to be very responsive to any issue or suggestion I’ve raised. I appreciate all the work you’ve done, and I appreciate the great app.
Keep on keeping on my good man!
If it means anything, the negativity on that post seems to be coming from just the OP and the asshole replying in the comments.
Blorp might not be perfect, but no Lemmy app is, and that’s what feature requests and bug reports are for. Thanks for all the effort you put into Blorp! 👍
Yeah honestly our mistake was having a multiple very talented frontend developers working on different clients instead of collaborating. Voyager was a big inspiration for me. Photon’s post editor is fantastic. Interstellar has mbin, PieFed and Lemmy support, which is amazing. I haven’t used tesseract but from what I hear it’s also fantastic. I really look up to all the other client devs.
Edit: oops, said mlem instead of mbin
Yeah honestly our mistake was having a multiple very talented frontend developers working on different clients instead of collaborating.
I agree with you here; it would be so nice to see all these talented developers working on one project in unison. I’m sure the resultant fediverse client would be a dream! I’m just not sure how we could make that happen.
At the very least we should borrow each other’s good ideas!
I’m also proud of my using post/comment/community activity pub id over local id. That makes account switching a breeze. I don’t think I’ve seen anyone else do that, and honestly I don’t think activity pub id was even ment to be used in that way.
I even do this now where if you are looking at an object that isn’t on your currently selected account/instance, I suggest what accounts you have that do know about that object. As you can see I have way too many account for testing my app lol.
Oh wow, your account switcher screen looks nice! So far, Interstellar doesn’t have any method of switching accounts like that.
Using the AP id is interesting. And you use it for users and communities too? Do you use the dedicated AP object API routes to fetch data, or do you somehow parse the AP id itself? From my personal experience, the AP object endpoints are a bit slower to return data (maybe that’s just Mbin though).
We’re currently working on adding web support to Interstellar, so we will need to make a decision on how we handle routes.
Fetch community by communty@instance works on lemmy.world the same as it works on lemmy.zip since it contains the instance the community is on. So I don’t need need to do anything special here other than enforce that @instance is always added.
Users, posts, and PieFed feeds (PieFed resolve object works with feeds) are fetched via their activity pub id. I haven’t run any benchmarks as far as how fast resolve object is.
I have added a few optimizations where if you’re on lemmy.world and the apId is lemmy.world, we can extract the local id from the activity pub id url. Potentially I could store a local cache of
Map<apId, localId>, so when you click on a post that we already know about from a list of posts, we can skip the object resolve.I think resolve object was intended to be used to force an instance to discover an object that it doesn’t already know about. So I’m kinda abusing that endpoint. But I actually get the added benefit of making the instance discover the object you’re looking for more quickly.
Interstellar has mlem, PieFed and Lemmy support, which is amazing.
I think you mean mbin support, as mlem is an iOS piefed/Lemmy app.
I only heard of Blorp due to our Lemmy.zip mod mentioning it a while back. So I knew there was a Blorp.Lemmy.zip access I could use while on my PC. Didn’t know there was a phone app as well until a couple days ago. Glad there is, it’s good. Keep at it, hopefully more folks will find it.
I used Blorp for a while and found you mostly to be a very responsive developer. I stopped using Blorp because I found myself trying to get you to turn it into Mlem 2.0.
I had to unblock unpopular opinion to see the thread you linked. His first criticism, about long pressing to save an image is an issue I brought up with you quite some time ago. I do not see an issue for it, maybe it is not something I opened an issue for, but discussed it with you. You said saving images was done through the share menu or something. I still think there should be an option to long press to save.
Do I like Blorp? Yes I do. And I think you are doing a good job with it. And I will continue to use it on Mac.
Keep on keeping on man.
Edit: thinking about the past discussion regarding saving images, it was in relation to the Mac app. So it likely was about right clicking to save, not long pressing.
Yeah saving an image is not as “intuitive” as most people are used to otherwise with current UX patterns.
And I don’t find anything wrong with pointing that out, that’s all good and helps improve the app in the long run. As lomg as its done politely and in a constructive way like you just did.
I just hate it if people feel like they have to shit on something just because it doesn’t do 100% what they would like it to. Nonetheless for a product they can use for free and someone put hard work into it, most likely in their spare time.
Yes, 100%! I want to continue to make my app more intuitive, but kinda like you said, it’s frustrating when I fix 5 things and the only thing people see is the 1 thing missing. But that’s the name of the game. The goal is to try and eventually fix everything.
I agree with you that long pressing does make sense. I think I actually had it working at some point, but I removed it for some reason. I wanna say it was because it was unintentionally triggering the share menu while you were scrolling the feed.
Anyway, it is a good idea. I’ll see if I can add it without causing any other issues. It was truly just the tone of the post I was frustrated with, not the actual feedback given.
I appreciate your feedback here!
I like the share menu for downloading photos, but sometimes it fails to download .webp images. My workaround for that is to “share” it to the material files app which can save them. This usually works but sometimes it fails as well. Gives me error messages.
I forget if I made a GitHub issue, but does that sound familiar?
I think you did make a GitHub issue. Just to make sure I don’t forget, broke it out into it’s own issue.
https://github.com/Blorp-Labs/blorp/issues/328Thanks! That’s awesome.
I agree the tone was harsh in that post, which is why I chose to reply here, and not there. Some of the replies are pretty harsh too.
As I said I stopped using Blorp because I was trying to change it into something that already existed.
Haters gonna hate.
Thank you for Blorp, it’s a great app!
Don’t get too hung up on those comments. I agree that a GitHub issue would have been the right way for them to address their problems with the apo. Or at least a well-written post with helpful pointers on what exactly isn’t working if they don’t feel comfortable with GitHub (not all Fediverse users are technically adept).
Unfortunately, the more people flood into the Fediverse, the more entitled jerks and trolls will find their way onto it as well.
If it’s any consolation, I really like the app, and I’ve tried many of the Lemmy apps available on Android. I really like its aesthetic, and it somehow fits my “flow” the best. There are some minor things that don’t work properly all the time (e.g., automatic theme switching as soon as the OS does it), but nothing that has really bothered me or ruined my experience. :)
Thank you! I honestly should have completely disregarded that post. I tried to reply as productively as I could. But I’m new to this and figuring it out as I go.
As for your issue with theme switching, it should default to using the OS dark/light mode setting if that’s what you mean. If you provide more detail, I can help figure out why it’s not working.
Ignoring this kind of stuff is easier said than done, especially when it concerns something you’re passionate about and have put your heart into. In my experience, it tends to keep nagging in the back of your head even when trying to ignore it.
Yeah its using the automatic dark/light mode from the OS. However, if the app is open or running in the background and the OS switches to dark/light mode, Blorp does not switch theming and I have to kill the app. If I open it afterwards its using the correct theming.
But since it hasn’t really bothered me so far I haven’t felt the urge to open a GitHub issue yet 🙈
I have a possible fix, but it didn’t make it into v1.10.8. But I’m to try and get back into doing weekly releases. I just streamlines my release process. Unfortunately this is the type of bug I have to guess the fix.
No worries, as I said it doesn’t really bug me and most people probably use it in dark mode all the time anyway I would assume 😄
First and foremost you have to look after you and your health! Won’t do you or your app any good if you get burnt out even more. I’d rather live with less frequent updates than an abandoned app.
