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
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.
Bravo Voyager! 🔥
What about eternity. Pretty sure it hasn’t been updated in ages tho.
It did not fit the criteria to be included in the experiment.
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
Not only has Eternity not been updated in almost an entire year, but it is still a pre-release (v0.1.2 at the moment).
A new version will be out soon
9 months ago, which is a good reason to not include it in the overview.
The dev is back, and has released a beta of the next release: https://lemmy.toldi.eu/comment/3217386
At the very least it doesn’t handle spoilers correctly
One note on Jerboa, at least for me gifs don’t seem to play when embedded in comments. Otherwise 10/10 for me.
I did not test different media types - but maybe in the future!
I love Jerboa, it most closely resembles RiF from the beforetimes.
did
u
know
u
can
nest
spoilers?
dog pic
I did not knew that. Works on Android Thunder.
Worth the effort for the good boy or girl.
Whoa that’s cool! It works in Thunder!
This displays incorrectly for me on Jerboa
:( It works on lemmy-ui/photon/alexandrite/voyager (maybe others too - these are just ones I’ve tested that work)
Why is your username color highlighted in voyager
I am the voyager dev!
Neat! I did not know that.
Not on Jerboa apparently.
Awesome
hello fellow client dev
Ouch, I use Boost and paid for ads free. Pls bring it up to 10.0.
Sync only got 6.9 but I have no complaints about the app
Voyager gang!
Same here
Where are all my fellow voyagers at?
I usually use desktop, but when it’s not available I use Voyager.
Checkin innnn
74656
Checking in
Checking in.
Checking in
wefwef 🫡
I don’t see foot notes mentioned in the CommonMark spec. https://spec.commonmark.org/0.31.2/
That’s really interesting. AFAIK Lemmy devs do not have a comprehensive markdown documentation. I thought it was CommonMark plus spoilers and Lemmy links, but it seems like they have other changes as well.
I filed a bug with Jerboa a long time ago about something related to this (I don’t remember exactly). I guess right now the philosophy is that every front end/app can render how they see fit.
Ultimately, this is just my opinion about what apps should prioritize in terms of markdown. I don’t think it’s too much of an ask that these be consistent across apps. I’m not sure that there has ever really been an effort by the devs to standardize things in this kind of way. As I said in the post itself. Lemmy is no longer a baby platform. people have been sharing these best practices for markdown for over a year at least.
I think that when someone posts, they should have a reasonable expectation that people will see what they intend.
I agree, it should look the same everywhere
They aren’t in the CommonMark spec but tables and spoilers aren’t either.
Whoa footnotes! That’s a thing?
Yes, I didn’t go that far down the rabbit hole. I decided to very unscientificly pick five categories that I personally thought were relevant and score those. There are lots of markdown types and situations that are not captured here.
I don’t even see footnotes in the documentation[1], but they can be pretty useful. It’s
^[text]
, in case others are curious.
This is awesome, thank you. I switched from memmy (iOS only) to voyager because it doesn’t display code blocks properly (usually doesn’t even show what’s in them) so reading certain posts or comments about computers or programming was a disaster.
Memmy was the first app I used, but it is abandoned now, sadly. But Mlem is actively being developed. I have not tried Voyager yet.
Interesting to see that even Lemmy-UI does not display markdown completely correctly
It doesn’t display headings, I know that much.
#Heading
In doing this I learned that there are “correct” but also “preferred” ways to use markdown. A heading should have a
space
after the#
even though it is correct either way.##Heading
Heading
These lines may be the same or different in different apps.
The thing of it is, if you just highlight some text and hit the heading button in the GUI, it doesn’t include the space.
I’m not sure
#heading
is valid markdown (see, eg, Daring Fireball’s “original” syntax page) … and I’ve never seen it. I’ve always understood that the space was necessary, which I think makes sense for a number of reasons TBHSo …
#This does not work
This does work
I know that it works on some sites (reddit for example). Generally, it is not preferred.
Didn’t know it worked on reddit. Generally it seems necessary to require the space as it disambiguates headings from hashtags, and also makes the raw text more readable.
I wasn’t sure if Lemmuy-UI in the results list was a typo or an alternative interface. Now I know. 😄
Dunno … I went to the linked page in the top post and everything seemed fine to me (using Lemmy-UI)
if you want to get fancy you can even use undocumented tables Works on Thunder.
Confirmed here on android
This surprisingly works on boost.
Works on Voyager.
Tables are a very common markdown extension most(?) popular markdown parsers support them
for sure, but they’re neither mentioned on https://join-lemmy.org/docs/users/02-media.html nor on the linked CommonMark tutorial.
Which is funny because the main part of that documentation is a Markdown table
Did I pass? lol
just as great as lemmy-ui
For some reason, Lemmy-UI does not convert usernames to links: @gedaliyah@lemmy.world
it does, but only if you use the autocomplete feature. it’s also a bit delayed without any indicator that it’s loading.
if you type @gedal and wait a moment it’ll load @gedaliyah@lemmy.world to be selected:
Yes, I’m not sure if that is meant to be a placeholder or a substitute for native user links. What it actually does is generate markup that converts the username into a web link, which is fine for most circumstances, but not ideal. A plaintext username should automatically link to the user. This creates an inconsistent behavior between posts depending on where (and when) they were typed.
In other words, it’s a very helpful feature, but it is not recognizing and linking usernames.
It’s weird that community names are automatically rendered as links, but usernames aren’t. Isn’t it pretty much the same thing?
yeah exactly. On mbin it works this way and lemmy inserting the link breaks that. But it does it for communities in the community description sometime as well, though I don’t know if it is just a user “error” or a lemmy error
Actually that behaviour is very annoying to other platforms. Mbin for example can only link to the lemmy server this user is on and no longer the local profile of that user. Example:
gets converted to
[@ user @ lemmy.instance](https:// lemmy.instance/u/user
so on mbin this does not open the profile of the user on the local server, but instead links the lemmy instance, so you leave your instance to view the profile.(spaces included so this won’t get converted to mentions, etc)
Are those not two different users though? Joe at Hotmail and Joe at Gmail are different.
Yes they are, but you have my profile on your server and you do not need to leave the server to view my profile…
should link to
https:// mbin.instance/u/ .instance
and not tohttps:// lemmy.instance/u/user
I’ll have to try on desktop, in the app it isn’t very clear what exactly it’s looking at to see profiles.
Yeah, it’s rather inconsistent. I opened an issue for it a while ago.
Compare the source of your comment to the one you’re replying to. Those are two different things. I’d argue it’s a workaround of anything.
What happens if you press tab or click on the suggested item at the point in your screenshot?
For me, it inserts the link at the cursor position, but doesn’t replace the bit you’ve already typed, resulting in
@gedal[@gedaliyah@lemmy.world](URL)
.Anyone else have this issue?
on firefox, if i type
@gedal
and click or press tab once it replaces the text with[//lemmy.world/u/gedaliyah)
. the behavior is the same whether i hit tab, enter or click the text. .world](https:if i type
@gedal
and click or press tab once it replaces the text with[//lemmy.world/u/gedaliyah)
.world](https:Ah, you are correct. It turns out that the issue I was encountering was a little more subtle.
If I type all the way to
@gedaliyah@
and click or press tab once it replaces only the second ‘@’, resulting in@gedaliyah[@gedaliyah@lemmy.world](https://lemmy.world/u/gedaliyah)
.It’s not even just that. It seems that the extra
acts as a separator, so you can’t even autocomplete e.g.
@threelonmusketeers@sh
as that’ll try to autocomplete@sh
instead of taking the instance domain as part of the mention.I’ve raised a GitHub issue for this now: https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy-ui/issues/2652
Woohoo Voyager!
Voyager da 🐐 no 🧢
Voyager gang, let’s scroll
It’s the best PWA ever made, to my knowledge.
Oh I didn’t know it was a web app, I’ve only seen it on droidify, among other “normal” apps. It looks amazing !
It was initially a pwa, but now it is a full and proper app, even available on Google play now!
I believe it can still be used as a pwa though.
Yup, still works great as a PWA.
PWA?
Progressive web app
I have to use desktop mode here to make sense of the posts
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.I’m very excited to see a new update from eternity. It’s always been a solid app and is likely to be my daily driver again. Right now I’m using raccoon mostly, although I was pretty disappointed to see the low score on markdown
Same here, switched from Eternity to Raccoon. Maybe Raccoon’s @DieguiTux8623@feddit.it can help with better markdown support.
We were working on this but it’s a hard task and Compose Multiplatform is still not mature as a technology, there are few libraries and those which exist do not work well.
Help would be welcome, otherwise people can use Jerboa or Voyager, nobody is forcing anybody to use any app (especially if they are FOSS).
I can imagine it’s a hard task. I read from OP’s post that most apps struggle with it, so it must be hard.
Sorry, I didn’t mean to put you on the spot like that. Just wanted to ping you. I would gladly help, but sadly I lack the skills to do so.
Don’t worry @squirrel@discuss.tchncs.de you have been one of the ones who helped the most and I am glad we had the opportunity to collaborate. I don’t appreciate the original poster though, because it only gave general hints of what has been tested but no evidence about the tests. I know that some features (like subscripts, superscripts, strikethrough, tables, footnotes) are not supported BUT the perfect Markdown rendering has never been a priority for me.
I’m also using Raccoon as my daily driver. It does most things very well.
The app has a very small user base of approximately a hundred people worldwide and I know almost all of them one by one, but I’ve never heard of you. I’m glad to meet you, even in these unfortunate circumstances.
By the way I am considering closing the project, because I am being personally damaged by what is happening now, and my reputation as a professional has been compromised.
Do you know if the new version supports user tagging?
I haven’t had a chance to really test it
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?
There are Markdown libraries. Many have small differences and many apps have their own custom additions though.
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.
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. :-)
I see. Markdown badly needs a good standard, doesn’t it.
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.
Lemmy documentation references CommonMark so I’m assuming that is the accepted standard, plus a few Lemmy specific things.
Isn’t the base markdown standardized?
It’s just that so many flavors advertise themselves as markdown+ flavor?
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.
Funny how the competition between charger standards in the alt text was eventually solved with, you guessed it, another standard, called USB-C.
Lol. I wish XKCD showed date published.
Explain xkcd shows the date published: 2011-07-20
The comic is now a teenager.
P.S. Pedantic rule on the capitalization of xkcd:
The preferred form is “xkcd”, all lower-case. In formal contexts where a lowercase word shouldn’t start a sentence, “XKCD” is an okay alternative. “Xkcd” is frowned upon.
I am fairly sure that the comic isn’t that old. So I think usb-c is what it’s alluding to.
that the comic isn’t that old
That comic recently became a teenager. The first USB-C specifications weren’t published until 2014.
What’s the score on Eternity?