Physical controls were a primary reason I went with a 2023 Mazda 3. I didn’t want a touch screen as the primary input device. The rotary dials for menus and volume have been great. I find the screen is just in a better position too; it doesn’t need to be within reach so it just blends into the dash better and is at an easier angle to see.

I only go for one community surrounding a book series, and only on Mondays when there are weekly discussion threads for new chapters. I found reddit pretty easy to cut out when I just stopped using it on mobile entirely.

Less engagement is exactly what I would want. Show me my new chronological content and then I’ll get the hell out of there.

Just to pose these in a similar thread, I have a few questions as a casual observer, some of which I’m unclear if they’re handled at the protocol or Lemmy level.

• As I understand it servers subscribe to other servers and everything is then push based?
• I assume ordering is not a guarantee. So there’s probably no concept of offset tracking on subscriptions or replaying a time range?
• If ordering is not a requirement how do likes/comments handle out of order receipt? Everything seems to have a local ID, so can content get pre-liked before the root message arrives? Unclear if ID generation is based on any identifiers you’d have to work with or not - or whether remote content retains its origin IDs?
• Lemmy at least appears to have some retry mechanism, but I’m unclear the behavior on that - seems annoying with 1000+ subscribing servers.
• I seem to recall reading ActivityPub has some pattern for batching, but reading the spec again I’m not seeing it. Is that a thing?

The level of unity has been awesome. At first I thought this might only really spread through tech minded subreddits, but it really caught on broadly.

Feels very early. The site design needs quite a bit of work.

• The usual confusion on fediverse domain boundaries and usage. Seems very easy to accidentally route to another server rather than viewing that content within the current server (community/user links).
• Doesn’t retain sort/filter options on the home feed. I get that the default is local to promote some growth, but when I switch to subscribed I want it to stay that way.
• Excess visual space, cluttered design with avatars and community icons and excess padding. It falls into some of the traps that make me despise the reddit redesign.
• Strange prioritization of elements; visual emphasis on features that seem pretty niche or obvious (crosspost, tooltip text post preview, comment language, usernames), while more important elements get dwarfed or lost in the noise (timestamps, comment delineation + nesting).
• Live reloads are confusing and would be nice to be able to disable.
• There’s a real lack of dom class tagging that would make it easier for me to remedy some of those issues with custom css and the number of !important definitions doesn’t inspire confidence.
• Ultimately the above are all things that can be worked out. If the core systems work well enough then the design is something that can be augmented. I’ve had some navigation issues (including a page that wouldn’t load because it received a malformed json response from internal service), but the core functionality seems to be mostly there. Whether it’ll hold up to more load we’ll have to see.