18+ fastfinge, 4 months ago

If any Iceshrimp developers run across this post, I do not intend this feedback to be harmful. You’re all amazing folks, working hard on difficult work. This is just my completely unfiltered feedback as a new Iceshrimp user. So, that said: here are a few thoughts after a while using #iceshrimp. I don't think most of these are specific to #blind users, but it's possible. First, the good! Iceshrimp feels fast. With all of the clients I use, it’s way snappier than any of the Mastodon servers I’ve used. Notifications come in quick, posts send and federate quickly, and streaming support seems solid. I have no idea if this is because of the software, or just this server being extra well run. Formatting is nice to have, when I'm using a client that supports it. The web interface is about as #accessible with my #ScreenReader as is the default Mastodon interface. I haven't found anything I couldn't do. But it doesn't matter that much, because the support for third party Mastodon clients is just as good as advertised. The developers say they test with both of the clients I use, and it shows. Now, the less good. Pages look like an interesting feature, but they're currently half baked. They don't format with Markdown. They have support for some kind of undocumented scripting language? And forms? I don't understand any of this, I have no idea if or how it works, but it looks useful. Publishing longer-form pages would be really neat, and save a lot of folks from writing huge long threads. But as it stands, from a new user perspective, it's not really in a usable state right now. Similarly, the “I am a cat feature”. I don't know what it does, or why it's needed. I'd like to see the developers focus on pages, and if this is causing any complexity or overhead, remove it. Speaking of client support, on Iceshrimp #mona loads posts in batches of 30, but on #Mastodon it loads batches of 200. I don't know why, but I wish Mona would load the same number of posts with Iceshrimp. As well, Iceshrimp shows me public posts that are replies to people I don't follow, whereas Mastodon does not. This is actually useful sometimes, but I wish there was an option to turn it off. None of these issues are showstoppers for me, just small niggles. But unfortunately, I do have to talk for a minute about the awful. Antenna's are TERRIBLE! Just absolutely useless. You can't access them via RSS. You can't access them via the API. You can't follow them and have them show up on your timeline. Third party Mastodon apps can't interact with them. Huge, big, terrible yikes! This is the only thing about Iceshrimp that's far worse than Mastodon. I’m fine because I just use saved searches in my apps of choice, but this isn't ideal. I would be thrilled if this feature was removed or redesigned. Let us follow hashtags directly. Or let us follow antennas via RSS. Or let us set an option in our antennas to have matching posts appear in our home timeline. Please! Anything! I’m begging! If this was fixed, I'd happily recommend Iceshrimp to anyone looking for a drop-in Mastodon replacement, for any of the possible reasons you might want that.