Ok, so firstly... This is really long. Individual issue reports would be repetative and too narrow for what I think is a bigger problem. Most of this, is stuff I have been noticing as part of a recent & fast downtrend in client & ux quality that isn't contained to a single client but repeated throughout many, often the exact same bugs/flaws. A lot of these have been reiterated by other users. Some, I think are just neglected, overlooked, or unfinished things and maybe I am the only one who thinks they matter. We can blame AI models for most of these. It's always been obvious by UI which ones are being used to build or "improve" a client. Now it's becoming clear through bugs & patterns, too. Which is why I'm not tagging devs but naming some clients (if its listed a lot its because i use it a lot). I can't possibly test everything on every client, and I can't attest to anything built for iOS. I'm also doing this as a kind1 so other users can easily affirm, refute, or add to my laundry list. If any of this matters, it'll make it to where it needs to be. Here we go. I'm sorry or you're welcome. Not sure...
- Can't reliably mention: Type @..., select, continue typing. More often than not the mention collapses into an illegible mess of the string + display name + whatever was being typed.
Affected apps: Amethyst and Wisp
- Broken reactions: Custom reactions, hosted on Nostr Build & sent from Jumble render as 404 in other clients.
Long-press reaction sent from Wisp appears as blank in Amethyst.
Affected clients: too integrated for me to tell who's at fault
- No support for protected events or access to restricted relays & chat rooms makes your client feel broken. Maybe figure out how to hide them if you don't want to support them?
Affected clients: Amethyst, Wisp, Grimoire, RelayTools app
- Incomplete relay feeds: Comparison across clients yields very different results. Kind 6 is most often missing, other kinds are missing too, but less predictably. That gets into weird territory on kind support and all that, which is why reposts are an obvious example.
Affected clients: basically everything but Jumble & it's forks
- Painfully slow badic actions:
3-5 second delay before typing action appears in the text box. Content taking minutes to load, if ever.
Affected clients: Flotilla Android App, Flotilla desktop, Primal
- Intermittently cannot find my own content and chat groups, with little or no notice of poor relay connection.
Affected clients: Alexandria, Im Wald, Amethyst, Flotilla, Wisp (also specialty clients like ZapCooking, Habla, Boris)
- Incomplete follow feeds (realistically, not idylically): For some, performance of building the feed has drastically dropped over the course of a couple months. For others, it has been an ongoing issue.
Affected clients: Amethyst, Wisp, Yakihonne, Nosotros, Coracle
- Sticky deleted user lists: it is almost impossible to get rid of a list.
Affected clients: Anywhere lists are handled
- Predictive typing wakes up nip-07 extensions too fast on Chrome. One letter in the browser bar triggers permission requests. If I want to visit Yakbak, I have to deny permissions to Yakihonne 3x before I can type the rest of the url. Not sure what the best way to address this may be but it's annoying af.
Affected signers: Alby, Nos2x, haven't tried others recently. This is probably an adversarial situation, but one that will annoy casual nostr users, especially if they leave their extension enabled when doing non-nostr things.
- Creating lists a user doesn't want. It seems like every vibe-coded nip17 DM implementation does this.
- Poor resizing on mobile screens: Buttons half missing, text spilling out of borders, overlapping, etc
Affected clients: almost everything created with Shakespeare.
- Media uploading confusion: Blossom fallback flows work but they strip users of agency. Maybe reveal a failure message & fallback request, with skip. Payment for storage, limited capacity, and very public media host interfaces are all reasons for users to want control.
Affected clients: Flotilla, Wisp, Grimoire, Chachi, Jumble, I'm sure many others.
(On the topic of Blossom & media in general, defaults create a situation where people won't know where to look for or how to manage their media. Eventually they are going to want to revisit their files. First-use choice of defaults is better in the longrun than immediate defaults and it's a teaching moment.)
Uptrending problems that others are having, based on what I've seen on asknostr, in replies, and in DMs over the last 2-3 months. Most of these are problems that largely went away 2 years ago, but are becoming commonplace again.
- wiped follow lists
- wiped profile data
- wiped mute lists
- missing received zap receipts
- unable to load follows' profiles
- general spam replies
- hellthread notifications to people who have no clue what is happening
- harassment by report-bots, content "grading" bots, and un/follow bots
- trouble seeing and finding their own sent dms, notes & replies
- dead clients and resource materials that people were using, which have no obvious alternatives
On a much brighter note, now that DMs are working a little better in some popular clients, I'm learning that there are quite a few people who want to ask questions, learn, fix their issues, explore alternatives, etc. They just don't necessarily want to ask aloud... so we're working through user issues more effectively lately.
