As a dedicated Jellyfin user, 100% agree. I love it, but glitches where it loses my seek progress and requires restarting the video, or the terrible subtitle support on Roku, or the often lackluster library management (they improve it slowly though!), and more I’m sure, these all make it much harder to recommend.
Keyword searches worked fine and pulled up exactly what I wanted for years, I swear to god. Somewhere in the last decade though websites have gamed the system and now I can’t find anything no matter how I word my search. It’s depressing.
Google is worse, but so is Bing. I switched for about 6 months this year and honestly it wasn’t any better. I end up asking ChatGPT for more niche things because neither Google or Bing can pull up any good results anymore without “Reddit” tacked on. As for why I didn’t use Bing’s GPT integration, it was a mix of being forced to use Edge and the responses being much less useful than OpenAI’s GPT model.
Thanks for the explanation. I assumed most of that already, but it’s nice to have a clearer picture. My main complaint here is that it should be extremely clear to the user what is happening. If it’s fetching data it should say so. If that is going to take minutes or hours, it should say so. Because right now “no results” is meaningless. It could mean it doesn’t exist, it could mean it’s going to load in 3 seconds, or it could mean it will never load. And this is between two servers that are both on 0.18.3 (I was using sopuli.xyz and discuss.tchncs.de for testing). Actually, if I search for !vinyl@sopuli.xyz on tchncs.de right now, it doesn’t show up. I wait and wait and it never shows. But it is clearly cached on the server because you can visit it directly via discuss.tchncs.de/c/vinyl@sopuli.xyz.
It needs improvements badly and I would say the same improvements should happen for a direct link. Instead of erroring out, it should query the remote server (or provide an option to do so) and tell the user to check back if it’s loading.
Is there a plan to improve search and federating communities between instances? My biggest hurdle joining and using Lemmy was without a doubt the search functionality and subscribing to a community on my own instance, it was severely off-putting. Let me walk you through it: you find a community you like, say !vinyl@sopuli.xyz. You paste it into the search of your instance, as instructed. It immediately tells you “No results”. If you don’t click off, sometimes it changes it’s mind within a few seconds. Sometimes it never loads. You try manually creating the URL by going to example.com/c/vinyl@sopuli.xyz but it gives you an error. If you’re lucky it works the next day, if you’re not then I don’t actually know the next step. Not to mention the lack of feedback on subscribing to communities. I have “subscribed” to communities before then realised a week later that despite appearing in my list of subs it didn’t actually work and I have to redo, the only feedback you get is “pending”. This is the #1 issue that stops me from recommending Lemmy, or at least smaller instances that haven’t federated with much yet. Is the search a priority?
I know you’ve been asked about splitting NSFW already, but is there any chance of a specific NSFL tag or a generic spoiler/blur tag? Gore and nudity are such different topics they really don’t deserve to be under the same banner.
Are proper inline previews something on the roadmap? What I mean is items like YouTube videos, Streamable links, and just about anything that isn’t a Lemmy image is not expandable and requires leaving the website. It’s one of my most missed features from old Reddit with RES.
I read as much of the thread as possible, so hopefully these are new questions. Hope I didn’t come across too negative here as I’ve been enjoying my time overall and I know y’all have been swamped these months and never expected this popularity.
It does have a Roku app, but it’s very limited in features and barely developed. It will probably work if all your files are x264 in your native language, however it doesn’t work for my use case. I tried playing some anime encoded with x265 and it was unwatchable for me because:
A. The TV could not handle the decode and there is no (sensible) way to force server x264 transcoding for just the TV, and:
B. Selecting subtitles and audio tracks is painful and sometimes impossible. I tried changing my Jellyfin settings, my Roku settings, using the selectors on the episodes, even setting the default tracks in the video files. Nothing worked to have dual audio or dual subtitle files play the correct tracks.
I can’t speak for any other ecosystems, only Roku.