I’m bouncing back and forth between Avelon, Voyager, and Memmy. I’m honestly pretty impressed with the bug fixes they pushed out on all of the platforms.
I’ve given up on mlem, lemmios, and liftoff for now, and I tried a couple of others that did things like crash after logging on.
I’m not allowed to write apps myself, but I’d love to see someone with Christian’s design sense to attack the problem. Lemmy really needs the idea of multireddits that can cross instances and fold together identical posts. Like if a post is simply a link to a news article and I’m subscribed to politics communities across five different instances, I think I’d like to see replies all folded into the same virtual post at the client level. I think that a feature like that would enhance traffic and conversations while not compromising the intent or function of federation, since defederated (or user-level blocked) instances simply wouldn’t be incorporated. I don’t think you’d want to do that on the server side, but it seems very possible on the client.
Every client that I’ve tried also has annoying features like refreshing and dropping you to the main page when switching accounts, or sometimes just at random. That can happen if the app loses state, but I can’t see a reason for not keeping state by writing to storage. Even if there’s something about federation and accounts on different instances, it should be possible to maintain state. I’d think the client app could handle everything other than an edge case like two accounts on different instances having access to different communities based on the federation network.