State of Voyager for Lemmy, 2025 edition

Sometimes I’m far down in a thread and then swipe back to my subscribed list, but then I regret and go back into the thread. It would be nice if it remembered my last position in a thread. Maybe just for a few seconds, in case.

The tinkerer in me keeps trying other apps.

I always come back to voyager. Regardless of the current road map, you're doing a killer job.

Video from PeerTube and Loops is not embedded. Is it possible to be able to play videos directly in Voyager?

I’d love to see a floating action button like Thunder has with configurable shortcuts. I love this feature for quick navigation, dismiss all read (not fully hide since a refresh can bring those posts back), etc.

Wow so many replies with suggestions. Seems like I'm in the minority of people who thinks the app is pretty functional as is and does everything that I expect.

The best way i can put it is that during wefwef days and the early voyager days, I would look out for every update as functionality and polish was getting added. Nowadays, I dont actively look out for updates because the app is already soo polished and functional. I still like the QoL features that are getting added and appreciate them but the app is and will remain great even if development stops today.

Also @aeharding@vger.social, take breaks and relax - Voyager is great as is

I'd love to be able to save message drafts.

Sometimes I start typing up a reply to a comment, but I want to go back and check the OP, or a previous comment, or the community I'm in, or even the rules of the community I'm in.

Right now, I can copy my comment and paste it in. But if I find myself wanting to copy text from one of those other places, I'm out of luck (unless I want to turn on clipboard history, which I don't due to security concerns). I could use a separate app, but that's annoying.

Another thing I'd like is a better flow for recovered text. It seems that Voyager saves one draft whenever the app crashes/closes when writing a comment. It asks if I want to save or discard the comment. This is good.

What I'd like better is that recovering the text actually takes me to where I was writing the comment. Sometimes it's hard to remember where I was writing the comment, or even if I do remember, it can be hard to find it again.

Overall, I'm loving the app. These are my only 2 pain points right now.

Previous Apollo user, this is where it’s at. Without Apollo support I dropped Reddit. Without Voyager I would most probably not be on Lemmy.

I’d love Apollo-level inline video playing.

Keep up the great work!

Thanks for all the work.

If I accidentally swipe open the communities when browsing my feed, I should be able to swipe out of it back to my feed. Another option would be to have an option to disable swipe to open communities picker.

Just dropping in to say brilliant app mate! It fills the Apollo shaped void in my wee geeky soul. Can’t think of anything to make it better as it already does everything I want.

I'd suggest the following major things:

• Commenters in threads to be colored by their first comment in that tree (if they first commented in red their username will be red the entire tree, that way it's easier on the eyes to distinguish who's talking), idea taken from a Reddit client I used to use ages ago
• I really don't like it when I'm on all and by mistake click on Android's Back button, it just moves me back to the community selection screen and doesn't let me get back to where I was in the timeline
• Highlighted search in the comment section of a post
• I'd love the ability to copy the URL to the attached content directly from the post

Also, I feel like clicking on a post frequently sends me to the attached content instead of into the post itself, maybe the post structure can be improved somehow?

Thank you so much for this awesome app and being so open to feedback

First off, thanks for making a fantastic app! Just a couple of niche requests:

1. (Likely incredibly difficult to implement) When reposting have a way of detecting that the post in question has been reposted to that community already.
2. A hopefully simpler request, NSFW images should stay blurred even when navigating to the comments. Often people like to check the comments before unblurring to avoid any unsightly images. I believe this is done by several other apps already.

Again though, great work! Been a very nice experience so far!

Please add some well placed "back" confirmations. For example, when browsing All please ask for a confirmation when hitting back before returning to Home.

Would it be possible to make it easier to copy a single word? Right now there are multiple steps where I need to hold it down, then click select text, then try to highlight a word if I want to get a translation of a word for example.

It would be nice if I could just directly highlight a word with a tap or translate without the multiple steps. Thanks for the app.

Searching in the settings would be great

I have a simple one.

When you search for a community, then start browsing one and go back to the search the text is gone. This requires you to retype the query for each community you visit.

It would be cool if the query was saved.

Thanks for all your hard work :)

Apart from the known iOS issue requiring the occasional app restart, no bugs and loving the app. Only feature i’d like to see is a display of the instance in the post list. So not just ‘news’, but ‘news@lemmy.world’. Some community names exist on different instances (which I think is not helping new users, but it’s a lemmy problem, not a voyager one)

One feature I’d like to have is the option (maybe a setting) to recover text when commenting and then pressing as sometimes I reply to a comment and then want to read the original post again.

Thanks for making this app, it has been the Lemmy app I’ve tried by far

I still want a way to go from the subscribed community list to where I was in the posts. If I'm in an article in a post and hit back once extra time by accident then I'm screwed and the entire post list refreshes.

This is my main lemmy app.

The one mildly annoying thing that might be a user error on my point is that if I swipe into the community selector menu, I'm stuck. I haven't figured out how to get back to where I was.

I'd like to see number of new comments since the last time I opened the post.

I would like tags I've made for users to allow a dropdown to select ones I've previously made. For example, I've tagged numerous people as Zionists or Tankies, and would like to be able to quickly select that tag for new users to the list, instead of having to type it out and select the color.

I'd love it if deleted posts included a link to the mod log to easily see if it was a case of moderator power tripping or just some asshole commenter.

Apollo had great media sharing capability. Ability to share videos and gigs and images.

That’s all I want.

Lots of images are webp but when I share them I just get the link to the file instead of a downloaded and cached media share.

Oh and when viewing responses to a comment I’ve made I’d love a button to see all responses to that comment, and then a further button to see the comment that I commented on if it was not the OP.

Thanks

I don't know if it's my phone or my fingers, but I constantly have issues with hitting the *3dot menu when I try to hit the vote buttons.

Oh, and inconsistent back behavior. When opening images, sometimes swiping for back closes the image and returns me to the post list, and sometimes it backs me out of the post list and I can't get back to the listing I had been looking through without reloading.

Do you receive enough to make a living improving voyager?

When you maximise an image without going into the thread itself (I.e. tapping the image displayed in the feed), if you press the back button, it exits to your instance list

Would prefer if it only exited out of the maximised image

One of favourite apps!

Two requests:

1. Ability to open shared Lemmy URLs in Voyager, via share sheet to the app, iMessage extension maybe too, and clipboard recognition once in the app although this might have privacy issues I suppose. My family sends a lot of Lemmy links via iMessage and it’s annoying having to load the page, tap the image, close the tab after and return to iMessage to comment. I remember Apollo having something better with this.
2. Block community on a post from an All, Local or Home feed. Right now you have to tap into the sub/community and then tap ellipses to get the block function.

Another thing is better search but I believe Voyager might be doing the best that it can right now compensating for the terrible search in Lemmy. And that terrible search might also be a byproduct of the federated instances (sync time, different restrictions, etc) which I guess is an acceptable trade-off for now if so.

Newer lemmy versions have the option to add a thumbnail url yourself when creating a post. It would be nice to have that also on Voyager.

Add swipe forward as Appollo had (same as back, just in the other direction, to e.g. get to last opened post (which is on the right side in feed view.

I'd like to save drafts and have it connected to the post or comment I'm replying to.

Be able to search my saved comments and post.

I just want to chime in and thank you for putting together this awesome app. I use the iOS app not than anything else on my phone, and I probably use v.programming.dev more than any other website on my Linux PC.

i really like voyager. one thing irks me though, and it's sort of hard to explain...

when i press the back button in most applications, the expectation is that i move one level back in a tree structure rooted at the application entry point. in voyager, back is more like stepping through my browser history.

for example, if i'm viewing a single comment, depending on the way i got there the back button may take me to either a) the thread that comment was in, b) another post that links to the comment, c) a profile, d) something else, probably.

now, this is not necessarily wrong, but it clashes with how i use apps. whenever i want to "reset" an application without closing it, i usually press back until i'm at the aforementioned root of the tree. with voyager, this is difficult to gauge because depending on how long i've been usinc it, the back button may go to comment > thread > community feed > community selector > feed > comment > selector > profile > comment > thread > post > feed > exit.

i don't really know how i would fix this behaviour either, just that it feels off compared to other apps.

Honestly, i just love voyager as it is. I'm still on reddit, but use voyager/lemmy like 4x more by now. So i'm sure there will be great improvement ideas here, I'm here just to thank you 💪💪

I’m glad it has accessibility features!

Wood be nice to have a gif integration in comments where you can search and post gifs straight from the app. Prob no gif providers that are privacy focused though.

Please, PLEASE adjust the UI to prevent accidental touches. On far too many occasions I mis-tap and end up going to the community instead of the post. Or the User's profile instead of collapsing the comment. Drives me nuts! Those links are already in a separate menu; no need for the redundancy. Tapping anywhere on a post should only ever go to the post. Tapping anywhere on a comment should only ever collapse the comment.

Take a page out of Relay for Reddit, where you swipe to the left on a post or comment to bring up a submenu, and that's where your options to upvote/downvote, reply, view the community/user profile, etc. are. (i.e. Remove the 3 dots and put all those options in such a swipeable menu.) The current swipe gestures should be turned into a "slow swipe" gesture so that people still have the option to set their favorite shortcuts to them.

Please, I'm begging you to implement this.

Would it be possible to implement translations of posts and the ability to download videos like Apollo did?

Search bar for settings. So I can tour a word in the settings page and quickly get to the relevant setting.

Could we add the “disable downvotes” option that lemmy had in native settings. Ie. it’ll hide downvotes and behave according to upvotes only.

I know this is technically possible in voyager if you’re on an entire instance with downvotes disabled, but lemmy settings let you do this with a single account, which voyager does not.

ALSO I’m loving the new label/tagging system. :)

This is a bit of a big ask and maybe something that needs to be done in lemmy core, but I’d love it if posts of the same image/link posted around the same time were consolidated into one item in the feed.

The one bug that's always super annoyed me: clicking on a photo in my feed and when I swipe out it takes me to the "communities" tab where you choose Home/Local/All and it completely loses my place in my feed

• Tags are working great! Would love to be able to link to the comment that made me tag, too.
• Would be nice to have the searchable modlog instead of just myself
• If I'm in a thread and accidentally hit back, I have to go back through the list to find that post again. A "last post" or something in the menu would be handy.
• A bunch of gifs/videos don't show/play, but it works in other clients, instead I have to open in a browser. That would be a nice one to hit.
• db0 added some flairs, which are apparently natively supported by lemmy, which is cool. They are gigantic in voyager (in comment threads when its posted standalone). Compare to the thread here. Would be great if this was supported to display next to the users in app too.

Definitely the one app I keep coming back too though, great work!

I would love to see a way to group communities akin to “multireddits”. So if I want a view of just my Apple related communities, for example, I can click my custom community and see only that content.

This is frankly not a huge issue, but in the iOS app, sometimes pulling down to refresh doesn’t remove read posts. I also have the setting that shows the button to remove seen posts. Tapping on it doesn’t seem to do anything. When this happens, I just close the app entirely and try again.

This is literally the only problem I have with Voyager. The app is otherwise perfect. Thanks for the incredible work!

i have a privacy/security feature request:

lock screen prompt when trying to switch profiles.

currently all it takes to switch is two clicks, no identity verification.

so if you have a regular and a NSFW (or otherwise private) profile, and you give someone your phone to look at a post, it's easy to switch to a profile that should be gated behind a verification screen...

infinity has this feature, and it's really nice for peace of mind!

otherwise voyager has been excellent all around! thanks for putting the work in!

Hi!

Let me please add to the thanks and kudos for all your efforts developing a truly excellent app!

Two new features I didn’t see elsewhere (my apologies if they were already mentioned or are otherwise off base):

1. ability to search the comments of a post you’re viewing (like “find in page” on a web browser)
2. ability to view the relevant portion of the mod log by clicking on a comment that has been moderated (e.g., deleted)

Thanks again!

A couple of things irk me (on iOS):

• Shaking the phone if I’ve opened a text editor brings up the “undo typing” dialog, even if I’m on the main feed or in a comments section
• sometimes, the app freezes and restarts (almost like an out of memory) and I think it’s related to sometimes when I swipe away from a video or browser view, I can still hear audio from a media player for a second. Are views being left open on the background for a long time, possibly indefinitely?

Other than that, great app! Loving as an Apollo replacement.

Swipe anywhere to go back would be a nice added feature.

push notifications and widgets

I would like to see mod logs for other users because I think that would be funny

The only bug I've run into is that I can't download videos. I'll hit "download video" and then it just does nothing. No prompts and I can't find any videos saved anywhere from it.

Otherwise I think Voyager has been the premiere experience for Lemmy 👌

As far as features go, I'd love for loops to get embedded!

I've noticed a couple fairly annoying and related bugs involving images on android (pixel 5a, f-droid release), but I haven't checked yet to see if it's been reported. When I select an image and then dismiss it with a swipe gesture, rarely I'll be taken to the communities menu and have my feed refresh and return to the top. Even more rarely, it will send me to my profile, then returns me to the communities menu, before returning to the spot I was in. It's entirely unpredictable from my testing, so attempts to record have been fruitless for me. Most often though, it occurs if I've scrolled through the feed for an extended period of time. It doesn't occur when selecting text threads or viewing comments though