Onboarding Friction Subscribing To A Magazine (Mobile)

[psaunders]

Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe. When I initially opened Mbin on mobile (fedia) I knew my first stop was to subscribe to a bunch of communities so my feed comes to life with interesting stuff.

https://github.com/user-attachments/assets/023f234c-20ac-4df1-a191-c308af1b3aae

1. Clicking on search I was hoping that I would see at the top of the results a name match result for the "Montreal" community
2. I realized that the term "Magazine" means community after clicking on it and looking at the list
3. Went to search and typed in the name of a city to try to find that the community I know I've seen on Lemmy but the community didn't open.
4. Searched for a string to open the community, realized there must be some over way to search for the community at this point but figured this would work
5. The community opens and then I went on a hunt for a subscribe button, finding it in the menu on the side

Describe the solution you'd like There are a few ways to handle this, seems like anything helps

• [ ] (1) An exact string match for a community (less the domain) seems like it could show a "Community Results" box that show "Communities matching your result". It would contain one or two results and have a "view more" link at the bottom if people are in serious onboarding mode and looking to add a lot of related communities "montreal_food" and "montreal_housing" etc.
• [ ] (2) The term Magazine has become confusing, especially now that we are federated and viewing /c/ urls for Communities in Lemmy and PieFed. It's easy to get overwhelmed/confused with fediverse software and that step of "Oh, this is a community... I think... maybe it's a superset, maybe it's a subset, OK note to self this is probably a community" I'm not seeing the benefit, I can definitely see and have experienced the barrier.
• [ ] (3) The autocomplete for this is excellent, but I was hoping if a community was selected and the text field above left blank that the "Community Result" search box would show up with the community to "go to the community"
• [ ] (4) Maybe allowing a blank search term just shows the latest posts for the community, or goes to the community if it has been selected?
• [ ] (5) I would suggest a very compact community header that has the name, logo/background image and a subscribe/unsubscribe button and a button to "expand" it to show everything. It's hard to know that you are actually on a community and I really only found that I could subscribe by chance. Under the hamburger menu I just don't expect to find elements related to inline content. That's where I expect to find search tools, DMs, profile settings perhaps.

Describe alternatives you've considered Detailed above.

** Additional Context ** I'm a brand new user to Mbin who users Lemmy, Reddit and Piefed so I though I would just note the pain points I hit before I learn the software and stop seeing them. Hope this is helpful and not too annoying.

[BentiGorlich]

Hi there, sadly mbin has 2 different searches: one for magazines (communities) and one for everything else. Being on mobile the magazine search is not that easy to find, as the header links are hidden in the menu (what you called "hamburger menu"), but on desktop you'll see this:

The box that you filled in is an additional filter for the search term, not intended to work on its own. But maybe it should be.

The magazine panel is only hidden in the menu on mobil, on desktop it looks something like this:

And the indicator that you are in a magazine gets hidden on mobile...

So things to fix this issue in my opinion:

• [x] Add an indicator on mobile that you are inside of a magazine. Preferably use the one already in the header and do not hide it on mobile
• [x] Add magazines to the results of the "normal" search

[BentiGorlich]

The search enhancements are taken care of by #1670, the indicator gets added in #1671

[psaunders]

Thanks for chipping away at this, I'll get a friend to try onboarding when the next release is out and see if they snag on anything.