mastodon
mastodon copied to clipboard
mastodon
Mobile view: No search bar - Cannot search for users
Steps to reproduce the problem
Use case: As a user I want to follow a person. I know her username.
- Open mastodon.social on your mobile phone
- search for the search bar
- cannot find the search bar
- so I cannot follow her
Expected behaviour
a icon to open the search bar
Actual behaviour
no search bar
Detailed description
Table view:
Mobile view:
Normal view with search bar:
Specifications
Mastodon on mastodon.social (4.0.0RC1)
You can search in the "# Explore" (Entdecken) view. Took me a while to find that as well. Very confusing, this should be changed.
I believe the Search bar visible in the #Explore view is only visible when the viewport is under 630px wide, but the left-hand column is only visible when the viewport is over 896px wide. In between those two, I don't see any easy way to Search. This is particularly problematic as the default viewport with of an ipad is in this range.
Viewport at 896px wide
896px: 
In between, the web interface does not appear to have a Search bar.
894px: 
631px: 
There is some oddness at 895px wide as well, where the left column disappears but the Search option does not appear in the nav.
895px: 
The Search box appears in the single-column UI at 630px where "#Explore" was before:
630px: 
I'm guessing this is a CSS media query issue, but I'm not sure where to poke to find the CSS in this case. Perhaps I'm missing a third location for the search box at these widths; if so, please point me to them, thanks!
Similar situation now (4.0.2). It would make sense to me for the search box, or an icon for it, to be in the top area, left of the “publish” button – and, for that matter, for the hashtag list to be shown unless the rightmost column is collapsed.
(Desktop browser, but normally kept to ~1000px wide for reasons including convenient tiling with other windows and too-wide text columns on various sites.)
For the Mobile web view, I think it would already help a lot, if the icon for the Explore tab would be a magnifying glass instead of a hashtag, also makes more sense from a semantic point.
This seems to depend on the specific server instance. For example scholar.social does have a search icon (a magnifying glass) in the sidebar, which stays visible in all layouts.
A poor workaround I just did when I hit this problem - editing the URL to /search as the path takes to a search page with a visible search box. I'm on mastodon.social
You can search in the "# Explore" (Entdecken) view. Took me a while to find that as well. Very confusing, this should be changed.
A related post just showed up on my timeline and I believe this is a UI issue: the hashtag icon should be replaced by a search icon as it leads to a page with a search bar that allows to search for accounts, posts, and hashtags, and not to a hashtag-specific page.
In Mastodon >= 4.2 the top search icon would become a duplicate that could be dropped, thus solving #25990 at the same time
