Try using the Progressive Web App (PWA) instead. I’m on iOS and haven’t found a good app for Lemmy yet but the PWA has helped me get used to Lemmy on my phone in place of Reddit. You just open the site in your phone’s native browser (Safari on iOS, probably Chrome on Android?) and choose “Save to Home Screen”. Now it looks like any other app and behaves like it too, even though it’s secretly just the web page.
As others have said, you can log in using any general Lemmy app. However, you can also use specifically Beehaw (or any Lemmy instance like sh.it or world) as a Progressive Web App (PWA).
If you’re on iOS, go to the site on Safari (other browsers don’t work) and in the browser options select “Add to Home Screen”. The page from Safari will appear on your home screen like any other app. Not sure how it works on Android but I imagine the process is similar and involves using Chrome.
Navigating it is easy enough, tap posts to load them and swipe left-to-right to go back one “layer”. You do need to make a PWA for every Lemmy instance you use, however. If you use a standard app, you can use the one app for all your instances. I haven’t found a good app on iOS yet, so PWA it is for me!
This is also how I got over the urge to go on Reddit. I simply replaced Apollo with Beehaw’s PWA so if I feel the Reddit urge, I end up on Beehaw instead.
TIL. I guess they must have improved it recently. That’s one of the worst parts about starting on a smaller instance for sure. Being able to copy+paste the URL from its source is really helpful.
You can subscribe to any content anywhere as long as neither instance is on the other’s block list. If your instance hasn’t federated with the other instance yet, then you need to do that thing where you search for “!community@instance” and wait a few minutes. Otherwise, you just go to that community while on your home instance (e.g. for you, “mander.xyz/c/community@instance”) and click subscribe.
Back in the day (pre-2015 or so) Reddit used to feel a lot different. Odds are, a lot of the big-name mods came into power back then. It’s been a real slow “boil the frog” type approach for many years as they slowly made the logged out user experience worse, then the “new reddit” experience worse… and now the mobile apps.
If you weren’t paying attention, it was really easy to fall into a routine where you believed the site’s operators still had the users’ best interests at heart. Especially if your subscriptions only brought you posts from older subreddits that managed to retain that old feeling. I could see someone wanting to moderate that for free, even if it was out of a naïve belief that it was possible to return to the old days of Reddit.
That being said, they’ve really gone full mask off as of late. Hard to imagine anyone could return to moderating that for free. The glory days of Reddit are definitely behind us. Here’s hoping Lemmy manages to keep the momentum going. So far, it really does feel like the old days on Reddit.
At least let me get some cybernetic enhancements off the street or something…
$0.99 per month to read all the comments on a thread, slowly increase the cost year-over-year and eventually add a second (initially) $0.99 per month to read any comments at all (because you should only read posts and only the ones we want you to see).