I was literally about to make a post about this.

I was in a thread about indigenous peoples cultivating ancient trees in the Amazon and had a long comment written up about the rainforests and diatoms and ocean acidification. I left the app to do some fact checking, and I guess the app must have cleared some memory, as apps are known to do, so when I got back, my comment was gone.

Frustrated, I found my way back to the thread and pressed the bookmark button before opening it. I typed the whole thing up again, careful not to leave the app. At the very end, I tried to scroll up to proof read, but I find that Lemmy apps tend not to understand the ergonomics of scrolling. Even if I’m trying to scroll straight up, doing so with your thumb often involves a slight movement to the right. The app interpreted this as a swipe right and exited the thread, deleting my comment.

Luckily, I had about half of my comment copied to the clipboard. So, I typed the rest of it back out in the Word app. It ended up being over 2500 words. I went back to the app and it had refreshed again. I figured I’d just use the bookmark, but I guess I must have bookmarked the wrong thread.

I tried going to all, going through top last 6 hours, didn’t see it where I’d last found it. I tried searching whatever keywords I could half-remember from the title, can’t seem to find it. I thought maybe it’s rolled over to top last 12 hours, so I have been scrolling that list for about 20 minutes. Still couldn’t find the thread I was looking for, maybe it’s deleted for some reason. But I did find this one.

I’m starting a new job tomorrow morning, meant to be doing basically nothing this evening so I could get to bed early, but now my heart is all anxious about this essay-length comment I’ll never be able to post.

It’s not anyone’s fault and I’m certainly not telling my story here to place any blame. But it sure is frustrating. Makes me yearn for the automatic draft saving feature of rif. In the meantime I’ll just have to get used to copying everything to clipboard every few lines and remembering not to overwrite it.

Anyway, thanks for listening. I think writing this comment might let me relax enough to calm down and sleep. And in the future, as lemmy apps like Connect become more developed, hopefully I’ll wake up one day to find this feature has been included. I know development is hard work and I don’t want my frustrations to negatively affect anyone’s experience making this app. I appreciate this community and the app in the state that it is, even if it isn’t perfect yet.

Much love ❤

Android 10 Galaxy S9 (Phone running just a bit slow these days, no surprise if memory is frequently cleared, but would be great if app could save and reload state on refresh)