If you look at what makes really good sci-if stand out, its that the authors figured out how to make the incredible seem mundane

Once upon a time, air travel was the purview of the rich and famous. Early aviators like Amelia Earhart were celebrities, but their once-dangerous routes are now flown hundreds of times a day by commercial jets that most people can afford to fly on. The reason we all fly around today is that aviators discovered a virtuous cycle of scale -> profit -> investment -> scale that enabled the industry to develop ever larger and ever more efficient aircraft.

The same thing is going to happen with Spaceflight over the next few years. It took us about 60 years, but we have finally reached the point where lots of ventures can make profits in space, which should hopefully trigger another virtuous cycle that will end with affordable space travel for all

Seems to me like we are close to hitting some kind of critical mass. It’s been amazing seeing things shift from 1-2 posts getting big threads and 100+ upvotes per day to seeing thousands of those. Also seeing over 100 comments on posts created 30 minutes ago has been neat

Something that some of the other replies have missed is that older movies were often shot (and a lot of actors were trained) from the perspective of a “stage play for the silver screen.” Stage plays have to work for large audiences, and so they tend to feature more exaggerated voice / body movements. These tricks were used on movies for a long time, but have faded as visual effects and sound recording have gotten better

Some feedback: 1: I’m sure you are working on this, but adding the ability to search for communities should be a priority. IMHO, I would copy how Apollo has a dedicated tab on the bottom menu for search. Alternatively, see (7)

2: A couple of features aren’t properly scaling when using the app in the “slide over” configuration on an iPad. The ones I’ve found so far are: it’s impossible to downvote a comment, the top UI elements smoosh into each other, and images don’t display without clicking on them

3: Consider getting a bit more active about promoting the app. This is way more impressive than Mlem

4: Consider adding a dedicated downvote button to comments. Currently people browsing with gestures disabled would not be able to downvote comments at all

5: Consider copying how Apollo will report how many comments are in a collapsed thread / comment chain. This is required to implement (6)

6: Consider automatically collapsing comment chains that are more than 5 replies deep.

7: Consider creating a dedicated interface for selecting communities / all. Perhaps the dialog could be triggered by tapping the top bar, and would contain radio buttons for sorting by all / subscribed / local, as well as a list of subscribed communities. You could also include a redundant shortcut to search (or even put the entire search dialog) here (see (1))

8: The menu when inside a community is currently missing the sidebar

Overall, this app is amazing! —