Everything is disconnected.

Despite being such a small change, the removal of the channel preview has opened my eyes to realizing exactly what I find wrong with the mobile app.

When navigating a server with this UI, it no longer feels like I’m moving around in one place. It doesn’t feel like a server. None of the pages we see are linked together.

The server list has simply become a list of images that open a list of words. With the removal of the preview, each channel feels like its own seperate environment, entirely disconnected from the server itself— which now just feels like a list of words. Without seeing the chat moving, or even seeing that there’s messages in the first place, the server feels barren and lifeless. Suddenly, each channel feels alien, like it’s not part of the world of the server. I didn’t realize how much the channel preview was doing until it was gone.

And not only that— all the way back to when they removed the swipe to view members, that removed the feel that it was actually inhabited, too. It feels like there’s nobody there. Swiping to view the list of people there with you was so easy, a fast motion, just like swiping the other way to view the channel list. It made everything feel connected together when you could see the previous screen moving to the side. Everything really did feel like it was one app that was home to so many communities.

But now, having to navigate so many popup menus, having to click so many little buttons and move around to so many little submenus, it just feels like I’m looking at several unrelated things. Servers don’t feel like places, it doesn’t feel like I’m connecting with anything or anyone. It just feels like menus stacked on menus, with not a single one being connected to each other. The app no longer feels like a collection of communities, it just feels like a pile of menus. It’s slowly feeling more and more barren the more everything is broken apart into seperate pieces stuck in seperate locations. 

I really miss the old mobile UI.