I really love the idea of a hub for all my media reviews/engagement/etc, but Popfeed has seemed to be a bit neglected more recently.

It was due to be open-sourced a long time ago, and since then it's been said that it is still intended to be (though that was itself also months ago), but it is still closed source - there is a github page with the lexicons but that's it for now. Additionally, it has become much more sluggish to load and there are various bugs, big and small, that have long been reported but have not been addressed, something open-sourcing would help to fix.

When it works, Popfeed is genuinely something I love to use. The issue at the end of the day is that it has been given less love than it deserves, and is becoming buggy and tough to use as a result (which is just pushing existing users away rather than drawing more in). I hope this changes, and we see Popfeed open-sourced, regularly addressing bugs so that the great core idea and experience can be the focus instead

In the past, I've tried many other sites that handled books, games, movies, and other separately, but I'm glad this gets them all together. I actually used it to log my physical home library to show my ever-growing TBR list. With that said, I have some issues:

• The media switch causing a full-page reload is a weird decision
• This chugs on my 2018 laptop.
• Long loading time for navigating between screens.
• I can't open listings in a new tab since default navigation controls are overriden (press and hold on mobile).
• It'd be easier to search books by ISBN, especially given the datasource. (I assume. I had to type in the URL when I added my books.)
• It'd be nice if the lexicons were published because I want to read from it for my own use.

I've been using popfeed for over an year, while I never managed to stuck with other log/review services. The main reason being that I always found it annoying to need one app for each different type of media (specially for movies and series that often complement each other; games and books have been a nice addition imo but I'm not a fan of having the music stuff there personally.) Popfeed managed to fill that niche for me and it's been nice overall.

I do feel, however, that there's a lot of work to be done and it doesn't help that the service is closed source. It is a very complex app being grown and basically a single guy doing it all.

My 3 main grudges are:

• The website version is lacking. Not being able to open pages on other tabs makes it so organizing or logging anything, specially the watchlist, is a really annoying task. The UI in general isn't the best for this type of service.
• Diary entries were a nice idea taken from letterboxd but because it works so differently it feels unfinished. You can't add a second diary entry for something already logged, no tags for diary entries (only reviews), not being able to add a second review, not having a "liked" section, not being able to add individual tv shows episodes, currently not being able to edit diary dates.
• You can't mute or block people. If you have someone blocked on bluesky, popfeed completely ignores it.

I really like the idea of it and I really want it to be better! I never had anything that attended my needs as much as popfeed does, the experience just needs a boost :)

Overall, I enjoyed the idea of being able to share my favorite pop culture interests with my friends on the Atmosphere. I agree with one of the other reviews that mentioned Popfeed is spreading itself too thin covering a lot of different types of media, like with movies, TV, books, etc. I think one other thought I have is that UI is confusing at times, am I leaving a comment or a review, and do both need to exist? Why not just let people leave reviews with the option to reply to other people's reviews? I think it's a great first step to let people explore pop culture, but I think it could use some work.

I really want to like popfeed, it's likely the best reviewing platform built on atproto. My biggest issues are two fold:

1. popfeed spreads itself too thin being a review platform for tv, books, movies, games, and music. That makes navigation confusing and discovery near-impossible for me.
2. because of the friction I have with discovery, it makes it feel like an inherently non-social space (for me). My hope for platforms like popfeed (and popfeed specifically because I want to see them win) is for this to be a place where I read reviews I enjoy and find people that feel like tastemakers I align with. Right now it feels like popfeed is mostly just a place for me to leave a review, share it on bluesky or somewhere else, and talk about it there.