what lemmy web app do you use and why?

vestmoria@linux.community to Technology@lemmy.world – 88 points –
79

Jerboa because it's the closest I have found to RIF other than Liftoff, which no longer works since most instances have updated to 0.19 and above.

The dude working in it had a kid (made an announcement for it) and then hasn't seemed to work on it since. Which is understandable, I guess. Kids ruin everything. 😩

Isn't Jerboa an Android native app? I don't think they have a web app like how Alexandrite or Photon are.

Does it still work pretty well? I tried it for awhile but ran into some issues I can't remember early on. If I could get close to RIF for Lemmy, my battery would drain a lot quicker

Jerboa has some weird problems very early on, but I don't really have any now. I'd suggest trying it again.

The only issue I have is that it doesn't seem to poll for messages/reply notices unless I close and reopen it.

I'm having the same issue with message/reply but otherwise it's a great app.

I'm still wanting the "marked as read" option though, I'm not a huge fan of having to vote on everything.

Photon because cool design

That’s my go to app for desktop

I use Photon on Android Firefox in light mode. Shocked the hell out of me, too! I use dark mode for everything else.

Alexandrite is the best web front-end for me because of the 2-column view.

Jerboa. Because it's fully open source and it's the first one I installed and I have yet to have enough of a problem with it to look for alternatives. (The left-right swipe features are... not a good thing, but they're not bad enough to make me want to switch.)

Yeah, I'm a Jerboa user too. The left-right swipe is my only criticism as well, mainly because it can be sensitive when you're just trying to scroll up or down.

Hey OP, I love you! I never used a Lemmy WebApp because I see no sense in it, but I tried Photon because of some comments in your post and holy fuck I have missed so much! It's incredible that I can even have two accounts at the same time from different instances without changing the URL!

glad you like photon! :)

Hey, I FUCKING love Photon and as soon as I can I'm going to donate to the project, but I have three questions: Is there any kind of official community for the project? And, is there a way to search communities and only communities? I mean, I can search for posts and then search for communities where that post may be, but can I search for communities directly, and lastly, how can I join a community within Photon?

  • Hey, thanks! The official community for Photon is !photon@lemdro.id (lemdro.id has helped a lot with the project and feedback, so I decided they should be it's home.)
  • To search communities and only communities, you can either press the globe icon in the navbar (which is better for searching just communities), or you can use the search button and filter by communities.
  • To join a community in Photon, you can click subscribe in the explore page (globe icon) or you can go to the community, click the three dots at the top right, and click subscribe. (On a wide enough screen, the subscribe button along with community info will be on the right.)

The amount of people not knowing what a "web app" is, is seriously concerning.

Anyway, I tried "old" and Alexandrite, but I just ended up sticking with the default. I find "old" ugly, and on Alexandrite, I couldn't find my saved posts. Maybe it has been fixed since, but the default one works for me best.

Is this thread intended for 1. Android/mobile users 2. iOS/mobile users 3. People with computers/mouse/keyboard or what? It seems most Lemmy threads are pretty exclusively aimed at mobile users.

Boost on Android. Used it for reddit, use it for Lemmy now that it swapped over.

I use Alexandrite on desktop but I'm excited about Lemmy-UI-Next which (IIRC) is being developed by one of admins of lemm.ee. It looks very promising.

For mobile I'm using Voyager (this account is actually on the instance for supporters.) I've tried everything available for iOS but Voyager is my daily driver, nothing else comes close to ticking as many boxes as Voyager does for me. I have Apollo sideloaded on my phone and it's incredible how much progress Voyager has made toward replicating the experience which is exactly what I want in a mobile app for Lemmy. The only thing it's missing is my favorite Apollo theme (Outrun).

I don't

I use mobile clients and occasionally the main interface

Yeah, switching web apps seems like way too much work. I use a mobile app on my phone and the regular web app on my computer.

Arctic and Mlem for iOS.

Arctic is my primary, it was the first that I know of to include admin tools, the single developer is super accessible and on top of for resolving bugs and does a good job at supporting markdown both in the editor and the viewer.

Mlem is my backup if I need to access 2 different spots on the Lemmy-verse. It has a great viewer and interface but is missing a markdown editor.

Eternity, loved it on Reddit, love it on Lemmy, bless the Open Source community for keeping it alive

Photon on desktop (although it's excellent on mobile too), however I use Boost on Android, and Voyager on iOS. Native apps always feel a little more cohesive

Voyager but keeping an eye on the development of Raccoon.

Wow! Thanks for the heads up. I'm also using Voyager, but Raccoon looks promising. 🦝

I made a Lite App with Hermit because I don't really trust random app developers? I'm somewhat of a crazy person.

Paid version of Boost. I could mute things without having an account, because I couldn't decide on which instance to select. Filters didn't reset either when I finally got an account. Non-account browsing was limited to lemmy.word pov though. I'll still shop around if an app catches my eye.

Sync. It seemed to have the closest feature set to RiF early on and I've just stuck with it since then. I try other apps occasionally. They all have their strengths but Sync feels the most polished.

edit: Sync has started the inserting ads into my feed. Maybe they always have and I just didn't see them because I use DNS based ad blocking? They have an ad free version, but it's too much at $20. Even worse, the "ultimate" edition uses a subscription model, or is $99. For a Lemmy app? Insane. Guess it's time to change apps.

Voyager, Photon, Lemmynade, Tesseract, Alexandrite.

Voyager as a PWA (Android). No need to actually install everything, but still feels the same.

I don't use it much on the desktop but when I do just the normal web interface. On Android I use Boost, because that's what I used previous to Lemmy.

Eternity, its simple, fast, open source and the succesor of the reddit app Infinity.

Boost... because it's the one i was using with reddit. At one point i tried Jeroba out, but i experienced some issues and decided to come back.

Summit. Neat, simple and clear. Updated very often and I simply love it.

Right now I'm mostly using mlmym (the "old" interface on most instances that support it) because it doesn't require JS for basic viewing.

It's kind of buggy though, unfortunately -- things like user history show up as a complete jumble, for example. :(

One of these days, I'll probably get fed up enough to go write my own interface and set things up exactly how I want them to work... but I've got too many projects already so I'm just living with it for now.

Yeah I wanted to love mlmym but it's just too buggy and laggy for me. Hopefully lemmy-ui-next will prove to be a good replacement. If anyone's curious, that UI can previewed at: next.lemm.ee

I haven't had much issue with lag, generally, but I don't get notifications any more -- which is probably the most pressing issue. (I have to remember to manually check once in a while after I post since the envelope doesn't light up.) That might be an issue with reddthat being on a recent beta version of lemmy -- I don't know.

We do have lemmy-ui-next over here too. Thanks for reminding me about that. I've been meaning to poke at it a bit.

The envelope not lighting up bug was fixed in mlmym version 0.0.43

Do you have any examples of the user history being jumbled up? Might be caused by the way the lemmy api returns user activity. If the page size is 10 results, it's going to return 5 comments and 5 posts regardless of how recent they are.

You can open any profile with multiple pages worth of posts or comments on old.reddthat.com and it's jumbled. Even my own profile is jumbled: https://old.reddthat.com/u/e0qdk

The first page is mostly comments I made two weeks ago plus a thread from today and some very old threads. The second page has comments I made earlier today and during the past week. The third page starts with my most recent comment and then has a bunch of older comments.

The exact order might change after posting this, but my own recent comments mostly being on page two has been pretty consistent for a while.

If I look at a very active user's profile (like MentalEdge's), I see threads from today show up on page three(!) while there are threads from a week or more ago on pages one and two.

I'm not sure what's going on exactly, but it basically makes user profiles pretty useless right now through mlmym.

Edit: I can't even find this comment in my profile, but my other reply (regarding the envelope being fixed in 0.0.43) shows up on page 3.

Looks right here https://old.lemmy.world/u/e0qdk@reddthat.com

looks like the default sort for the user history api changed in whatever version of lemmy reddthat is running. Fix in the latest mlmym release 0.0.44 accounts for that now!

Thanks! I'll go ask Tiff about getting reddthat updated later.

BTW, is there a community for discussion of mlmym itself somewhere on lemmy? I can't participate on GitHub, but those aren't the only issues I've found. (e.g. there's also ?format=jpg&thumbnail=96 on non-pictrs links and a text handling issue with angle brackets...)

no lemmy community for mlmym yet, that's good idea.

do you have an example of that thumbnail issue?

I ran into an example of the thumbnail issue again today -- this time on a post from kbin: https://old.reddthat.com/post/19193476

The thumbnail looks like this in the HTML:

<div>
  
    <div></div>
  
</div>

Note that it's making a request to kbin.social with ?format=jpg&amp;thumbnail=96 parameters in the CSS -- which results in the full image being loaded since kbin doesn't run pictrs.

The versions in use on reddthat (according to the settings page) are:

lemmy: 0.19.4-beta.7

mlmym: 0.0.44

This kinda looks like an issue between lemmy and kbin. The issue is present on the lemmy ui as well. The ?format=jpg&amp;thumbnail=96 parameter being there doesn't have an effect here. The issue is the thumbnail_url is reported wrong. You can see that here. The thumbnail_url should be: https://kbin.social/media/cache/resolve/entry_thumb/60/a4/60a45b8ff88b1b2e3a0f77b701feb323c5bbfb7ceeb75154ea7df5d6eea15ef8.jpg We could try and use some regex to lookout for kbin images and rewrite the thumbnail_url, but it should probably just be fixed upstream.

Found this github issue which might be related: https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/3775

I'm having trouble finding an example of the thumbnail issue again right now but I was seeing the pictrs conversion parameters passed to URLs from catbox.moe, i.postimg.cc, and other sources in the CSS for the thumbnail when I reported the issue to Tiff ~3 weeks ago. It's possible that it got fixed/suppressed by another change since then though. (0.0.44 was deployed a few hours ago and I think there may have also been a beta patch bump for the lemmy backend at some point since I reported the issue originally in our local support community.)

I'll let you know if I see it pop up again.

For the text handling issue, I was seeing text like " by in " (i.e. " by in " if it still happens) getting misinterpreted as raw HTML instead of being escaped. (i.e. `` was showing up in the HTML output for the page.)

You may recognize that text as the pattern for a recently fixed bug in the user profiles; I found the text handling issue while trying to explain the other issue to Tiff a few weeks ago.

Will edit this comment immediately after posting to let you know if I still see the text issue.

EDIT: I still see the text issue show up in this comment. https://old.reddthat.com/comment/10370610

I use the Web UI on desktop.

I use Eclipse on Android, because it's open-source, I used it on Reddit and was familiar with it, and because Jerboa had some really obnoxious bugs that I don't recall anymore.

Care to share Eclipse's url? I can't find it with a quick Google search or in Droid-ify.

Heh. My fault. It's "Eternity", not "Eclipse"

None, because I don't use lemmy.