Fediverse

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Any dev here ? Building an image scroller fediverse client (lemmy.dbzer0.com)

submitted 5 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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Hello, I'd like to build a mobile client for mastodon, lemmy and pixelfed that would be video/image focused with a scrolling ui similar to tiktok or the reddit video viewer.

You would have a sortable/filterable feed with contents from different activitypub networks and would see it full page with a like/voting button on the right and the comments under.

Does anyone know if such a client already exists, and if not, could any dev share starter point links for building such an app ?

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[–] [email protected] 8 points 5 months ago (1 children)

I'm a dev but not very good at mobile.

I can promise you that a lot of engineering work went into making the tiktok scrolling experience so smooth. Part of the trick is having a good enough algorithm that the user wants to watch the majority of served videos.

Another huge part of it is having lightning fast content distribution and aggressive "prefetching" of the next videos in the feed.

I don't want to discourage you but I also don't want you to be caught off guard by the difficulty. Do you want to make this bad enough to give it your nights and weekends for a year?

[–] [email protected] 6 points 5 months ago (1 children)

Thanks for answering

I am not planning on the algorithm part as it is too far for me and lemmy one is sufficient. That means you won't be scrolling for hours when you have catched up news, but I think it's a good thing since I don't want the addiction part. I was thinking about a very simplistic app with only the feeds we get in other clients, simpler than current clients.

I might have considered it too easy though looking at what you say

[–] [email protected] 7 points 5 months ago

You're welcome!

So if you didn't care about having to wait for the video to buffer on every scroll, it becomes an easier problem. I kind of think that defeats the purpose of a tiktok-style interface though.

I agree that you wouldn't necessarily need to build a new algorithm, but like I said, it's part of the smooth scrolling magic