technology

My phone barely manages to load the site. Pages crash and when they do load it's around 10-15 seconds. Pretty much all newer js-dependant websites are like this for me. I simply don't use most newer websites on my phone. Maybe eventually I'll buy a new phone, but things work fine on my laptop so I mostly use that and having a phone from this decade is bourgeois decadence.

A while back I thought maybe I should take a crack at writing a fast and simple read-only frontend that I can use on my phone similar I guess to nitter, invidious, bibliogram, etc.

So I went ahead and did just that: https://diethex.net

Hilariously, I actually wound up doing this TWICE. The first time I finished it up last June and then the site migrated to lemmy v3 so I had to rewrite almost everything which I just now got around to this month. Here's the code in case anyone wants to read it: https://git.sr.ht/~kota/hex

When a page is requested all of its data (comments, posts, etc) are cached for the next 20 minutes which dramatically reduces requests to the actual website when you're browsing around. Also every page is statically generated from simple html templates on the server; so javascript isn't required. I wound up adding a tiiiny bit of optional js to allow opening and closing comments. So you can swipe to the left on a phone to close a comment.

If hexbear is already fast for you then there's no point in using this, but figured I'd say something in case there's anyone else with my issues.