this post was submitted on 30 Jul 2023
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Lemmy.World Announcements

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founded 2 years ago
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We just added Alexandrite to the server, it's an alternative desktop UI for Lemmy created by Sheodox who worked tirelessly to make the necessary changes to we could host it ourselves here. So go to https://a.lemmy.world and have a look!

He continues to update it constantly, you can follow the development on his github page or in his community. If you like what you see and want to support him, why not buy him a coffee? :)

For those who don't have Lemmy World as their home instance and want to use Alexandrite, either ask your instance admins to add it or go to https://alexandrite.app!

Edit: I should probably have mentioned that Alexandrite is meant for desktop!

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[โ€“] [email protected] 48 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Huh, as soon as I went to the link I got banned by the server admin and rate limited?

[โ€“] [email protected] 57 points 1 year ago

Rate limits are being tweaked to combat ddos. You might experience some issues while they are being optimised. Apologies

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[โ€“] [email protected] 45 points 1 year ago (4 children)

Wow, thank you. I acutally was hoping you were going to add this becasue Alexandrite is the best desktop UI for Lemmy so far.

It also means Lemmy.world is turning into the best instance already because they're the most user-friendly and customizable one.

Great work!

FYI: I got rated limited on the first link but the second time worked right away. There might be some glitch there.

[โ€“] [email protected] 16 points 1 year ago

Rate limits are currently being fine-tuned so yes there may be some issues at the moment while our team sorts things out

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[โ€“] [email protected] 29 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Thanks for adding these UIs as an alternative. Especially m.lemmy.world, it feels like a native app.

[โ€“] [email protected] 27 points 1 year ago (3 children)

The m. Is voyager app. You can actually make a shortcut on your phone and it turns into an app.

[โ€“] [email protected] 11 points 1 year ago (1 children)
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[โ€“] [email protected] 21 points 1 year ago (1 children)

It's really great that you are moving so quickly and supporting your community in this way, but I wonder if all these front ends are potentially going to create a bit of a long term maintenance headache? How are we certain that they don't introduce any new vulnerabilities and how are we staying on top of those when they happen? I worry that each new frontend adds burden to an already small community for a potentially minor practical gain.

Don't get me wrong, you guys are doing awesome stuff, and I'm consistently impressed with this instance. That's just the first thing that comes to my head having done software for many years myself.

[โ€“] [email protected] 28 points 1 year ago (6 children)

Maintenance in regards to updates is not an issue. All the extra frontends we added run in docker and are automatically updated twice a day to make sure we are always running the latest stable versions. All apps are using the Lemmy api's just like the 3rd party apps and should anything break we have ways to contact the developers.

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[โ€“] [email protected] 20 points 1 year ago (8 children)

What I really want is a design that shows me twice as many posts at a time, there's too much wasted space.

A comparison photo with old.reddit.

[โ€“] [email protected] 25 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)
[โ€“] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago (3 children)

That's pretty handy to know.

But I kinda like the way Alexandrite looks, I just wish it was more compact.

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[โ€“] [email protected] 17 points 1 year ago

I'm planning on adding alternate post styles in the (hopefully near) future. A more compact style is one of the styles I want to add.

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[โ€“] [email protected] 19 points 1 year ago

That's how it should work! Click on post and instantly see the content and comments, without loading a whole page

[โ€“] [email protected] 17 points 1 year ago

beautiful! and the fact that i dont have to open a new tab for comments!

[โ€“] [email protected] 15 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Immediate rate limit. Opened home page, pressed communities.

Rate limited.

[โ€“] [email protected] 22 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Rate limits are being tweaked to combat ddos. You might experience some issues while they are being optimised. Apologies

[โ€“] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago

Thank you for your work!

[โ€“] [email protected] 15 points 1 year ago (4 children)

Am I missing smthing? If I open vygr or old I see posts. When I open a.lemmy I can only see a generic post about lemmy nothing else

[โ€“] [email protected] 19 points 1 year ago (1 children)

(dev here) Sorry! The post forgot to mention Alexandrite is meant to be a alternate UI for desktop. There are a lot of issues if you try using it on mobile at the moment, because I haven't done the work to support it yet. I would keep using whatever you've been using on mobile.

[โ€“] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago

Yes I should have mentioned that. I updated my post

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[โ€“] [email protected] 14 points 1 year ago (2 children)

I want to add my praise to the heap.

I'm pretty happy with Voyager on mobile, but when writing something, it's not ideal.

The generic Lemmy UI is more than OK on desktop, but the lack of error code reporting to the user was frustrating, at times I tried to resubmit posts and comments and the spinning Submit button just kept on going, for some communities in particular. So I stopped posting in these communities.

Now, with Alexandrite, I feel like this is a good UI that I really like. And I love that you write out the background error message for why posting or commenting fails!

Really nice job!

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[โ€“] [email protected] 14 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I want to caution that every new ui is a potential security risk. When it's a mobile app then it's entirely on the user to decide if they trust it, but when it's hosted the host is implicitly giving a seal of approval so I think at least a bit of a code audit should be done, especially since xss is much more of a risk on the web.

There's already been one security breach on the default Lemmy skin, so I think it would be a good idea to do an audit for every new hosted ui and include a section for it on these posts. You don't necessarily need to crawl through every line of course, but it'd be good to cover what framework and rendering engine it uses and acknowledge any risks associated with them.

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[โ€“] [email protected] 14 points 1 year ago

Just dropping in to say this UI is beautiful and the features are superb. Thank yous for all the lemmy world staff and Sheodox for the time and dedication!

[โ€“] [email protected] 13 points 1 year ago (3 children)

Anything that gets nearer to a RES-like experience from Reddit is an absolute plus. This UI is brilliant.

[โ€“] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago (1 children)

The genius thing about it is the way it fully utilizes the whole width of a display, with the post content appearing in between the list of posts and the sidebar. I haven't seen another Lemmy/Kbin UI that does this.

It might only be suitable for widescreen desktop use, but it does that one thing very well.

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[โ€“] [email protected] 12 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

I like the UI so much more than the standard Lemmy. This should be the default UI. Hopefully he makes a light version.

[โ€“] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago

I need a light version.

[โ€“] [email protected] 12 points 1 year ago

I love the side-by-side view. No more opening posts in new tabs for me.

[โ€“] [email protected] 11 points 1 year ago (3 children)

Wow that is really cool, I hope you can add photon https://photon.xylight.dev/ at some point, it is super beautiful too

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[โ€“] [email protected] 10 points 1 year ago (2 children)

This is such a huge improvement over the base Lemmy theme. I just need a light theme now!

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[โ€“] [email protected] 10 points 1 year ago

Seeing custom web UIs being deployed officially and directly on the same domain as Lemmy instances is incredibly encouraging. I wonder if my Leanish will be polished enough to be published that way eventually.

One can dream!

[โ€“] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

I'm in love! Smooth, modern, and simple. One thing to note - the "hue" option for the theme in the settings is not very obvious at first or comfortable. We need some kind of visible color pallete or some squares with color options.

Also, Ctrl+Enter should allow me to post my reply immediately, but it doesn't.

[โ€“] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago

I love this, thanks.

[โ€“] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago (4 children)

As soon as I click on a link I get rate limited. That may need to get adjusted.

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[โ€“] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago

Whoa, reading this title was really trippy.

[โ€“] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Is there a post with all the different enabled UIs?

[โ€“] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago (3 children)

They are listed in the sidebar

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[โ€“] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

My experience:

  1. First load errored out over ... something
  2. Second page load: I'm greeted with a rate limit. Nice.
  3. Load: finally worked
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[โ€“] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago

Great stuff! I've been using Alexandrite for the last few weeks and it's become my default UI. I love that you can pin the navigation bar open and favourite communities (click on the icon to star it).

[โ€“] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago

Looks fantastic!!

[โ€“] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Yooo, this is dope. Looks great, responsive, and good use of screen space. I love the retractable sidebar.

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