The readme talks about docker. I’m not a docker user. I did a git clone when I was on a decent connection. ATM I’m not on a decent connection. The releases page lacks file sizes. And MS Github conceals the size:

curl -LI 'https://github.com/Xyphyn/photon/archive/refs/tags/v1.31.2-fix.1.tar.gz' | grep -i 'content-length'

output:

content-length: 0

So instead of fetching the tarball of unknown size, I need to know how to build either the app or the tarball from the cloned repo. Is that documented anywhere?

I've been messed around with random features in photon, and i tried something stupid today.

I was experimenting with an AI post summary feature, (just because i wanted an excuse to make a cool animation) but as I was using it, it actually ended up kind of useful.

If I were to implement this feature, it would only work like this:

• The user would have to opt-in manually.
• The user would need to specify what AI service they wish to use.
• The user would have to specify their own API key, if the service requires one.

In the end, I probably won't add this, since you can just copy/paste the content into an AI app. But it could also be slightly more convenient.

What do you think?

I just wanted to say thanks to all the translators of photon! Even if you only changed 1 word, translating this large app is not easy, especially because it's hard to find the context for certain actions.

With all of your help, Photon is now available in 13 languages!

English, Hebrew, Bulgarian, Estonian, Finnish, French, German, Japanese, Dutch, Polish, Chinese, and Portuguese!

If you want to help translate, you can do so at https://weblate.xylight.dev. You can translate as little or as much as you want!

Photon has a feature on links which gets data from Media Bias Fact Check to determine its media bias. However, I've seen controversy on lemmy.world's bot with this, and I'm not sure if this is the best place to get the data from.

Should I use a different dataset? like allsides'?

A lot of admins trying to host photon have been unable to after i switched from Node to Bun server. Bun is a newer server that is significantly faster, but it seems to have caused issues when hosting for weird reasons when people try to host it.

Starting from v1.31.2, I will publish node images as well as bun images, it's very simple to access:

Instead of ghcr.io/xyphyn/photon:tag, do ghcr.io/xyphyn/photon:tag-node

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/18159531

UPDATE! Fewer than 15% of Lemmy Apps display posts accurately

Updated! Updates are shown in quote text like this.

An Apps Experiment

Introduction

This is an experiment I performed out of curiosity, and I have a few big disclaimers at the bottom. Basically, I've seen a lot of comments recently about one app or another not displaying something right. Lemmy has been around for a while now and can no longer be considered an experimental platform.

Lemmy and the apps that people use to access the platform have become an important part of people’s lives. Whether you are checking the app weekly or daily, and whether you use it to stay up on the news or to stay connected to your hobby, it’s important that it works. I hope that this helps people to see the extent of the challenge, and encourages developers to improve their apps, too.

How I did it

I wanted to investigate objectively how accurately each app displays text of posts and comments using the standard Lemmy markdown. Markdown is a standard part of the Lemmy platform, but not all apps handle it the same. It is basically what gives text useful formatting.

I used the latest release of each app, but did not include pre-releases. I only included apps that have released an update in the last 6 months, which should include most apps in active development. ~~I was unable to test iOS-exclusive apps, so they are not included either. In all, 16 apps met the inclusion criteria.~~

I also added Eternity, which is in active development, although it has not had a recent update. I was able to include several iOS apps thanks to testing from @jordanlund@lemmy.world – Thanks, Jordan! This made for 21 apps that were tested.

Each app was rated in 5 categories: Text, Format, Spoilers, Links, and Images. I chose these mostly based on the wonderful Markdown Guide from @marvin@sffa.community, which was posted about a year ago in !meta@sffa.community (here).

I checked whether each app correctly displayed each category, then took the overall average. Each category was weighted equally. Text includes italic, bold, strong, strikethrough, superscript, and subscript. Format includes block quotes, lists, code (block and inline), tables, and dividers. Spoilers includes display of hidden, expandable spoilers. Links includes external links, username links, and community links. Images included embedded images, image references, and inline images.

Thanks to input from others, I also added a test to see if lemmy hyperlinks opened in-app. There was a problem with using the SFFA Community Guide that caused some apps to be essentially penalized twice because there was formatting inside formatting, so I created this TEST POST to more clearly and fairly measure each app.

In each case, I checked whether the display was correct based on the rules for Lemmy Markdown, and consistent with the author’s intent. In cases where the app recognized the tag correctly but did not display it accurately, that was treated as a fail.

Results

Out of a possible perfect 10, only 3 apps displayed all markdown correctly:

Jerboa (Official Android client) - 10.0

Alexandrite - 10.0

Voyager - 10.0

Summit - 9.7

Photon - 9.3

Arctic - 9.3 (pending)

Interstellar - 9.1

Lemmy-UI - 9.0

Thunder - 8.9

Tesseract - 8.6

Quiblr - 8.1

mlmym - 8.0

Lemmios - 8.0 (pending)

Mlem - 7.5 (pending)

Boost - 7.3

Eternity - 7.0

Sync - 6.9

Connect - 6.7

Lemmynade - 6.1

Avelon - 5.7 (pending)

More details of testing here

Disclaimers

Disclaimers

I Love Lemmy Apps (and their devs)

Lemmy apps devs work very hard, and invest a lot in the platform. Lemmy is better because they are doing the work that they do. Like, a LOT better. Everyone who uses the platform has to access it through one app or another. Apps are the face of the entire platform. Whether an app is a FOSS passion project, underwritten by a grant, or generating income through sales or ads, no one is getting rich by making their app. It is for the benefit of the community.

This is not meant to be a rating of the quality or functionality of any app. An app may have a high rating here but be missing other features that users want, or users may love an app that has a lower rating. This is just about how well apps handle markdown.

This is pretty unscientific

You’ll see my methodology above. I’m not a scientist. There is probably a much better way to do this, and I probably have biases in terms of how I went about it. I think it’s interesting and probably has some valuable information. If you think it’s interesting, let me know. If you think of a better way, PM me and I’d be happy to share what I have so you don’t have to start from scratch.

My only goal is to help the community

I do think that accurately displaying markdown should be a standard expectation of a finished app. I hope that devs use this as an opportunity to shore up the areas that are lagging, and that they have a set of standards to aim for.

~~I don’t have any Apple things~~

~~Sorry. This is just Android and Web review. If someone would like to see how iOS apps are doing, please reach out and I’ll share how we can work together to include them.~~

Photon, on mobile browser, seems to “snap” to the beginning of each post when scrolling. Is there a way to turn this feature off?

When I changed the default theme I saw someone say I should name the classic theme "AMOLED". Apparently, the theme was so dark to a lot of people that it appeared black! I guess my designer's eye and working on photon for over a year made me not notice this.

The classic theme uses a very dark gray for the main background, and an even darker gray for the sides. There was never any black, except in very very early versions of Photon.

So I'm looking for a new client, specifically mobile, that's FOSS, easy to use, allows for browsing communities on other instances easily (not just searching for instances, but actually viewing the list of instances, etc).

I'm a dev, so happy to put some legwork into it myself. So my question is - technically, is the UI tied to being run on an instance "directly", or could it be detached, electron- or atom-ified and put into an app?

I can do the work, but before starting I'd like to know :⁠-⁠)

EDIT: This is now integrated to Photon as the Neutral theme.

I did this a while ago, when theming was first introduced. I wanted a dark theme that wasn't black, and also not tinted.

{"other":{"black":"#000000","white":"#ffffff"},"primary":{},"zinc":{"700":"#484e57","800":"#373b41","900":"#282a2e","925":"#202225","950":"#1d1f21"},"slate":{}}

TL;DR: nonstandard community and user links should work properly now, when people waste their time by doing [!community@instance.url](https://instance.url/c/community) instead of [!community@instance.url](/c/community@instance.url)

test

I like these colors, as it gives a bit more personality than neutral gray.

But what do you think? If I did make this the default dark theme, I would add presets to the theme page including a "classic" preset.

If you'd like to use this theme right now, here:

{"other":{},"primary":{"100":"#f3f4f6"},"zinc":{"100":"#f3f4f6","300":"#d1d5db","400":"#9ca3af","500":"#6b7280","600":"#4b5563","700":"#374151","800":"#1f2937","900":"#111827","925":"#080C19","950":"#030712"},"slate":{}}

This will be a test post for markdown, as I'm switching to a faster markdown renderer that will allow me to do some cool stuff, like allow expanding images and running my code in markdown.

It might release with v1.31.2.

arguably a bigger update than v1.31, lots of backend changes for better speed

i've been using this command palette a lot because it makes doing everything so fast. let me know if there's any action or link you'd like added, since it's very easy to do.

What's Changed

• feat: add a command palette by @Xyphyn in https://github.com/Xyphyn/photon/pull/364

  • Press / or ctrl + p or right click the photon logo to bring up the command palette
  • Instantly start typing to find a link, or run an action

• design: Make compact mode even more compact

• misc: add infinite scroll to communities too

• code: rewrite how post feeds are handled, improving speed and cleanliness and allowing more opportunities for caching.

• misc: add support for upvoted/downvoted posts and uploaded media in the profile page

• strings: tweak some strings for better clarity

• Vertical postlink layout for mobile by @sevonj in https://github.com/Xyphyn/photon/pull/360

Full Changelog: https://github.com/Xyphyn/photon/compare/v1.31.0-fix.1...v1.31.1-rc.1

I'm working on a command palette for Photon, which will allow you to press ctrl + p or / to open a prompt where you can type and go to a page or a recent post instantly.

Are there any actions or links that you'd want me to add?

This update is currently available on phtn.app, with a tagged release coming soon. Post navigation is down by 65% and returning from posts is instant.

What's Changed

• feat: add infinite scroll

  • You can now scroll down infinitely without clicking next!
  • As a bonus, returning from a post page is now instant.
  • Of course, you can turn it off in settings.
  • A virtual list is also used so that infinite posts can be loaded with no performance impact.

• feat: parse tags from title

  • Tesseract dev and I had the same idea, [tags in brackets] in posts will automatically be converted to a badge/flair. You can click it to search for all posts with that tag in a community.
  • I added options which let you choose flairs to blur posts of or hide.

• tweak link design

• improve smaller screen support

• codebase: move $profile to a derived, immutable store to improve consistency

• i18n: add new languages/update languages

  • Chinese
  • English
  • Estonian
  • French
  • Finnish
  • German
  • Hebrew
  • Portuguese

• Update p.darrennathanael.com photon region by @DarrenOfficial in https://github.com/Xyphyn/photon/pull/350

• Remove empty space left by hideTitle by @sevonj in https://github.com/Xyphyn/photon/pull/352

• docs: Post component comments by @sevonj in https://github.com/Xyphyn/photon/pull/354

Full Changelog: https://github.com/Xyphyn/photon/compare/v1.30.4...v1.31.0-rc.1

I'm working on adding a feature that will convert tags in the title to flairs, which you can add custom filters/rules to.

Hey, I've been working on a few changes to photon that make it a lot faster to open posts and return, and as a result of these changes I can also make infinite scroll work. If you go to this link, Vercel will have commented on the post with a preview link. Those are basically the beta links.

Preview Link

Let me know of any bugs and any changes you'd like!

Current roadmap

• [x] Make this not duplicate posts in memory
• [ ] Make this work on all posts
• [x] Use a virtual list for better render performance

all 0.19.4 features coming soon

One year ago, on June 24, 2023, I saw the migration to Lemmy. I wanted to make something like libreddit, so I decided to mess with Lemmy's API. Lemmy became something I wanted to use daily, so I got to work, and I made the first commit:

I started with something that reused components from another project of mine, Imagi. It looked awful and had no features. But, some people actually started using it, and I was motivated to continue this.

After about a month 0.0.1 was released, with very basic features.

One of the earliest Photon versions

The only thing that's missing from the new navigation layout is in my opinion an easily accessible "Frontpage" button like there was in the old navigation layout. So I made a pull request to re add the Frontpage, Settings and Explore buttons back into the sidebar for easier access.

On ... https://phtn.lemmy.blahaj.zone/

the "random" thread loader runs twice.

I am on a slow rural connection so it may not be noticeable in town.

I go to read the first post, then page gets replaced by different posts.

This does not happen on... https://lemmy.blahaj.zone/

I think there is yet another theme for blahaj, but have not tested it.