Progressing well! We're hoping to have the next TestFlight build out soon.
That's him! He founded Mlem a couple years ago as a pet project and is responsible for basically all of our alpha code. When Lemmy took off, he stepped away from the project for personal reasons largely driven by the scope of the app suddenly exploding from "hobby project" to "production app." He handed ownership of the codebase over to one of the current team members, and it is now maintained collectively by the Mlem Group.
Some of the features that are coming in the next week or two:
- Fully-fledged media viewer for gifs and images
- Marking and hiding read posts
- Guest mode
- Crossposting
- Image upload
Thanks for the download, and I hope you enjoy it! We’re firm believers in the native Swift experience, even though it takes a little longer to develop in
Mlem dev here—couldn’t agree more about Gavin, he’s a fantastic guy. Gave us some helpful tips about getting through App Store review. Massive props to him for getting that app up and running so fast.
The image viewer is our #1 priority right now. To zoom you can tap the image once in the post view--we're working on getting a hotfix out shortly to make that work the intuitive way, where tapping the image in feed opens the quick viewer.
Longer-term, we're working on a much more robust, fully-featured media viewer, but it's a complex piece of code and we want to get it right--it's slated for our next milestone (1.1, targeted Aug 5).
There are a couple smaller reasons, but the big one is that we use NavigationStack to handle our core view navigation--it's a truly monumental improvement over the old NavigationView, and lets us do things like build an iPad version without rewriting all our nav stuff, but it is unfortunately only compatible with iOS 16+.
I know that's probably not a super satisfactory answer, but I'd rather be transparent than spin some PR nonsense at you.
Yes! We will continue using TestFlight to try out our beta features, so if you want the cutting (and maybe buggy) edge of our development, stay on there. If you just want the stable, reliable app, the App Store version is your friend.
We sure will! That's currently slated as a 1.1 feature, so it should be coming shortly after our App Store release
They're doing great work over there too! We saw they just launched--congrats to them!
For what it's worth, we don't like the drama either, and we're hoping that this will be the end of it and we can focus all our energies on what matters: updates!
Haha yeah it's definitely been a bit bumpy, but the core team works really well together and we're optimistic that it's smooth sailing from here on out. We're hoping our next release will restore some of that confidence--it's got some exciting features planned!
It looks like the biggest domain count driver by far is image fetching for link posts, since rendering a website preview involves fetching both the preview image from the linked website and the favicon from Google (favicons account for all those
t1.gstaticcalls). Disabling website previews and the associated image fetching code cut the domain list down to just Lemmy instances. Mastodon appears to proxy image requests through the instance, which prevents that high domain count. Lemmy has recently added that feature, but right now only instances running the very latest Lemmy code perform image proxying.We're looking into adding enhanced privacy features to 2.0; we'll include one to disable fetching favicons and image thumbnails, since favicons especially are a known tracking/fingerprinting vector.