sheodoxJul 6, 2023

Introducing Alexandrite for Lemmy, a desktop-first alternative web UI

https://lemmy.world/post/1095076

Introducing Alexandrite for Lemmy, a desktop-first alternative web UI - LemmyWorld

Website [https://alexandrite.app/], community [https://lemmy.world/c/alexandrite], Github [https://github.com/sheodox/alexandrite] I’ve been working on an alternative web UI for Lemmy for a couple weeks now and it’s got enough features I wanted to share it. I love that somehow people have found it despite me never having posted online about it until now (until a couple days ago it was called sx-lemmy, sx being an abbreviation of my username) so you might have seen it in a list already. Alexandrite is a (for the moment) desktop-first Lemmy interface, I primarily use Lemmy on my computer and I wanted a more convenient way to view posts and comments without juggling tabs or losing my place in the feed (with infinite scrolling). It’s still very much in beta, and I have a lot of work to do still, but it’s got most of the basic features. You can view a post and comments in an overlay without losing where you scrolled to: [https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/e465c65b-173a-43c4-9177-109b288df51d.png] [https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/96af075b-d844-40a4-b662-ae12ffaad590.png] [https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/739a274c-a5d2-4ed7-9c83-286837b477ba.png] A non-exhaustive list of things you can do: * view home/community/user/communities feeds * post/comment * subscribe to communities * vote * save posts * search * inbox stuff Noteworthy missing features: * reporting * blocking users/communities * mod tools * image uploading * automatic linkifying of urls/communities/users in comments/posts For those who care, it’s all Sveltekit which is a dream to work with. Alexandrite is the name of the kind of gem in my wife’s wedding ring, it looks cool and changes color in the light.

Show threadbdonvrJul 6, 2023

Oh this looks great! I’d love to host this alongside my instance.

I already do with WefWef - app.thelemmy.club

Maybe something like desktop.thelemmy.club

Is all the action client side?

Voyager for Lemmy

Voyager is a beautiful mobile web client for Lemmy. Enjoy a seamless experience browsing the fediverse.

Show threadsheodox

Thanks!

See my other comment about self hosting, as it’s probably not super easy right now.

The site uses Sveltekit and so far every interaction with Lemmy happens server side, so it’s probably not as easy to host as WefWef. I got partway through implementing image uploading yesterday until I hit a bug (fix just got merged today!) that prevented that, but image uploading is going to happen client side so it doesn’t cause extra server load.

Introducing Alexandrite for Lemmy, a desktop-first alternative web UI - LemmyWorld

Website [https://alexandrite.app/], community [https://lemmy.world/c/alexandrite], Github [https://github.com/sheodox/alexandrite] I’ve been working on an alternative web UI for Lemmy for a couple weeks now and it’s got enough features I wanted to share it. I love that somehow people have found it despite me never having posted online about it until now (until a couple days ago it was called sx-lemmy, sx being an abbreviation of my username) so you might have seen it in a list already. Alexandrite is a (for the moment) desktop-first Lemmy interface, I primarily use Lemmy on my computer and I wanted a more convenient way to view posts and comments without juggling tabs or losing my place in the feed (with infinite scrolling). It’s still very much in beta, and I have a lot of work to do still, but it’s got most of the basic features. You can view a post and comments in an overlay without losing where you scrolled to: [https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/e465c65b-173a-43c4-9177-109b288df51d.png] [https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/96af075b-d844-40a4-b662-ae12ffaad590.png] [https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/739a274c-a5d2-4ed7-9c83-286837b477ba.png] A non-exhaustive list of things you can do: * view home/community/user/communities feeds * post/comment * subscribe to communities * vote * save posts * search * inbox stuff Noteworthy missing features: * reporting * blocking users/communities * mod tools * image uploading * automatic linkifying of urls/communities/users in comments/posts For those who care, it’s all Sveltekit which is a dream to work with. Alexandrite is the name of the kind of gem in my wife’s wedding ring, it looks cool and changes color in the light.

Jul 6, 2023 at 2:23pmWeb
Show threadbdonvrJul 6, 2023

so far every interaction… happens server side

Well that’s not ideal, both resource wise and the fact that this would cause you to run into rate limiting issues very fast

Show threadsheodoxJul 11, 2023
Hey, just wanted to let you know I just updated the site to do everything client side. Haven’t done anything yet about the self hosting instructions though, but thought I’d update you.
Show threadsheodoxJul 29, 2023
Another random reply to an old comment! I’ve got a branch out for self hosting Alexandrite if you happened to be interested in trying it out at all, more info on this post.
Looking for testers! Self hosting support - Lemmy.world

Self hosting support finally (almost)! I have a branch up with self hosting instructions, a Dockerfile, and images published to Github’s container registry. If anyone wanted to help test it out it’s available on this branch [https://github.com/sheodox/alexandrite/tree/self-hosting] (and the PR [https://github.com/sheodox/alexandrite/pull/34]). There are a few configuration options you can change as you wish to disable some of the login page links, change the default instance, and optionally only allow logins to a specific instance. The published image is just slightly out of date since I changed the publish rules, but at the moment it’s only missing some extra validation to check if an instance url is valid. Let me know if you run into any issues or have anything you think I should change or better explain.