I'm working on a new filtering engine that I think will be like nothing you've seen yet.

Basic overview:

• There will be a list of filters you can browse
  • E.g. US Politics
• You select the filter list(s) you are interested in
• The filter list will receive updates.
  • Say a new political event happens and a new name floods the news. The list can be updated dynamically to include the new name without you having to do anything.

For those of you that are tech savvy:

• Filter lists will live on GitHub
• You can fork an existing filter list.
• You can create/host your own filter list for other Blorp users.
• You can open pull requests for existing filter lists.
• There will be some tools within Blorp to debug your filter list

Other notes:

• I don't plan on letting you build these filter list from within the app. They are far too complex to edit easily within the app.
• But that complexity means you can do far more than other apps
  • Block a post IF it mentions a US state (e.g. "Texas") AND it mentions "shooting"
  • Block a post IF it mentions "ICE" AND it mentions ("detention" OR "deport")
  • Block a post IF it's by a specific list of users AND it mentions a specific word
• The goal is to create more collaboration between users and make it easier to cut through all the noise on Lemmy and PieFed

How are you currently using filtering in Blorp, Voyager, etc?

• What type of content are you currently trying to block?
• Are your filters very unique to you, or something that could be shared as a list?

I had some mixed thoughts on Blorp that I wanted to share so I'll just put them all in this post.

Firstly regarding Peertube embeds. I'm not sure if this is something you can change, but in the iOS app the embeds use the Peertube player UI instead of iOS built in player interface. This only happens with the app, the web version uses the iOS UI. The Peertube player is a bit to convoluted for a phone so it would be nice to use the iOS one.

It would also be nice if you could add an accessibility text when posting an image. If this is implemented it would be nice if it functioned like in Photon, were you can add an alt text to links as well, so it works with external media.

A bug I noticed is after I moderate more communities the list on the startpage keeps jumping from showing the new communities and not showing them. This is on Piefed, but I don't know if it's specific to it and happens on the app and the web version.

When clicking the share button it would be nice if there was an option to get a link to the post/comment on the instance where it was posted originally instead of a Blorp link. Also I noticed that in the web version there is the option to "Share link to comment" that doesn't seem to do anything.

The favicon of website sometimes is the Blorp logo, sometime the favicon of the instance. Be nice if this was consistent.

The lightbox feed has been great so far, however when I use it I just want to see image posts not the thumbnails of articles, so it would be nice if there was a setting to filter these out.

One problem I see with it is that there is no way to unblur a NSFW image without opening the lightbox feed, which is inconvenient if you want to find something in the image mentioned in the comments.

When saving a post the little pink icon appears and I assumed that pressing it would unsave the post. This isn't really a problem, but it would make the UI more intuitive IMO.

I also noticed a bug were some long usernames extend out of the field when hovering over the user eg https://blorpblorp.xyz/inbox/c/microblogmemes@lemmy.world/posts/https%3A%2F%2Fpiefed.zip%2Fpost%2F491912/comments/1533646

Another thing I’d love to see in Blorp is the ability to automatically set the headline at an article as the post title

I was just trying to edit this post with the app and I got an error “Unexpected error status code 422”

That's gonna be it, I know this is a bunch of stuff at once but I just wanted to get these thoughts out

As development on Arctic seems to have halted, Blorp seems like a promising alternative for its Piefed support, but could use additional quality of life features. Among the most important of these from Arctic is additional granularity in post filtering, ensuring that posts one doesn't want to see can be excluded without impacting the visibility of other posts.

Beyond just filtering keywords, options to apply distinct keyword filtering for post titles, content, URL, OP username, and community name would allow users to preemptively exclude content they aren't interested in. Furthermore, via regex expressions, terms can be combined to increase efficiency and maximize the scope of the filters.

Here's an example of how Arctic handles it, with several of my own regex filters.

Support for PieFed flairs is currently being tested on https://blorpblorp.xyz/. You must select a PieFed instance that’s already using PieFed v1.2 (e.g. PieFed.social). You can visit !movies@piefed.social, which already uses flairs.

This functionality will take a couple weeks to roll out to the iOS and Android apps. You feedback on the web version would be helpful, thanks!

v1.9.22 in production

• feat: progressive load high res img in post feed #166
• refactor: update env vars to support multiple default instances #178
• refactor: shrink post screen comment mobile border size #163
• feat: tune seo #181
• feat: add user and community mentions to tiptap #165
• fix: piefed save user #183

v1.9.23 in beta

• feat: easter eggs, can you find them 👀
• fix: piefed community featured posts #191
• feat: small post cards #188
• feat: show user sidebar on mobile, closes #192
• fix: piefed pagination #194

Please if you have a moment, either a Star on GitHub or an app review is the best way to support Blorp ❤️

Hey fellow Blorpers.. Blorpee’s? Idk.

Enjoying this app so far, but would like to request 2 features that I think would benefit a lot of users.

1- A compact view for posts.

2- The ability to organise the subscribed sidebar communities by name.

Compact post view is arguably more important IMO, and would definitely cement this as my daily driver for Piefed.

Regardless, Thanks for your hard work! Any consideration would be appreciated!

I'm changing how I handle releases a little. I'm going to have releases sit in beta for 1 week, then push them to iOS and Google Play. Anything in beta is done being worked on, but if anyone identifies any critical issues, please let me know before that version makes it to prod.

v1.9.21 in production

• Show each comment's score on user profile
• Make markdown link not inclusive
• Toolbar disappearing on mobile pull to refresh
• [Feature Request] Left handed mode #159
• Left sidebar doesn't update on subscribe/unsubscribe without page refresh #156
• Can only feature your own posts #154
• Share user not working on web #153
• unable to download images on desktop #111
• Double tap to like post/comment #100

v1.9.22 in beta

• feat: progressive load high res img in post feed https://github.com/Blorp-Labs/blorp/pull/166
• refactor: update env vars to support multiple default instances https://github.com/Blorp-Labs/blorp/pull/178
• refactor: shrink post screen comment mobile border size https://github.com/Blorp-Labs/blorp/pull/163
• feat: tune seo https://github.com/Blorp-Labs/blorp/pull/181
• feat: add user and community mentions to tiptap https://github.com/Blorp-Labs/blorp/pull/165
• fix: piefed save user https://github.com/Blorp-Labs/blorp/pull/183

Also!

If you haven't noticed, blorpblorp.xyz is like alpha. It get's releases before beta.

I mean i see links in the posts (if that posts have links) but tapping doesn't do anything.

Is it just me or...?