Which lemmy/piefed frontends are there? (programming.dev)

submitted 1 week ago by CoderSupreme@programming.dev to c/fediverse@lemmy.world

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I’m aware of Photon and Alexandrite, but since Alexandrite is now unmaintained, Photon seems to be my only viable option at the moment. I’ve also been searching for an old Reddit–style UI, but so far I haven’t been able to find one that fits the bill.

Does anyone know of any active alternatives, or ways to achieve that classic look with current tools?

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[-] artyom@piefed.social 20 points 1 week ago

Blorp is the only other one that I like.

Don't look at what's in the past. Reddit is disgusting at this point and we should not be trying to clone it. Just like "we" for some reason try to clone Instagram, Xitter, and Facebook instead of drawing inspiration from it, removing the crap, and building new features on top.

[-] ptz@dubvee.org 15 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

AFAIK, Mlmym is the only "old" reddit UI. I'm not sure if it's still maintained or not but the last commit was sometime last year.

Didn't know Alexandrite wasn't maintained anymore. I liked it.

Tesseract is sort-of like "new" reddit circa 2023 but without all the crap. It's Lemmy only.

Voyager is also pretty popular, but not my cup of tea.

Blorp is I think relatively new but looks really nice. Haven't played with it much.

I'm a bit lost beyond those, but you can check out https://lemmyapps.com/ for a mostly up to date directory.

[-] dil@piefed.zip 3 points 1 week ago

I always liked tesseract but had forgotten the name and reinstalled my pc without transferring my browser profile, nice to have it back

[-] OpenStars@discuss.online 2 points 1 week ago

One problem I'm noticing in Voyager is seeing the same identical post over and over and over and over again - and this despite the fact that it can collapse cross-posts together (seems to only work when the author is the same). The PieFed web UI does a much better job of gathering those together, even combining together comments across all of them, although I don't recall whether the Lemmy web UI did this or not. Do you know of any apps that make that easier? Strong bonus if it also supports PieFed too.

[-] ptz@dubvee.org 4 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

The Lemmy API doesn't combine duplicates/crossposts together and requires it to be done client-side by detecting duplicate URLs when calling getPosts() to generate the feed. This means most apps that do roll up crossposts can only do so for ones that come through in the same API fetch. It's possible to roll up crossposts across different fetches, but having done that in Tesseract, it causes more user confusion than just letting it be a duplicate.

I've got a natural bias towards Tesseract because I build it, but it does roll them up both by URL and by title. The latter covers cases where someone posts identical things to different communities that don't use a URL, such as questions to the Ask communities. No bonus points because it still doesn't support Piefed, and it's not looking like that's going to happen any time soon.

[-] OpenStars@discuss.online 4 points 1 week ago

You put a shit ton of effort into it, you have every right to be proud!! 😁

It's a bit sad that Tesseract won't integrate PieFed soon, though it wouldn't be the first Lemmy app to forego that procedure. There's also a number of issues preventing PieFed from taking off as we all hoped, with multiple highly active people either migrating their communities off of it or not switching to it as previously planned. We HOPED that it would reduce tankie dependency, but in practice it doesn't seem to want to be a true "social media" replacement so much as something more akin to Mastodon, and it is actively even if almost silently pushing its own ideology more and more all the time lately.

Otoh, Lemmy development is GLACIALLY slow, plus they likewise push their ideology, and refuse to allow donations solely to code development without putting a heavy (though undisclosed iirc) amount of that towards maintenance costs specifically for lemmy.ml. So it's not like one side is demonstrably superior to the other there, just different flavors of the same - they'll each do as they please, regardless of feedback.

Thank you for all your efforts to make the Threadiverse more usable! :-)

[-] ptz@dubvee.org 3 points 1 week ago

I think Piefed has a workable API now, but the big limitation for me is that all of the components that make up Tess are tightly coupled to Lemmy's type definitions.

To support Piefed, I would need to make a translation layer to build Lemmy-esque objects from Piefed's API responses. That's perfectly doable, but Lemmy's type definitions are also limiting a lot of things I want to do. I've extended a few of them but, really, I need to re-write most of these components to use platform agnostic interfaces that meet my own needs while mapping both Lemmy and Piefed objects to those.

Unfortunately, that's going to take a lot of work that I just don't have time to dedicate to right now. Life has been hectic to say the least.

[-] OpenStars@discuss.online 1 points 1 week ago

I'm sorry to hear that, but it does make sense - the whole Fediverse is like the wild West, and things are barely being "done", much less properly with an eye to elimination of the technical debt, even while people are actively trying to use it.

Keep doing what's fun for you! Especially if that helps with the irl stress. The latter may get worse, as e.g. it looks like the USA is next preparing to take on Cuba as a target - and then either Greenland and/or Canada?

We all gotta find a way to survive somehow...