We just added Alexandrite to the server, it’s an alternative desktop UI for Lemmy created by Sheodox who worked tirelessly to make the necessary changes to we could host it ourselves here. So go to https://a.lemmy.world and have a look!
He continues to update it constantly, you can follow the development on his github page or in his community. If you like what you see and want to support him, why not buy him a coffee? :)
For those who don’t have Lemmy World as their home instance and want to use Alexandrite, either ask your instance admins to add it or go to https://alexandrite.app!
Edit: I should probably have mentioned that Alexandrite is meant for desktop!
Huh, as soon as I went to the link I got banned by the server admin and rate limited?
Rate limits are being tweaked to combat ddos. You might experience some issues while they are being optimised. Apologies
Yeah, I tried to reload the page because it already showed an error.
I did get a successful hit on the web page. It’s good that they are finally tackling the screen width issue. It also comes with auto-reloads as well.
My only complaint is that the items are a bit too tall. It could be shrink down to a more compact space to fit more items per screen-full.
Wow, thank you. I acutally was hoping you were going to add this becasue Alexandrite is the best desktop UI for Lemmy so far.
It also means Lemmy.world is turning into the best instance already because they’re the most user-friendly and customizable one.
Great work!
FYI: I got rated limited on the first link but the second time worked right away. There might be some glitch there.
Rate limits are currently being fine-tuned so yes there may be some issues at the moment while our team sorts things out
Thanks for adding these UIs as an alternative. Especially m.lemmy.world, it feels like a native app.
The m. Is voyager app. You can actually make a shortcut on your phone and it turns into an app.
Using it right now! But since I do, I wonder how (why) this works? What keyword would help me find info about that?
Progressive web apps!
Also an app app now, available in beta.
It’s really great that you are moving so quickly and supporting your community in this way, but I wonder if all these front ends are potentially going to create a bit of a long term maintenance headache? How are we certain that they don’t introduce any new vulnerabilities and how are we staying on top of those when they happen? I worry that each new frontend adds burden to an already small community for a potentially minor practical gain.
Don’t get me wrong, you guys are doing awesome stuff, and I’m consistently impressed with this instance. That’s just the first thing that comes to my head having done software for many years myself.
Maintenance in regards to updates is not an issue. All the extra frontends we added run in docker and are automatically updated twice a day to make sure we are always running the latest stable versions. All apps are using the Lemmy api’s just like the 3rd party apps and should anything break we have ways to contact the developers.
How did you set them up to automatically update? Have you done a write up on how you set these up? Would be great for other admins to be able to do the same
We use docker compose in scripts and crontabs
/scripts/update-alexandrite.sh:
cd /opt/alexandrite docker-compose pull docker-compose down docker-compose up -dThen use crontab -e and add this line:
00 05,00 * * * bash /scripts/update-alexandrite.shSweet thanks, do you have this and scripts to keep the other front ends updated on GitHub somewhere?
Immediate rate limit. Opened home page, pressed communities.
Rate limited.
Rate limits are being tweaked to combat ddos. You might experience some issues while they are being optimised. Apologies
Thank you for your work!
Am I missing smthing? If I open vygr or old I see posts. When I open a.lemmy I can only see a generic post about lemmy nothing else
(dev here) Sorry! The post forgot to mention Alexandrite is meant to be a alternate UI for desktop. There are a lot of issues if you try using it on mobile at the moment, because I haven’t done the work to support it yet. I would keep using whatever you’ve been using on mobile.
Yes I should have mentioned that. I updated my post
maybe it is because it is set by default to local, try clicking on all instead.
I found the arrows that toggle sidebar and setting it to All shows this in android Firefox:
If I close the sidebar all I can see is this
It’s actually more for desktop. I updated my post
Anything that gets nearer to a RES-like experience from Reddit is an absolute plus. This UI is brilliant.
The genius thing about it is the way it fully utilizes the whole width of a display, with the post content appearing in between the list of posts and the sidebar. I haven’t seen another Lemmy/Kbin UI that does this.
It might only be suitable for widescreen desktop use, but it does that one thing very well.
It definitely could use a bit of work on the mobile screen sizes, but it looks very promising!
Hell, I’m a web developer, maybe I’ll try to contribute.
yes, goes well together with Voyager. From app subdomain I route mobile clients to Voyager and desktop to Alexandrite, feels amazing.
I like the UI so much more than the standard Lemmy. This should be the default UI. Hopefully he makes a light version.
I need a light version.
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I assume there’s an API to allow individuals to develop their own front end if they wanted? Is there any documentation to this end?
Yes there’s an API (docs here), but the docs are little more than type definitions right now so it takes a bit of digging to figure out what you’re meant to do. You can look through all the methods on the LemmyHttp section of the docs, and watch the network tab in your browser’s dev tools to figure out which APIs are called.
Yeah there is a lot of push back for full API documentation. I get it, they want to move fast and not have to rebuild thier old CI tool. But being open source its going to stifle development in the long run. I almost started building my own front end for Lemmy a month ago when there was only Jerboa but I didn’t like some of the decisions of the core devs and I didn’t want an ongoing battle to keep a front end up to date when changes are made.
I’m very appreciative to the Lemmy devs and all the app builders but I’m also lazy and perfectionist when it comes to coding in my free time.
I gave it a try and that UI is not for me. I’ll keep using old.lemmy.world
I agree completely.
I should probably have mentioned that Alexandrite is meant for desktop!
I’m so confused by this.
As soon as I click on a link I get rate limited. That may need to get adjusted.
Ah. Will look into that.
Does this still happen?
Yep, just happened to me too.
I just had it happen
Edit: but now I can use it
I want to add my praise to the heap.
I’m pretty happy with Voyager on mobile, but when writing something, it’s not ideal.
The generic Lemmy UI is more than OK on desktop, but the lack of error code reporting to the user was frustrating, at times I tried to resubmit posts and comments and the spinning Submit button just kept on going, for some communities in particular. So I stopped posting in these communities.
Now, with Alexandrite, I feel like this is a good UI that I really like. And I love that you write out the background error message for why posting or commenting fails!
Really nice job!
Great stuff! I’ve been using Alexandrite for the last few weeks and it’s become my default UI. I love that you can pin the navigation bar open and favourite communities (click on the icon to star it).
Looks fantastic!!
Wow it looks amazing!!
This is excellent news :) I’ve been using Alexandrite since u/sheodox announced it so I’m very pleased to see it added as a dedicated front end for .world :)
