cross-posted from: https://dubvee.org/post/1757374

1.4.13

Docker Tags

• ghcr.io/asimons04/tesseract:1.4.13
• ghcr.io/asimons04/tesseract:v1.4.13
• ghcr.io/asimons04/tesseract:latest

Bugfixes

• [0ed97991] Don't badge-ify hashtags if the hashtag linkify option is disabled
• [ce5a310a] Make markdown text reactive (and re-run pre-processing step) to changes to the enable/disable hashtag setting.
• [704e2d78] When clicking the user/community links in the modal, close the modal when navigating to the target (previously modal stayed open)

Enhancements

• [3b8ef653] Update banner when viewing a post on a remote instance to use more concise verbiage and add an extra button to link to the post's canonical instance.
• [ec8c4bfe] User and Community links are now a elements rather than button. Allows middle-clicking or right-click-> open in new tab to immediately open the profile/community in a new tab without having to click through the modal. Regular clicks still open the modal.

New Feature: Synthetic View Modes

Under the hood, there are still only two main types of view: Card and Compact

However, Compact view is affected by several options which can be combined to create different view styles.

The "compact/card" switcher button has been replaced with a selector menu to select from one of 6 views:

1. Card: The flagship Tesseract post view. Posts are shown as cards with all the media embed bells and whistles. Post body preview is set to 240 characters.

2. Compact: The classic "compact" view as of 1.4.12. Feed margins are present, post images are thumbnails, the post body preview is 240 characters, and no media is embedded unless the post is expanded into card view.

3. Wide Compact: Same as "compact" but without the feed margins. Posts span the full width of the display. Clicking the thumbnail image or the "expand" button in the post action bar will expand the post into card view.

4. More Compact: Same as "wide compact" except the body preview length is set to zero and can be expanded.

5. Ultra Compact: Same as "wide compact" except the thumbnails and the post body are hidden. Post body cannot be expanded, and you will need to click into the post to see it. Post can be expanded to card view only with the "expand" button in the post action bar. Expanding into card view does not reveal the post body, only the thumbnail image (if present). If the post is a media post, the embed will be available (either in full or click-to-play depending on settings)

6. Reader: Same as "wide compact" except the entire post body is shown (up to 10,000 characters).

More views may be added along the way, but for now, those should cover more use cases without having to manually fiddle with the various options.

I'm really liking the "Reader" mode, myself.

There was like 8 prereleases for this because i kept changing stuff. This is actually going to be from v1.31.1 and v1.31.2.

Biggest changes

Command palette

• 
• Press / or ctrl + p and start typing to instantly go to a page, switch themes, switch accounts, etc.

Theming changes

• You can now have multiple presets for themes, and there are 5 default presets. (Default, Classic, AMOLED, Catppuccin, Lightly)
• Admins can set their own default theme for photon with PUBLIC_THEME.

New markdown renderer

• Photon now uses svelte-markdown for markdown rendering, which lets me use custom components for markdown.
• Instead of only style changes, I can run actual code, meaning images can be made expandable and codeblocks can be copyable.

Lots of languages

• There are a ton of languages thanks to the community.
• English
• Hebrew
• Bulgarian
• Chinese
• Dutch
• Estonian
• Finnish
• French
• German
• Japanese
• Polish
• Portuguese

Minor features

• New "link actions" menu
  • This will have options for archive sites to bypass paywalls, etc.
  • Media bias action was moved next to here, or in here depending on your selected post style.
• Allow uploading multiple images at a time
• Select menus use my own components now, making them more powerful
• Add infinite scroll to communities too
• Add uploaded media/voted posts in your profile page
• Using my own service worker now, so caches should work properly

Other stuff

• Use sharper icons for readability

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/18684855

Hey everyone, Thunder v0.5.0 is finally here! This release cycle took a quite a bit of time, but introduces a lot of new features, changes, and fixes which should make for a even better Thunder experience. If you have any suggestions or feedback, feel free to discuss it in the Thunder community or on GitHub.

If you're enjoying Thunder and would like to show some support, star this project on GitHub! This helps gain visibility for the project and allows more contributors to help with the continued development of Thunder. If you'd like to show some appreciation, here is a post with details on how to donate to the active contributors of Thunder.

Important: Your feed settings (default feed type and sort) will now be based on your Lemmy account settings. The previous feed settings will now ONLY apply to guest accounts. As such, you may have to re-configure your default feed type and default sort type if you were previously using the in-app settings.

Now onto the update notes. This update brings a few major features:

🎉 New Features

• The inbox page has been completely re-written with an updated design to more closely align with Material 3 design guidelines. There's also been a number of fixes to support quick actions within the inbox page (e.g., voting, saving, etc).
• Thunder now respects more of your Lemmy account settings including your default feed/sort settings. You can update your display name, bio, email, and much more in the new Account Settings page. You can also quickly switch between different accounts to modify your Lemmy settings across all your authenticated accounts.
• Additional Lemmy 0.19.x features have been added to Thunder including the ability to hide posts, custom thumbnail support, site content warnings, and more. We are still continuously working on bringing Thunder up to feature-parity with Lemmy, so let us know what features you would like to see.
• Custom user notes/labels are now available in Thunder! This will allow you to add any custom notes to a given user. You can add user labels from the settings page via Settings -> User Labels. Alternatively, you can add labels through the action sheets by long pressing on a given comment and selecting User -> Add User Label.

ℹ General

• The create/edit button for posts and comments have been moved to the markdown toolbar. This should hopefully make it more accessible for one-handed use.
• URL filtering has been added to keyword filters. Simply add a new keyword filter with a URL, and it should be hidden from view.
• Link sharing has been improved to support additional media/external links.

And much much more. I can't go through all the changes in the changelog, but for those who are curious, feel free to check out the full changelog below.

We have a Matrix space if you would like to join in on discussions: https://matrix.to/#/#thunderapp:matrix.org

---

Additions

• Refactor inbox page by hjiangsu
• Add additional account settings by hjiangsu
• Add support for custom user labels by micahmo
• Add support for hiding posts by micahmo
• Add ability to create links to app settings by micahmo
• Add account birthday indicator to users by micahmo
• Add ability to import/export local app database by micahmo
• Add post/comment language metadata by micahmo
• Add community stats for community visibility/local subscribers by micahmo
• Add ability to create block quote from selection when commenting by micahmo
• Add ability to re-order user accounts by micahmo
• Add ability to upload multiple images at a time for a post/comment by hjiangsu
• Add support for site content warnings by micahmo
• Add support for custom thumbnails in posts by micahmo
• Add ability to sort inbox by ggichure
• Add ability to view post as a different user by micahmo
• [Experimental] Add debug setting to customize image dimension timeout value by hjiangsu
• [Experimental] Add new experimental post page by hjiangsu

Changes

• Extend keyword filters to URLs by hjiangsu
• Remove page scroll animation when switching between bottom navigation items by hjiangsu
• Decrease layout jank originating from images within comments, and improve image error states by micahmo
• Disable account switching when editing post/comment by micahmo
• Defer loading image dimensions when opening image preview by micahmo
• Improve link sharing for images/video URLs by micahmo
• Show placeholder icon for posts without thumbnails by micahmo
• Allow snackbars to be closed on action by micahmo
• Immediately remove blocked users/communities from feed, disable ability to block self by micahmo
• Use community/user display names globally by micahmo
• Show community/user sort type on community/user headers by micahmo
• Use user/community format styling to cross-posts by micahmo
• Fallback to opening non-Lemmy instances in browser by micahmo
• Improve feedback when subscribing/unsubscribing to community by hjiangsu
• Move create/edit post button into markdown toolbar by micahmo
• Move create/edit comment button into markdown toolbar by micahmo
• Show voting when hidden scores are enabled by hjiangsu
• Add option to navigate to user's instance from post actions by micahmo
• Disable "Subscriptions" sort type option for guest accounts by micahmo
• Remove images from push notifications, improve UnifiedPush logic by micahmo

Fixes

• Fix table column markdown alignment by hjiangsu
• Fix mark post as read when previewing media on 0.19.4 by hjiangsu
• Fix sidebar lag when subscribed to a large amount of communities by hjiangsu
• Fix superscript/subscript parsing edge cases by micahmo
• Fix image overflow when rendering inside a spoiler tag by micahmo
• Fix issue where optimistic voting would not reflect upvotes/downvotes properly by micahmo
• Fix post text preview showing raw markdown by hjiangsu
• Fix snackbar positioning when opening/dismissing keyboard by micahmo
• Fix labeling and minor semantics by micahmo
• Fix text field spell check causing exception on ** text by hjiangsu
• Fix minor typo in 'Change Password' page by wadamT
• Fix semantics for link information by hjiangsu
• Fix share text post by micahmo
• Fix image proxy handling by hjiangsu
• Fix for markdown toolbar not showing above system keyboard by hjiangsu
• Fix dim read posts setting not being applied for card view by hjiangsu

Misc

• Fix macOS build errors by hjiangsu
• Remove javaToolchain binaries by hjiangsu
• Remove push package Android dependency by hjiangsu
• Update PR template by hjiangsu
• Update instances by github-actions
• Update translations from Weblate by hjiangsu
• Update Turkish localizations by mikropsoft
• Migrate anonymous instances to database by micahmo
• Minor under-the-hood feed related changes by hjiangsu
• Improve parsing of video speed setting by micahmo
• Move experimental push notifications under experimental flag by micahmo
• Add more push notifications debugging by micahmo
• Migrate draft storage to local database by micahmo

New Contributors

• wadamT made their first contribution

Pretty much the title. Are there any apps with a "schedule post" feature?

Desktop interfaces and web apps are fine too, perhaps even preferred in this case.

I would find this useful, as I often find several things to post to a given community at once, but would prefer space them out a bit so as not to spam a particular community.

Could also be useful for posting weekly discussion threads, etc.

This is applicable to almost any piece of software with text in it. When starting your new app, you should make sure you are using a separate language file for the strings in your app. This makes text reusable, and you can change it all in one place.

Once your app gains a community, if you did this, you can also get translators!

With Photon i made the massive mistake of hardcoding everything up until the app became massive, and my PR for un-hardcoding all the strings looks like this:

It was worth it though! Because the community has translated it into 11 languages!

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/18444196

What are the particular tools or features that you must want to see in an app for moderating? Is it different on mobile from desktop? Let me know and I'll compile a list to help mods choose the app best suited to their needs!

See the "New Features -> Link Previews" section below for descriptions of the screenshot.

• Full Changelog
• Docker Tags:
  • ghcr.io/asimons04/tesseract:1.4.7
  • ghcr.io/asimons04/tesseract:v1.4.7
  • ghcr.io/asimons04/tesseract:latest

Changelog is pretty long this time, so use the link above for the full details. Only the highlights will be covered here.

Bugfixes, Tweaks, and Enhancements

Bugfixes / Tweaks

• [Crossposts] Text-wrapped community names in crosspost list (typically when on mobile) no longer incorrectly center-justify themsleves
• [UI] Fixed z-index for alternate source selector in /profile/user section to prevent it from showing over top of the nav bars when scrolling up
• [Hashtags] Fixed regex pattern for hashtag detection so it should now fully ignore any inside code blocks or inline code ticks.

Enhancements

• Brought Back the Discrete Listing Type / Sort Dropdowns: Based on feedback from users, I've brought back the discrete dropdowns in the nav bar for choosing the listing and sort options (they had been moved into the quick settings dropdown menu).
• Quick Settings is now a Modal: The dropdown menu was becoming too cumbersome from a UX and maintenance perspective, so it was moved into a modal. The button for it was also moved to the right side of the navbar rather than the left.
• Removed Context-Aware Search Button on Mobile: The context aware search (which will search the site, community, or currently-viewed profile depending on where you are) button has been removed on mobile to reduce clutter. Mobile users will need to use the main "Search" button in the main navbar and select the appropriate filter options.
• Deprecated Support for /c/ and /u/ User and Community Links: Those formats will no longer be turned into links automatically and are discouraged. The preferred way to link a user in markdown areas is @[email protected] and, for communities, it's [[email protected]](/c/[email protected]).
• Community Modals Now Work With "Unknown" Communities: The community modal has been extended to resolve the community prior to fetching it so that unknown communities can be resolved transparently when clicked. Unauthenticated/guest users will receive an error if clicking a community link that the instance does not "know" about (resolveObject is an authentiated call).
• Misc: Various UI tweaks/polish where things weren't exactly uniform (modal action buttons, etc).
• Misc: Added Quick Settings button to toolbar on post pages
• Post Titles in Feed/Profiles: Fixed quirkiness with post titles. Can now middle-click post titles to open in new tab again as well as right-click to copy link (turned them back from buttons into links but keeping the 'button' behavior)

New Features

Link Previews

Under Settings -> General is a new option called "Preview Links in Modal". This is enabled by default but can be disabled. It is also under the quick options.

Clicking markdown links (in post body, comments, sidebars, etc) will do a server-side metadata fetch and render a preview. "Internal" links that load in Tesseract will not preview and simply use the user's "open links in new tab" preference.

The preview includes:

• Link metadata if available (thumbnail image, embed video, description, title)
• Alternate source selector
• MBFC report (if available)
• If link is to a supported media type (YT, Invidious, Piped, Soundcloud, Bandcamp, Spotify, Odysee, PeerTube, etc), will show the media as an embed
• If metadata description contains links, they will preview in the same modal, and a "back" button will be enabled to return you to the previous preview.

e.g. If someone drops a bare Youtube link, it will render in the modal using your preferred YouTube frontend. Same for a Spotify, Bandcamp, etc link. The link is processed through the same rendering chain as posts, so any supported media should render as if it were posted to the feed.

It also has the alternate source selector and the MBFC plugin tied in, so a news article link in the comments can be vetted for credibility, previewed, and followed.

Post links are not tied into this since the post itself acts as the preview / renderer. This can be implemented, and easily, but it seems pointless to me. If I get feedback saying it should handle the main posts links through that, then I can enable it or at least make an option to.

Image Descriptions: The post image demonstrates the preview modal that's loaded when clicking the raw Youtube link in the comment shown above. The second image shows the preview for a news link posted in the comments of another post.

Badge-ified Community and User Links and Hashtags

Community and user links in post and comment bodies are now badge-ified and load the community or profile modals upon click (versus the old behavior of being a dumb link to the profile/community pages).

Currently, user links are blue, and community links are orange.

Hashtags are now converted into badges/flairs and are yellow.

Anyone know what happened with Raccoon for lemmy? I use Obsidian to download and update the app from Github but now it tells me there's an error when I try to update it. I tried checking the Github page and I get an error there saying the website doesn't exist.

Amazingly, Photon and Alexandrite started on the same day, June 24.

Top left: Voyager

Bottom right: Photon

Top right: Alexandrite

Feature: Alternate Source Selector

Implementation Difficulty: Easy

Live Example: https://tesseract.dubvee.org/c/[email protected] (The "link" icon to the left of the post's URL.)

Rationale: I'm quite annoyed with people whining "pAyWallED!" in news post comments, and this is Tesseract's way of addressing that (for users of that UI, anyway)

Description:

On posts with links (that aren't images, audio, video, Youtube, or other media), a dropdown menu is added with links to alternate sources.

Each one will search for the URL in the selected archive provider (currently Ghost Archive, Archive Today, 12ft.io) or Ground News (new in 1.4.5).

Lemmy-UI kind of does this, but completely ass-backwards (only during post creation to set the post link; I'll spare you my spiel about how that's a horrible vector for misinformation).

On Youtube-like posts (YT, Invidious, or Piped), the options are changed to go to the canonical YT link, your preferred Invidious instance, or your preferred Piped instance, but that's just a secondary (but still nice) feature of that component.

Would love to see something like this more widely adopted and am more than happy to answer any implementation questions.

Updated! Updates are shown in quote text like this. Some scores are updated following app updates.

An Apps Experiment

Introduction

This is an experiment I performed out of curiosity, and I have a few big disclaimers at the bottom. Basically, I've seen a lot of comments recently about one app or another not displaying something right. Lemmy has been around for a while now and can no longer be considered an experimental platform.

Lemmy and the apps that people use to access the platform have become an important part of people’s lives. Whether you are checking the app weekly or daily, and whether you use it to stay up on the news or to stay connected to your hobby, it’s important that it works. I hope that this helps people to see the extent of the challenge, and encourages developers to improve their apps, too.

How I did it

I wanted to investigate objectively how accurately each app displays text of posts and comments using the standard Lemmy markdown. Markdown is a standard part of the Lemmy platform, but not all apps handle it the same. It is basically what gives text useful formatting.

I used the latest release of each app, but did not include pre-releases. I only included apps that have released an update in the last 6 months, which should include most apps in active development. ~~I was unable to test iOS-exclusive apps, so they are not included either. In all, 16 apps met the inclusion criteria.~~

I also added Eternity, which is in active development, although it has not had a recent update. I was able to include several iOS apps thanks to testing from @[email protected] – Thanks, Jordan! This made for 20 apps that were tested.

Each app was rated in 5 categories: Text, Format, Spoilers, Links, and Images. I chose these mostly based on the wonderful Markdown Guide from @[email protected], which was posted about a year ago in [email protected] (here).

I checked whether each app correctly displayed each category, then took the overall average. Each category was weighted equally. Text includes italic, bold, strong, strikethrough, superscript, and subscript. Format includes block quotes, lists, code (block and inline), tables, and dividers. Spoilers includes display of hidden, expandable spoilers. Links includes external links, username links, and community links. Images included embedded images, image references, and inline images.

Thanks to input from others, I also added a test to see if lemmy hyperlinks opened in-app. There was a problem with using the SFFA Community Guide that caused some apps to be essentially penalized twice because there was formatting inside formatting, so I created this TEST POST to more clearly and fairly measure each app.

In each case, I checked whether the display was correct based on the rules for Lemmy Markdown, and consistent with the author’s intent. In cases where the app recognized the tag correctly but did not display it accurately, that was treated as a fail.

Results

Out of a possible perfect 10, 7 apps displayed all markdown correctly:

Alexandrite - 10.0

Connect - 10.0

Jerboa (Official Android client) - 10.0

Photon - 10.0

Quiblr - 10.0

Summit - 10.0

Voyager - 10.0

Arctic - 9.3

Interstellar - 9.1

Lemmuy-UI - 9.0

Thunder - 8.9

Tesseract - 8.6

mlmym - 8.0

Racoon - 7.6

Boost - 7.3

Eternity - 7.0

Lemmios - 6.9

Sync - 6.9

Lemmynade - 6.1

Avelon - 5.7

More details of testing here

Disclaimers

Disclaimers

I Love Lemmy Apps (and their devs)

Lemmy apps devs work very hard, and invest a lot in the platform. Lemmy is better because they are doing the work that they do. Like, a LOT better. Everyone who uses the platform has to access it through one app or another. Apps are the face of the entire platform. Whether an app is a FOSS passion project, underwritten by a grant, or generating income through sales or ads, no one is getting rich by making their app. It is for the benefit of the community.

This is not meant to be a rating of the quality or functionality of any app. An app may have a high rating here but be missing other features that users want, or users may love an app that has a lower rating. This is just about how well apps handle markdown.

This is pretty unscientific

You’ll see my methodology above. I’m not a scientist. There is probably a much better way to do this, and I probably have biases in terms of how I went about it. I think it’s interesting and probably has some valuable information. If you think it’s interesting, let me know. If you think of a better way, PM me and I’d be happy to share what I have so you don’t have to start from scratch.

My only goal is to help the community

I do think that accurately displaying markdown should be a standard expectation of a finished app. I hope that devs use this as an opportunity to shore up the areas that are lagging, and that they have a set of standards to aim for.

~~I don’t have any Apple things~~

~~Sorry. This is just Android and Web review. If someone would like to see how iOS apps are doing, please reach out and I’ll share how we can work together to include them.~~

Do any Lemmy apps have a "hide read posts" toggle on the main page, rather than buried deep in the settings?

Cross posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/17743645

Cross posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/17478363

Hi Lemmy! I've just uploaded a new beta version that adds support for Lemmy 0.19.4 features, this is the changelog:

• Hide posts: Individual posts can be hidden now. There is Show hidden toggle on the toolbar menu (Lemmy 0.19.4)
• View previously uploaded images on your profile page, Uploads tab (Lemmy 0.19.4)
• Add custom thumbnail when creating a link post (Lemmy 0.19.4)
• Show mod/admin indicators next to usernames in posts and comments
• Fixed mark as read on scroll not working on some instances
• Bug fixes and improvements

Thanks for using Lemmy. You're the best!

This update is currently available on phtn.app, with a tagged release coming soon. Post navigation is down by 65% and returning from posts is instant.

What's Changed

• feat: add infinite scroll

  • You can now scroll down infinitely without clicking next!
  • As a bonus, returning from a post page is now instant.
  • Of course, you can turn it off in settings.
  • A virtual list is also used so that infinite posts can be loaded with no performance impact.

• feat: parse tags from title

  • Tesseract dev and I had the same idea, [tags in brackets] in posts will automatically be converted to a badge/flair. You can click it to search for all posts with that tag in a community.
  • I added options which let you choose flairs to blur posts of or hide.

• tweak link design

• improve smaller screen support

• codebase: move $profile to a derived, immutable store to improve consistency

• i18n: add new languages/update languages

  • Chinese
  • English
  • Estonian
  • French
  • Finnish
  • German
  • Hebrew
  • Portuguese

• Update p.darrennathanael.com photon region by @DarrenOfficial in https://github.com/Xyphyn/photon/pull/350

• Remove empty space left by hideTitle by @sevonj in https://github.com/Xyphyn/photon/pull/352

• docs: Post component comments by @sevonj in https://github.com/Xyphyn/photon/pull/354

Full Changelog: https://github.com/Xyphyn/photon/compare/v1.30.4...v1.31.0-rc.1

cross-posted from: https://dubvee.org/post/1463905

1.4.1 is mostly a bugfix / under-the-hood release, though there are some new things as well as several refinements to old things (see Misc Changes below).

This is the first of a few releases that's going to focus on addressing some feedback I've gotten that basically boils down to "too many buttons". I agree with that completely, and this release eliminates at least one of them.

Say Goodbye to 'Community Menu' and Hello to Community Modals

The "Community" menu button on posts has been completely removed, and all of its features (and more) have been moved to the newly created Community profile modal. When you click on the community name in the post header, instead of being taken to the /c/ community page, it brings up a modal with the community icon, banner, description, moderators, and a list of action buttons. It does for community links what the user profile modal did for user links in the last release.

Another benefit to this is allowing access to the community details / sidebar info while on mobile. It used to have that ability, but it was ugly and kludged on, so I removed it several versions ago. Now it's available again, and implemented in a way I like.

Post Flairs

There's a new user option, enabled by default, that will extract any [tag] items from post titles and convert them into flair badges. Anything in [] in the post title will be converted into a flair tag, and the [whatever] removed from the displayed title.

Clicking a flair badge will perform a prepared search for other posts with the same flair (e.g. search?type=Posts&q=[tag]). They work more or less the same as hashtags do (if you have those enabled).

This had been half-implemented in a branch for some time now, but I wasn't sure if other front-ends were handling them in a similar way. Saw an post from the Photon dev saying they're adding them, and it's compatible with my implementation, so figured it was time to dust off that branch and merge it in.

It also supports nested flairs: if there are multiple, comma-delimited words in the brackets, each one will be applied as a flair.

Debug view showing original post title for the above:

1.4.1 Changelog

Infrastructure

• Update SvelteKit from 1 to 2 and update underlying dependencies
• Update other project dependencies to latest versions
• Update NodeJS from 20 to 22
• Update lemmy-js-client to 0.19.4 so latest features can be utilized.
• Removed svelte/adapter-auto and only use Node adapter.
• Remove some discrete, one-off logic and replace with shared/standardized components

Bugfixes

• Fixed modlog action menus clipping
• Fixed reactivity and blocked/unblocked status on profile modals and user pages. Added a call to getSite after blocking/unblocking to update person blocks list.
• Fix mobile reflow in modlog
• Fixed bug with non-default instance not showing site icon/banner correctly
• Fixed bug with re-authenticating to the first profile (index 0 was getting ignored and creating a new profile vs reauthorizing)
• Fix heading/icon in "Create" menu not being properly justified
• Fixed bug when inline images are disabled, the link isn't shown
• Fixed bug when refreshing profile page, sometimes the wrong comment data would be shown in the edit of another comment (added index to 'each' iterator)
• Fixed bug where setting the guest instance required clicking it twice to update the site info / logos.

New Feature: Community Profile Modals

When clicking on a community in the feed, instead of taking you directly to the /c/ community page, a modal will pop up with relevant options for the community. Works the same way as the user profile modal.

• Browse Community
• Create Post
• Modlog
• Favorite/Unfavorite Community
• Add/remove community to group
• Subscribe/Unsubscribe
• Block / Unblock Community
• View Community Details
• View Community Moderators (click the mod username entries to bring up their profile modal + options)
• Zoom in on the community icon

Misc Changes

• Removed Fediseer badge option for posts (rarely used and Fediseer is accessible via Instance menu and from instances page)

  • I'm assuming rarely used. I don't (and won't) have any kind of telemetry, but from the instances I have seen running Tesseract in the wild, none have had those badges enabled.

• Removed the "Community" menu from posts; all of those options are now available in the Community Profile modal (access by clicking the community name in the post heading)

  • Also allows accessing these options from comments (such as on profile pages) which normally do not have the "Community" menus.
  • The option "More from {user} in {community} has been moved to the post action menu.

• Removed "Block {user}" from post action menu; access it from the user profile modal by clickin the user's name in the post/comment header.

• Changed the button layout in the User Profile modal.

  • "View User on Their Home Instance" button has been shrunk to just a "Home" icon and is in the same row as "Go to Profile"
  • Added a new, small button (also inline with "Go to Profile") that will open the profile in a new tab/window
  • Same as above, but for user modlog
  • Shrunk "Copy Lemmyverse Link" button to just a "Share" icon button, moved inline with "Search for Alts" button.
  • Added new button to copy the actor ID (rather than Lemmyverse link). It is the "Link" icon next to the Lemmyverse button
  • Block User button now fully reactive

• Add dark/light theme switcher to sidebar footer (near logo/version and Lemmy/Matrix/Github buttons)

• Removed background on image zoom toolbar

• SettingEditArray component is now filterable and can accept a comma-delimited list of entries

• De-cluttered main menu (top right).

  • Removed User Settings Button
  • Removed App Settings Button
  • Added "Settings" button to go to /settings, moved to old "User Settings" slot
  • Moved "Manage Accounts" out of profile submenu and into main menu

• Added user profile settings to /settings in addition to the application settings

  • Still accessible from Profile->Settings

• Slight updates to admin panel

  • Changed layout of tagline editor
  • Taglines are now previewed as markdown (as they would be elsewhere)
  • Federation block/allow list configuration now uses the SettingEditArray component rather than being a discrete editor.

---

Get Tesseract

• Hosted Instance: Unlocked to allow login to any Lemmy instance
• Github
• Changelog
• Docs
• Matrix Support
• Lemmy Community
• Docker: ghcr.io/asimons04/tesseract:v1.4.1 (Should have images for amd64 and arm64 now that the Github actions are fixed)
  • If the Github actions fail to build, you can use the alternate tag ghcr.io/asimons04/tesseract:1.4.1 which is the one I push manually for QA on the hosted instance. Note that it's only amd64, though.

Is there a Lemmy app that has the ability to download (via WiFi) a certain number of posts from predefined communities to be able to read them on the go without using any data?

Basically, I'm looking for a Lemmy equivalent to the offline Reader for Reddit

cross-posted from: https://dubvee.org/post/1381314

Changelog for 1.4.x Series (Intrepid)

1.4.0

This is the first release which completely drops "legacy" support for 0.18.x and below. The minimum required API level is now 0.19.3 (though it will work with any 0.19.x series, there will be broken features that require 0.19.3).

None of the 0.19.4 features are implemented yet. Updating my instance to 0.19.4 is not on my priority list at the moment, though I really wished the media listing was present when I added the new media handling stuff. :sigh:

I'll probably be working on the 0.19.4 features sometime soon as I would like to finish what I had in mind for the media handling, and 0.19.4 provides the missing piece.

Anyway, here's what's new and improved:

New Features

Zoomable Images

Most images are now zoomable: post images, user/site/community avatars, images posted in comments, etc.

All the pan/zoom libraries I tried suuuuuuucked, so I ended up rolling my own from scratch. The pinch zoom isn't quite where I want it, but it's a start. If anyone wants to contribute some code for improving that, please let me know.

• Support zoom, pan, and rotate
  • Mouse scroll to zoom
  • Click/grab to pan
  • Rotate via on-screen buttons
  • Double-click to quick zoom in/out by 2x
• Gesture support
  • Pinch zoom in/out
  • Swipe up to zoom in
  • Swipe down to zoom out
  • Swipe left or right to close the zoom modal
  • Other gestures may be added once I figure out a clean way to differentiate them from conflicting mouse events

Basic Gesture Support

First, I should point out that I am not a fan of gesture navigation; absolutely hate it as a primary method of interaction. I'm old and hate having to guess whether my fingers need to do the Macarena or the Hokey-Pokey to perform what should be an intuitive action.

That said, I do like waving things (and people) away.

To that end, I've added some gesture recognition in a few places, mostly modals. Any modal can now be dismissed with a left or right swipe in an area not bound by other event handlers.

• e.g. You can't swipe in the text field to dismiss an edit/report/ban/remove modal; you have to swipe outside of that.
• Left/right swipe was chosen as to not interfere with scrolling so it could be used consistently across all modal types.

The only other place, currently, with gesture support is the image zoom modal (described above).

I may add some additional swipe actions where it's intuitive to do so. For now, I'm content with modals being easier to dismiss on mobile without having to reach up to the close button in the top corner.

User Profile Modals

Clicking on usernames throughout the application will now load a modal with their user card and relevant action buttons. Old behavior was taking you to their profile directly.

Actions include:

• Go to profile
• Message in Lemmy / Matrix
• Block User
• Search for alts / simiarly-named accounts
• Ban user from instance (admins only)
• View user on their home instance
• Copy Lemmyverse link for user

Image Management on Posts/Comments (Paste Images into Post URL and Markdown Editor)

• Images can be pasted in the post's URL field as well as in the markdown editor.
• Images can optionally be pre-processed to webP along with a user-selectable quality level. Especially useful if your instance limits the size of uploads
• Can delete post images (only before you save the post; unfortunately there's no way to retrieve the delete token after that even though it is stored in the DB. Yet another API limitation :sigh:)
  • This is addressed in 0.19.4, but I don't have support for that yet.
• Images pasted/uploaded into the markdown editor are tracked in a bar along the bottom of the editor. Individual images can be deleted as needed along with the corresponding markdown code for them.

Hide Posts/Comments From New Users

In App Settings -> Filters, you can now opt to hide posts/comments made by new users. You can also set the number of days an account is considered new: 1 to 30 days. That setting also is applied to the new user badges (if you set the minimum age to 15 days, any account 15 days or younger will show the new user badge).

This setting behaves differently for mods and admins:

• Mods: Filter will be applied to all posts/comments except in communities of which you are a moderator.
• Admins: Filter will be applied to all posts/coments except those made to communities local to your instance or those made to remote communities of which you are a moderator.

Comments made by new users will be hidden, and that includes any replies (essentially behaves the same way as blocked users)

Federation State Viewer

From the instances menu on a post, there's a new option called "Federation Stats" which will show you the stats from your instance to the target and from the target to your instance. Also included in that is an estimated cacluation of the number of activities each instance is behind (useful for troubleshooting federation delays).

This information has also been added to the instance items at /instances

Please note that the "Activities behind" counter is only an estimate. The value for newest_activity_id is not provided by the API (because that would be useful, so why would the Lemmy devs include it?), so it has to be estimated. The estimation is done by looking at the last_successful_id of all the linked instances and grabbing the highest number and subtracting the last_successful_id for the selected instance. Not all of those activities would necessarily be coming to your instance (votes/posts/comments to communities yours isn't subscribed to, etc), so it is merely an estimation. Just because it shows you are behind by X number doesn't necessarily mean it's behind by that many.

Instances Page

Re-wrote this to do manual pagination, searching, and filtering. Much more responsive now that it is not rendering several thousand components each with actions items.

"Click to Play" Media Embeds

If media is disabled in the feed, the thumbnail will now have an overlay button that will convert it to an embed on-the-fly.

When loading a video via click-to-play, I'm conditionally setting the "autoplay" flag where the embed API supports it, but it doesn't always seem to be honored. This is an attempt to not have to press "play" twice for a video. So far, the only video frontend that seems to honor it is YouTube. Invidious/Piped, so far, do not, and neither does PeerTube.

Ok, so autoplay works if muted (no idea how YouTube's player gets around this; probably some chicanery). I think that's worse because you still have to click twice on the videos, and the "unmute" button is harder to reach than "play". So I think I'm going to just settle on having to click play twice.

This seems to be be a Chrome/Chromium thing (and explains why YT gets to bypass this). In Firefox, the autoplay flag is respected without having to mute the video.

Re-Integrated Piped Support as an Embeddable Youtube Frontend

Now that click to play has been added, Piped support has been added back. It was removed due to poor performance and rate limiting when used with feed embeds.

If media embeds are enabed in the feed, only YouTube frontend will show direct embeds. Piped/Invidious will always be click to play regardless of embed setting due to above mentioned rate limiting / performance.

Alternate Source Dropdown / Archive Links

Removed the [Archive Link] next to the post URL and replacd it with a fancy menu to the left of it.

• On posts with links, it currently has buttons to search for the article at Archive Today, Ghost Archive, and 12ft.io
• On Youtube-like posts, can select alternalte links for YouTube, Invidious, or Piped
  • Invidious/Piped will open with your preferred instance (defined in settings)
  • Useful if someone posts a video to an Invidious instance that performs poorly for you and you would prefer to view it on your preferred Invidious/Piped instance or canonically on YouTube.

Quick Action Menus

On mobile, the navbar was getting cluttered, so most of the discrete dropdowns there have been moved into Quick Actions menus.

• Main, Community, and User feed pages: Quick Actions has replaced all discrete menus
• Search Page, Modlog, instances page, and Community Browser: All of the filtering options are in a quick action menu

Users Can Now Add Their Own Preferred Invidious/Piped Instances

Prior to this release, any Piped or Invidious instances needed to be added by the administrator via environment variables. In addition to that, users can now add any number of custom Invidious and/or Piped instances in the app settings.

These will be combined with the built-in list and the admin-extended list and be available for use as your preferred YT frontend and for detection of Piped/Invidious links in posts.

Be aware that those custom instances will only render as embeds for you; they will be thumbnails for anyone else who hasn't added them to Tesseract. If you feel that instance should be added to Tesseract's built-in list, please submit a Github issue with the details.

Tesseract is pre-populated with the official list of public instances for each, but it can get out of date easily.

Note: As of 6/20/2024, I've noticed a lot of Invidious/Piped instances are now requiring login, and embeds through them no longer work. I believe if you have an account with one, log in, and enable 3rd party cookies for that domain, the embeds should work. I have not tried that, but it does work with Spotify. This isn't a Tesseract bug, unfortunately, or I'd fix it.

Can Disable Infinite Scroll if you Want

If you're not a fan of the infinite scroll, you can go to App Settings -> Feed and disable infinite scroll.

TOTP 2FA Setup

Can now enable and enroll in 2FA as well as disable it.

Account Icons Now Use Your Profile Avatar

Icons in the account switcher and account screens now sync to your profile avatar, if defined.

New Placeholder User Avatars

Instead of the initials as used previously on accounts without avatars, now uses Dicebear Adventurer pseudorandom avatars. Initials are still used for placeholder community icons when the community mods haven't set one.

Passwords Can Now Be Revealed

All password elements will now allow you to toggle them to reveal. Should make a big improvement when logging-in on mobile.

Vote Viewer (Admins Only)

Admins can now see votes like in Lemmy-UI. Uses infinite scroll and deduplication to compensate for the stupid API that returns multiple/duplicate votes on each page.

---

Bugfixes and Enhancements

Removed 0.18.x Backwards Compatibility

• Or, more specifically, removed 0.18.x JS client and the extensions I wrote to make that compatible with 0.19.x. Now uses the 0.19.3 JS client.
• Removed the image upload proxy which was needed in 0.18x due to CORS restrictions.

Various Enhancements to Auth Module.

• Added safety check so that the auth token is only ever sent to the profile's associated instance and cannot accidentally send to non-home instance (e.g. when browsing communities on a remote instance).
• Fixed a few chicken/egg situations where the profile store needed to be accessed before it was initialized
• If your auth token is invalid, such as after changing your password on another device, you will get a toast message you can click to take you to the login screen.
• If a profile exists for a username/instance combo, logging in will update the auth token for that existing profile rather than creating a new one.
• User avatars are now fetched when logging in.

Grace Period Before Media Embeds are Destroyed When Scrolling out of Viewport

• Embeds now have a short timeout when leaving the viewport before they're removed from the DOM and turn back into thumbnails. Fixes annoyance when resizing the window while a video is playing and the video temporarily leaves the viewport and is destroyed. Timeout is 2 seconds and will reset/disarm if the post returns to the viewport before it expires.

Community Creation / Editing

• Uses new upload handler for banner/icon
• Can pre-process the banner/icon to webP before uploading
• Shows a live preview of how the community card will look

General

• Slightly darkened background color in light mode cards (bg-white->bg-slate-100) for better contrast. Did similarly for some button colors
• Added "OpenDyslexic" as a UI font option
• Can now close modals with Escape key, close button, or by swiping left/right
• Added button to reveal password fields
• Some modals can be closed by clicking out of them.
  • I need to disable this or make it more consistent. Some workflows utilize nested modals, so I do need to be able to keep them open when interacting with a child modal.
• Added "share" link for searches.
  • Will generate a URL with the current search params and copy to your clipboard.

Other Stuff

Peertube Follows

On my last release post, someone mentioned that following Peertube channels may be broken. At the time I was still on 0.18.5 and had followed a PT channel, and seemed to be getting updates from it. Then I wasn't sure.

I can say that I have been getting at least some updates to the PT channel I follow (mostly as a test). While there have been videos posted there that did not come through to Lemmy, I don't know enough about PeerTube to know if they were published differently or what. However, I have gotten at least 2-3 that someone posted to Lemmy that would absolutely had to have come in via Federation.

Also confirmed that commenting on a PT video (from the channel feed, not an embed to a Lemmy community) does federate out and show up on Peertube's side along with any votes you give in Lemmy.

This isn't really a Tesseract issue since the Lemmy backend handles that. Just figured since I do support Peertube, it would be worth mentioning that it seems to work.

What Didn't Make the Cut This Release

• User profile import/export
• Link previews
• Custom feed rewrite
• Custom emoji management
• Fediseer Rewrite

I keep kicking the can on the custom feed and infinite scroll re-writes, but for a good reason. I want to start using IndexedDB to get around storage constraints in the browser's LocalStorage API. I need to write and integrate a library for this (or find one I don't hate), and that's going to take some dedicated development time. Switching to IndexDB is also a step in the direction I want to go towards providing offline support. So, at some point, there will be a release that only focuses on that. Not sure if it'll be in the 1.4.x series or later, but ultimately, that is where I want to go.

Get Tesseract

• Hosted Instance: Unlocked to allow login to any Lemmy instance
• Github
• Changelog
• Docs
• Matrix Support
• Lemmy Community
• Docker: ghcr.io/asimons04/tesseract:v1.4.0 (Should have images for amd64 and arm64 now that the Github actions are fixed)

I've been looking around for lemmy apps but I just can't seem to find the best one if anyone has any suggestions they are welcome

Basically, title.

Here is the comment asking for help: https://lemmy.ca/comment/9663003 (paste it to your search bar if you're not on lemmy.ca)

I'm currently using Eternity but the developer stopped supporting it. Do you have any suggestions for another Android app I could switch to, preferably FOSS? I don't like Voyager for its UX and particularly the swiping functions. I prefer using swipes for navigation only and doing everything else by tapping buttons. In Voyager, I keep accidentally doing things I didn't intend to do.

Hi all,

Quiblr now has personalized post feeds for Lemmy!

I haven't seen a "recommended feed" feature anywhere else in the fediverse but I thought I would take a crack at building it!

My goal was to make a privacy-focused recommendation engine that tailors your experience based on the content you interact with. None of the data leaves your device. You don't even need to log in for it to work

• You can turn it off or tune your feed in the settings
• Each post now also includes a show me more/less button

I would LOVE feedback from folks if you get a chance to try it out!

This was really fun to build so let me know if there are any questions!