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?
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.
I’d just like to say that some of us smaller instances have had both old.* style and Alexandrite active for a a few weeks ;)
- old.lastname.nz (0.18.3 has broken this for now)
- my.lastname.nz
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.
Also an app app now, available in beta.
Using it right now! But since I do, I wonder how (why) this works? What keyword would help me find info about that?
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 -d
Then use crontab -e and add this line:
00 05,00 * * * bash /scripts/update-alexandrite.sh
What I really want is a design that shows me twice as many posts at a time, there’s too much wasted space.
If you want old reddit, just use https://old.lemmy.world
That’s pretty handy to know.
But I kinda like the way Alexandrite looks, I just wish it was more compact.
Compact, like this? https://photon.xylight.dev/c/selfhosted@lemmy.world
I agree. For now, as I find everything to be a bit too big, I put the zoom at 90% in my browser.
Are you on Firefox? I use an extension called PagezoomWE or something like that. It remembers the zoom level for you.
