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sheodox @lemmy.world

Introducing Alexandrite for Lemmy, a desktop-first alternative web UI

Website, community, Github

I've been working on an alternative web UI for Lemmy for a couple weeks now and it's got enough features I wanted to share it. I love that somehow people have found it despite me never having posted online about it until now (until a couple days ago it was called sx-lemmy, sx being an abbreviation of my username) so you might have seen it in a list already.

Alexandrite is a (for the moment) desktop-first Lemmy interface, I primarily use Lemmy on my computer and I wanted a more convenient way to view posts and comments without juggling tabs or losing my place in the feed (with infinite scrolling). It's still very much in beta, and I have a lot of work to do still, but it's got most of the basic features.

You can view a post and comments in an overlay without losing where you scrolled to:

A non-exhaustive list of things you can do:

  • view home/community/user/communities feeds
  • post/comment
  • subscribe to communities
  • vote
  • save posts
  • search
  • inbox stuff

Noteworthy missing features:

  • reporting
  • blocking users/communities
  • mod tools
  • image uploading
  • automatic linkifying of urls/communities/users in comments/posts

For those who care, it's all Sveltekit which is a dream to work with. Alexandrite is the name of the kind of gem in my wife's wedding ring, it looks cool and changes color in the light.

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43 comments

  • Great work! Looks beautiful :)

    I have two questions:

    1. If I login on your site, where does username/password get stored? Local Storage?
    2. Can I clone the repo and run it locally on my machine? If so, how? I'm not familiar with Svelte.

    • Thanks!

      The username/password are just used once to login and get an auth token and that auth token is stored in a cookie. The username is also stored in a cookie, but the password is not. Here's the login code

      Yes you can! However the production version currently uses Sveltekit's adapter-auto which just runs on various cloud platforms, so it might not be that easy to self host without changes. You can run the dev version of the site by cloning it, running npm install and npm run dev and viewing it at http://localhost:5173/ but that won't be as optimized so your page load would be slower.

      If you want to self host, would a docker image make it easier?

      • Thanks for the reply :)

        Docker would be good for some people I would guess, but I'm quite happy to clone the dev site and use npm - thanks again :)

43 comments