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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

  • Oh this looks great! I'd love to host this alongside my instance.

    I already do with WefWef - https://app.thelemmy.club

    Maybe something like desktop.thelemmy.club

    Is all the action client side?

    • Thanks!

      See my other comment about self hosting, as it's probably not super easy right now.

      The site uses Sveltekit and so far every interaction with Lemmy happens server side, so it's probably not as easy to host as WefWef. I got partway through implementing image uploading yesterday until I hit a bug (fix just got merged today!) that prevented that, but image uploading is going to happen client side so it doesn't cause extra server load.

      • so far every interaction... happens server side

        Well that's not ideal, both resource wise and the fact that this would cause you to run into rate limiting issues very fast

        • Hey, just wanted to let you know I just updated the site to do everything client side. Haven't done anything yet about the self hosting instructions though, but thought I'd update you.

        • Another random reply to an old comment! I've got a branch out for self hosting Alexandrite if you happened to be interested in trying it out at all, more info on this post.

        • Ahh, I hadn't considered the rate limiting stuff, great point. I will probably move things to the client at some point in the near future, so it's easier for me to host too. Right now it's using Cloudflare Pages and so far my usage today is well within the free tier limits, but hosting it as a static site elsewhere would be more easily scalable.

43 comments