1y ago

a.lemmy.world

a.lemmy.world

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!

183 comments

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
- 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.
  https://lemmy.world/post/2250485
  
  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

What I really want is a design that shows me twice as many posts at a time, there's too much wasted space.
A comparison photo with old.reddit.
- 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.
- I'm planning on adding alternate post styles in the (hopefully near) future. A more compact style is one of the styles I want to add.
- I agree. I hate the trend of moving away from information density. It may seem silly, but it's the number one reason I can't use an iPhone.
- I agree. For now, as I find everything to be a bit too big, I put the zoom at 90% in my browser.
  
  I wish my browser would remember zoom settings for different sites.

That's how it should work! Click on post and instantly see the content and comments, without loading a whole page

beautiful! and the fact that i dont have to open a new tab for comments!

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

Just dropping in to say this UI is beautiful and the features are superb. Thank yous for all the lemmy world staff and Sheodox for the time and dedication!

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!
- Lack of error codes is something I see often even in professional website development. Even Windows has run into that issue now; Click button. Button loads. Button stops - no action. Or, the application just closes.
  I think with the separation of product design and engineers in modern teams, it ends up being really hard for everyone to settle on a good path for errors on every single little thing - and including that in the design can make you "feel" your product is error prone, even if 99% of people never see any of those.
  
  Well pointed out.

I want to caution that every new ui is a potential security risk. When it's a mobile app then it's entirely on the user to decide if they trust it, but when it's hosted the host is implicitly giving a seal of approval so I think at least a bit of a code audit should be done, especially since xss is much more of a risk on the web.
There's already been one security breach on the default Lemmy skin, so I think it would be a good idea to do an audit for every new hosted ui and include a section for it on these posts. You don't necessarily need to crawl through every line of course, but it'd be good to cover what framework and rendering engine it uses and acknowledge any risks associated with them.
- We have the devs of all but one of the alternative UI's on our discord server. We try to provide options for our users as well as give some extra exposure to the Lemmy developers community by hosting these on LW. It's actually pretty cool to see that devs from different apps are going through each other's code and are being helpful. And other community members are actively helping the developers test (and request) new features.
  So that is one of the things that we did to "play safe". But I understand your concern and I'll have a talk with the team how we can organise something like a code review of the UI's we host.
  We have one more UI to be announced soon. And that will most likely be the last one we will add.

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.
- There is https://old.lemmy.world, which I am using. It even has a dark mode! It does have a few missing features. The message field doesn't have any formatting buttons, you can't change the shortcuts up top, the submissions don't have alternating colors (but comments do!), and the preview button for messages sends your message to the server, which breaks often and deletes your message.

I love the side-by-side view. No more opening posts in new tabs for me.

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.

Wow that is really cool, I hope you can add photon https://photon.xylight.dev/ at some point, it is super beautiful too
- Just go to settings and change the instance
  
  I mean, same with Alexandrite.
- +1 for this. I'm also excited to see photon being implemented as one of the frontends. Exciting times! And kudos to all the people working behind the scenes. Your works are really appreciated 😊

This is such a huge improvement over the base Lemmy theme. I just need a light theme now!
- This, dark themes are gross. You can change the hue but not make a light theme?
  
  While I absolutely 100% disagree, I respect your preference and your ability to achieve it.

Seeing custom web UIs being deployed officially and directly on the same domain as Lemmy instances is incredibly encouraging. I wonder if my Leanish will be polished enough to be published that way eventually.
One can dream!

As soon as I click on a link I get rate limited. That may need to get adjusted.
- Does this still happen?
  
  I just had it happen
  Edit: but now I can use it
- Ah. Will look into that.

I'm in love! Smooth, modern, and simple. One thing to note - the "hue" option for the theme in the settings is not very obvious at first or comfortable. We need some kind of visible color pallete or some squares with color options.
Also, Ctrl+Enter should allow me to post my reply immediately, but it doesn't.

I love this, thanks.

Whoa, reading this title was really trippy.

Is there a post with all the different enabled UIs?
- They are listed in the sidebar
  
  Thank you sir!
  
  I don't see it. Where is it?

My experience:
First load errored out over ... something
Second page load: I'm greeted with a rate limit. Nice.
Load: finally worked
- Same for me.

Such a nice interface!

Looks fantastic!!

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).

Yooo, this is dope. Looks great, responsive, and good use of screen space. I love the retractable sidebar.

I love the Alexandrite UI

Wow it looks amazing!!

Nice! Thank you.

Looks great but really needs a light theme
- I agree, I hate the dark theme on anything. I'll even be okay with a medium theme.
  
  I initially downvoted since I love dark theme, but changes to upvote because everyone has their preferences

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 :)

I kinda like the general layout, but that color scheme is annoying. Can I change it somehow?
- There's a slider in the settings for the hue used for all the background/borders/text etc, so you can change it from purple to other colors, like:
  
  Eventually I plan on adding more customization so you can change the colors of links/votes, and I need to make a light theme because so many people want that too.
- Yep, just go to 'Settings' under the Profile icon, top right.
- You can change the colors but not remove them entirely. It's not possible to have it entirely white on black.

This is amazing.

And the developer is quick to add features. Highly recommended for desktop.

Looks really nice!

I like it but one thing I would change is the position of my subscribed community: from the left self-hiding sidebar to the righ always visible one
- There's an option in the settings that makes the left sidebar not auto-hide if you just want to always be able to see them.
  
  Wow, I didn't know that!
  Thanks for share, now I like it even ore because with this option the post column is narrower
  
  But I found a bug, it start hidden even with the option checked: you have to open it at least one time

Great work Sheodox. Its beautiful!

Doesn't work. It says I'm temporarily banned.
- Turn off your vpn?
  
  I don't use a VPN.

rate limited wtf

Says I'm rate limited, then on refresh, banned. I don't think any other person in my household uses lemmy.world at all, so I wonder if it's just the high amount of traffic going to it from Comcast users.
- One of the admins said in another thread that they were fending off attacks and are going to be dialing in the rate limiting.
  
  Should be better now!
- Got the same, all fine after refresh.

Looks good! Sadly I can't seem to login with my lemmy.dbzer0.com account though.
- No, this is only for lemmy.world accounts but you can go to alexandrite.app and login there with any instance account.
  
  Yes I'm aware; I did that. Couldn't login.

@antik Amazing! Alexandrite has become my absolute favourite way to browse lemmy over the last few weeks. Great to see it become part of .world!
- Yep, loved it so much I contacted @sheodox@lemmy.world to help us add it to the instance. He added some changes to Selfhost, put it all in a docker container and made it all happen in a couple of days ❤️
  I'm sure more admins will be adding it to their instance!

Working for me now.
just needs "alexandrite" in the header changing to lemmy.world i think, and maybe the logo changing
- Yep, I'm actually working on making those changes now.

looks great!!

Very nice looking

Thank you for all your hard work.

looks great!!

Wow, I love this a lot. Initially chuckled at the theme color slider in the settings, but it's unironically a great way to edit that haha.
My instance (lemdro.id) has Photon as their modern look alternative, which also looks pretty sleek IMO, but I think I'll be using this going forward mostly because it's more desktop-looking than Photon's more mobile-centric layout.
Fantastic work on this, can't wait to see how it grows going forward.
- Photon dev here, what's mobile-centric about it? I actually aimed for it to work well on both. The reason the pages don't span the whole distance is for legibility reasons.
  I actually aimed for this to be desktop first, that's why i use buttons instead of gestures.
  Your decision is good though, I personally think Alexandrite is much better than Photon.
  
  It definitely functions well on both, I don't mean to suggest that it's meant for mobile. But yeah, I think it's mostly the fact that all the content is only on the center 1/3 of my screen. To me, that just feels a lot like a mobile view compared to something that uses the whole area of the browser.
  A lot of social sites on the modern web look this way now, and generally it's a result of them trying to prioritize mobile uses first, so when I see it anywhere now it's just a "oh, this is a mobile site" in my mind.

Thank you!

183 comments