3d ago

Blorp now supports PieFed on iOS, Android, web, and MacOS

Wow it’s been a crazy month and a half of working on this. This PieFed update was a doozy (mostly due to code debt in decoupling Blorp from Lemmy), but I’m so happy it turned out as well as it did.

Try it yourself!
\ You will need to click the user icon (top right cornet), login or add account, then select a PieFed server

PieFed support is still a little experimental. I’m currently working through some issues with comment loading. But I’ve been using PieFed with Blorp for a couple weeks now, and I love it.

If you decide to check it out, keep the app up to date for latest PieFed bug fixes.

Edit: anyone reading this in the future. The NSFW issue mentioned in the comments has been fixed in v1.9.2.

29 comments

Pro tip, if you see a PieFed server missing, you can paste the address into the search and Blorp will attempt to look it up.

Amazing, thank you !

Using it from blorp is pretty cool. Compared to all the other clients, I like how it looks.
- That means a lot! I’m pretty proud of what I’ve built, but there is still a lot of room for improvement. Expect it to continue to get better.

It's not in FDroid :(
- Not of F-Droid yet. On my todo list. PRs are welcome

Congratulations, it's a really great app!
Consider changing the default instance for https://blorpblorp.xyz/home/ because at the moment when you go there half the posts are 4chan screenshots. Was that the vision you had for your app or were you hoping for something more? To me, that's a really off-putting first impression.
- That just Lemmy doing Lemmy things lol. Because I support Lemmy and PieFed, idk if I want to change the default to PieFed at the moment. But if you were interested in hosting blorp.piefed.social, I can help you set it up with piefed.social as the default instance.
  Edit: My biggest concern with default instance is another lemm.ee scenario where the instance shuts down.
  
  Cool, that's a possibility. I'll look at your docs and get back to you.

I’m digging the simplistic design. I am one that generally doesn’t stray from defaults. I have two things I would like to see added.
NSFW images blurred in the feed. <- important for me to use Blorp as my daily client.
A bit more feed cache. Something I noticed was I was scrolling faster than the cache was loading. This could be more my connection mixed with how fast I scroll through my feed. That said I am comparing it to Voyager and that has not been an issue. On the flip side I have run into issues with the cache ordering being too much for a dog shit connection and in turn making Voyager unusable. <- this one is not very important to me, just something I noticed.
Otherwise great work man.
- NSFW is a big issue, and I’m really sorry to everyone that I missed that. I’m going to try and get a fix up for that tonight, but it could take a day or two to roll out
  I actually cache pretty aggressively, but what you’re describing is likely when I chose to load the next page. For example, it might say, “when you’re 50% through the currently feed of posts, fetch the next 50”. This could probably be tuned a little better.
  For the second issue, could you compare the loading time against Lemmy.world in Blorp? It’s probably the way I’m paginating, but that will rule out 100% that it’s an issue with Blorp and not a slow response from PieFed.
  
  No need to apologize for a piece of software you are gracious enough to share with us for free. These issues aren’t going to run me a way. :)
  Edit: Looks like switching from All to Local(Lemmy.world) there is zero issues. I can’t scroll fast enough to run into the same loading issue as before.

Incredible News!

I really do like how it looks. Probably the best looking out of all I have seen.
How does it handle instances that have downvotes disabled? It'd be nice to (optionally) see a heart icon or something.
- I need to fix that. I was thinking about just hiding the down arrow, but if you think I heart is better, I can try that. But the score should still be shown next to the heart, right? Unless score is hidden. I’m thinking I put the heart to the left of the score.

Is there any way to fix the font size? On iOS it’s tiny, and I can’t find a way to make it bigger.
- I tried my best to match other similar apps. Any specific elements too small, or is it all too small across the board? Did you increase the text size on iOS or is it set to the default?
  
  The text is just really small. I tried to increase it using the iOS system, but nothing got bigger.

Awesome, trying it out right this second.
Edit: One issue, I have NSFW posts blocked on this account, but on the app it's showing me NSFW posts. Anything I or you can do about it?
- Yeah that’s a bug I really need to address, sorry. I’ll bump that to the top of my priorities. Realistically I won’t have a fix for that until mid week.

29 comments