So I’m looking for a new client, specifically mobile, that’s FOSS, easy to use, allows for browsing communities on other instances easily (not just searching for instances, but actually viewing the list of instances, etc).
I’m a dev, so happy to put some legwork into it myself. So my question is - technically, is the UI tied to being run on an instance “directly”, or could it be detached, electron- or atom-ified and put into an app?
I can do the work, but before starting I’d like to know :-)
Photon can be installed as a PWA if that’s what you want. Photon v2 will take advantage of native features (👀)
Genuine question, what can there possibly be to improve to warrant a v2, its already so good.
Svelte (the JS framework I use) is releasing a really big v5 update which adds a lot of cool things and basically changes everything. It warrants a rewrite since I can make photon really fast with svelte 5, and the old codebase was limiting me in a lot of ways.
The biggest feature of this rewrite will be support for mastodon AND Lemmy, and thanks to the way I’m writing these adaptors, can support Sublinks, PixelFed, and almost anything if I write an adaptor for it.
I’m considering making this an entirely separate project (you might see it on my GitHub soon!) and maintaining photon separately, because I want to design this new one as an SPA for speed.
(👀)
(👀) indeed, definitely interested to see that.
If the new version is meant to be just better, why dont you just replace the old photon?
I want to start fresh, and this project will not use terminology from lemmy or mastodon specifically which will throw people off if I replaced photon.
Shameless github plug please so we can follow! 🙌
It’s very early, once it’s partially usable I’ll publish the github
Its not tied to a specific instance, but have you had a look at the multiple mobile clients that exist already?
The last thing Lemmy needs in another mobile client.
Maybe contribute to https://github.com/aeharding/voyager ?
I’ve tried most of them . The ones that work the way I want, especially for easy portable UI/UX design are closed source. Sadly, none of them have a nice workable UI for easy use, or if they do, they’re really poor in another area.
This does all I want, with a nice UI and works nicely on mobile (with a few sizing tweaks).
I’m going to add to my comment above - this is for me. If someone else wants to use it, great.
