If you’ve paid careful attention to our sticky, you may have noticed Lemdro.id hosts a few slick web app interfaces for Lemmy. Give them a try!
These are active projects, so please do report any bugs to their respective GitHub pages linked below.
What do you think of them? What kind of tools would you like to see for Lemmy?
Lemdro.id Interfaces
- Familiar for iOS redditors: m.lemdro.id powered by Voyager
- Familiar for desktop redditor: old.lemdro.id powered by mlmym
- Something new: nu.lemdro.id powered by Photon
I’m honored to have Photon a part of this list!
Just installed Photon on my instance (photon.fanexus.com) this morning and it’s beautiful!
It’s surreal that some random project i made because i was bored is now gaining some traction and is being hosted on large instances.
and we’re delighted to host you! what a wonderful little project!
Photon one looked best!
just tried and it looks pretty good.
nu.lemdro.id looks very interesting
Agreed. It’s my favourite design. I’m looking forward to seeing how things progress!
Unfortunately I can’t login no matter what neither on my laptop nor smartphone:(
Are you typing lemdro.id into the box? Keep it all lower case. What is it showing you?
“incorrect_login” Also I can’t type 0 (zero) in the 2FA code box but can paste the code even if it contains a zero
Tagging @Xylight@lemmy.xylight.dev for awareness :).
Could you send a screen recording of what happens?
Sure here is one (I tried uploading the screen recording as a gif here and got this error message:
SyntaxError: Unexpected token ‘R’, “Request er”… is not valid JSON)
Anyway here is the screen recording uploaded to mega link
The bug with not being able to type 0 in the 2fa will be fixed in version 0.2.4 (check version by clicking on the profile picture)
Is lemdro.id just a frontend? Is it not attached to a particular instance?
Lemdro.id is an instance but each instance can host mutliple frontends if they like.
It is an Instance.
Lemmy.world also hosts Voyager at https://m.lemmy.world and MLMYM at https://old.lemmy.world
It is an instance. This post is in the !android@lemdro.id community of the lemdro.id instance, for example. There’s also !askandroid@lemdro.id or !google@lemdro.id, to name a few
As mentioned by others, it’s a specific instance but with multiple frontends. The main LemmyUI is just one of them!
special shortcut
Can you elaborate?
Yes! There are 3 different “types” of Lemmy backends in our infrastructure. “scheduled” types, of which there can only be one, run scheduled federation traffic as well as some smaller load balanced load of requests. The “external” type handles generic requests same as “scheduled” except without scheduled federation tasks. These can spin up or down all the way to 0, as sometimes the scheduled instance can handle everything on its own.
Finally, there is “internal”. These are dedicated backend instances that are not publicly exposed and therefore do not handle any federation traffic at all. Lemmy-ui communicates with this internal backend, meaning that our UI has a path that is entirely separate to the federation traffic and should stay responsive no matter what!
I think they mean whether the entirety of lemdro.id is just a webapp like vger.app, rather than an instance as well.
ah, well this is why you usually do the communications stuff haha, I misunderstand people
It’s okay, you have +100 technical wizardry stats!
Yep. They are all great. Photon is my favourite so far. Sleek & Fast with a Black & White theme. But they are still a Work in Progress amd lack features. I tried them a week ago. I always end up reverting back to lemdro.id
You can always suggest new features on the GitHub!
I love this. So much choice, glad the 3rd party app community fully embraces lemmy.
Nice!
I’m a little confused. Those aren’t Lemmy Themes, are they? Instances that use them still use the Lemmy default look by… default, right?
They’re not themes, but entirely different web apps for accessing the Lemmy frontend. The default Lemmy-UI is just one of them and could be replaced outright.
…okay, that’s a bit confusing but okay.
I have two questions:
- Those web apps are made with theming in mind? One thing that Old Reddit allows is subreddits having their own css theme, some of them are better than the default old reddit. Suppose I’m the owner of a Lemmy instance and want to replicate the look of a specific reddit community, would that be a pain in the ass to do? The same question for Photon and Voyager, as I imagine some instance might want to further theme it, by changing things more thant just the banner and icon.
- Wouldn’t it be better to write those interfaces as Lemmy-UI themes? Or is that impossible?
- those aren’t just themes, they are totally different web apps likely written in different languages (eg. old reddit themes were like ice cream flavours but these are like comparing ice cream with cake, donut, all give you a feeling of sweetness, but use a totally different way)
To be fair, the default Lemmy-UI doesn’t really look that far off from Old Reddit in terms of organization, only in styling.
Those web apps are made with theming in mind? One thing that Old Reddit allows is subreddits having their own css theme, some of them are better than the default old reddit. Suppose I’m the owner of a Lemmy instance and want to replicate the look of a specific reddit community, would that be a pain in the ass to do? The same question for Photon and Voyager, as I imagine some instance might want to further theme it, by changing things more thant just the banner and icon.
These are all open source projects, so you can indeed fork the code to implement your own changes. You can visit the GitHub pages in the OP to see whether it looks like something you’d be comfortable with doing - but it’s all definitely possible.
Wouldn’t it be better to write those interfaces as Lemmy-UI themes? Or is that impossible?
You could fork Lemmy-UI and build in those changes, but it would be pretty messy. These are separate projects being developed using different languages/frameworks/design philosophies. It’s a bit like how there are many different Reddit apps on Android. You could theoretically just fork and reskin an existing project, but there’s a lot to be gained from having something purpose-built.
Forking=/=Theming.
Being open source does not make it easy to theme it. Reddit was closed source, but the tools to create a subreddit theme were far simpler than having to fork the actual visual code of reddit.
There are also open source projects that allows you to edit just the visual files in a simple manner, for instance, KDE’s Plasma is relatively simple to create new themes without having to fork the entire Desktop Environment, because it was made with theming in mind.
Being open source does not make it easy to theme it.
Yeah, I’m not suggesting it’s easy. They’re completely different web apps and Lemmy-UI is its own project that isn’t setup to be themed in such a drastic way.
Lemmy is built to interact well with a wide variety of web and native apps, so I don’t think we’ll see much effort putting into trying to make Lemmy-UI the answer to everything. Once the other options mature enough, instances could just switch their default web apps altogether.
However, Lemmy-UI accepts CSS themes. If Old Reddit could have significant changes between subreddits using CSS, then it doesn’t seems out of place that the same should happen with mlmym, or even Lemmy-UI.
