an extremely compressed image that is unreadable

I saw someone ask what Photon is, so I decided to make a sticky post for this.

Photon is an alternative client for Lemmy.

You probably have heard of "clients" like Sync for Lemmy and Jerboa, Connect, etc. Photon is another client, but instead of being an app, it is a web app. You can essentially use it as a website, by going to https://phtn.app . It's like the client Voyager.

The part that confuses a lot of people is that some people self-host Photon for their instance. Instances can host their own version of Photon if they wish, and can set a setting to add some flair for that specific instance. This is still "photon", it's just on a different domain and linked to that instance essentially.

Photon is currently one of the only clients with full feature-parity to the default interface, lemmy-ui.

Link to this post if someone asks what Photon is.

Lemmy v0.19.0 is introducing some breaking changes that, if I add support for in Photon, will break compatibility with instances before v0.19.0. If I don't add support for v0.19.0, instances with that version or higher will break. How should I proceed?

A: Keep an old version of photon available for people who need to use a pre-0.19.0 instance (medium difficulty)

B: Add a message to login saying the instance must be v0.19.0 or higher, nuke all backwards compatibility (easiest solution)

C: wait until most instances are on v0.19.0 to proceed with B

D: Add code to handle different versions (hardest solution)

I'd prefer that people be able to rely on Photon, and anything that prevents them from doing stuff on photon I see as a catastrophic issue. A looks the most appealing right now.

typing this from my phone so not the highest quality post but I've added some little tweaks since last update:

• fading out text now uses background clipping (no more janky transitions when changing background color)
• on a post page you can press the community icon to subscribe to it
• urls are now visible in list view
• fixed a few crashes

Versioning later

• Respect profile "hide scores" setting
• Disable downvote button on instances with it disabled
• optimizations
• fix crash when switching post page
• misc design tweaks

v1.8.0

• feat: completely rewrite report and inbox handling system, codebase is much cleaner
  • Private message reports are now visible in the moderation menu
• private messages are more consistent with other inbox items

Full Changelog:

v1.8.1

• comments and posts are finally consistent in compact/list mode
• added an option to align post thumbnails to the left in compact mode

I've implemented nearly all of the stuff I can think of. What should I add now?

I've tweaked the colors for light theme quite a lot. I think they look nice. It means I can make the background of buttons white, giving a clear separation.

• Tweak light theme colors
• Overhaul community page
• Add Inter font
  • I kept the default as System UI. You can enable Inter from the settings.
• Upgrade to Mono v0.3.2

obviously lots of these "just work" for most people.

An image of a dried up mummified "alien", likely hoax.

Captioned with "3am thirst be like"