Alexandrite

Just some quick features!

When creating a post there's now a button to suggest a title based on the URL you entered. Just enter a URL then click "Suggest Title"

Then if you want to use that title hit the button!

You can create a post without first visiting the community by clicking the new "+" button in the header. The menu looks a little bit empty right now, but I'll add more stuff here later.

Also:

• Added the ability to edit/delete/report private messages
• Links to external sites in markdown now open in a new tab
• If you have the "Keep navigation sidebar open" setting enabled, it will now open by default

I've been loving Alexandrite, it's my go-to recommendation for Lemmy on desktop. Keep up the great work!

Question for @sheodox@lemmy.world:

What's your preferred way to receive feature requests?

I see people making posts here, which is nice because it allows community discussion, but you also have a github issue tracker, which may be handier for you to actually follow up the request. I have some ideas I'd like to put forward, and I would like to use the way that's the least burdensome for you to manage.

Alexandrite now has cross-posting! You can cross post from the '...' menu on posts:

You then pick a community from your subscriptions, or search for any other community, or directly enter the full name like alexandrite@lemmy.world if you want a very specific one and don't want to bother with searching.

And links to cross-posts will now show when viewing a posts:

Alexandrite now matches Lemmy-UI handling taglines. If an instance has any taglines set it will now pick a random one instead of showing all of them.

Lastly if you have NSFW thumbnail handling set to "Hide" or "Blur", it will now hide/blur thumbnails when a post is in a NSFW community, even if the post itself isn't marked NSFW, as the post is probably actually NSFW anyway and it's better to be safe than sorry.

Github release notes

This looks like the future of using Lemmy, very beautiful UI

EDIT: This is now released, see the 0.8.0 release announcement

Please let me know if you have any feedback or find bugs! Note, if you are just seeing a bunch of exclamation marks instead of images and are viewing on alexandrite.app, that's a bug I just noticed, click the "Original Post" button on the post to view on lemmy.world. I'll fix that bug tonight.

I've been working on a light mode, and I added hue customization for links and votes, plus you can customize the base theme saturation. Light/dark mode will be chosen based on your device's preferred setting, but you can set one specifically on the settings page.

Here's the default colors for light mode (up/down votes for illustrative purposes lol):

If you don't want it to be so colorful, lower the saturation:

Or if you prefer a more 'plain' dark mode:

Here's all the settings:

Another screenshot for good measure:

___

tl;dr: Alexandrite now has version numbers, new official docker images are built only when publishing a new release instead of with every change to the main branch, currently 0.7.0 is the only/newest version (if you're using latest that's fine, it'll keep pointing to the newest version too). Now you'll find a version number at the bottom of the "About Alexandrite" page. Alexandrite.app continues to run the latest code from the main branch.

For the technically inclined who want more background: the official site, alexandrite.app, has always been built off the main branch with auto-deploys. I can find a bug and within 5 minutes alexandrite.app can be updated with my fix. It's really convenient because if I deploy something then realize I missed an edge case I can just fix it quick and probably not very many people were ever impacted.

When I first added self-hosting support I just made it publish images based on changes to main, and planned to add proper version numbers soon after (which I've now done). Now knowing people are self hosting using my docker images, and since I don't control how quickly fixes are deployed or when they update, I've needed to be extra cautious to make sure everything works perfectly the first time (or as close as I can manage by myself). I just want to avoid a scenario where I release a big update at 6:00PM, notice a bug and fix it by 6:05PM, but someone's self-hosted instance updates daily at 6:03PM and now that instance has to live with that bug for the next day.

That's why I made this change. The main site can be the "bleeding edge" and then the official docker image releases might be slightly behind and hopefully be slightly more stable.

Besides that, I've been thinking about creating somewhere to chat and share news/ideas of Alexandrite updates besides just this community. Thinking about making either a Discord server or a room on Matrix. Thoughts?

In my opinion, it would be nice to be able to search for communities on specific instances.

Also, would it be possible to have the option to sort or group my community list by instance?

Not a nag or anything. I just checked alexandrite on mobile and it seemed better than I remember. It’s probably better than the default UI. The only issues I could see are some minor sizing wrinkles (relative sizes between fonts and buttons/elements seem to need some tweaking) but otherwise it’s looking pretty good already! (Posted from alexandrite on mobile).

EDIT: This is now released.

Hey! I'm almost done with a new feature and was looking for some feedback. I'm adding alternate post layouts for when viewing posts in a feed. There's a new setting for it:

(List is the default, the only style until now)

Card layout shows the post's image at full height, and the first few lines of the embedded description/post content (got some of the ideas from Sync).

Compact Layout uses smaller thumbnails and fonts to fit a bit more on screen.

With this I'm also working towards mobile support. You'll find things generally work a bit better now with this.

Anyways, let me know how things go, if you find any bugs, or if you have any other feedback.

Recently started using Alexandrite and am really enjoying the experience, but have questions.

I'm thinking of Alexandrite as the chocolate shell over my lemmy.world ice cream cone. Alexandrite is not an instance, correct?

I have not found a place on Alexandrite where my subscriptions (joined communities) are listed. Is this not yet available?

I assume that if I join a community in one (either Alexandrite or Lemmy.world) it will sync with the other. True?

I've joined communities in Alexandrite, but they don't show in the list of subscribed communities in lemmy.world. That just may take more time. Yes?

Thanks!

Hey all, wanted to let you know about the stuff I've added in the last few days.

You can now configure your languages in the "Lemmy" tab in settings! Along with this Alexandrite now respects your instance/community's configured discussion languages, as well as your language settings. If you ever saw a language_not_allowed error when trying to post or comment, this should fix it!

You can now create an account from within Alexandrite! From the login page just enter an instance and you'll see a new button to create an account

And the account creation should have all the same things you're used to seeing. Now if you're introducing someone to Lemmy and send them a link to Alexandrite you won't need to include a "well if you want to make an account go here first, then go back to this site" caveat.

Moderators! There are a couple changes for you too. First off when banning a user you can now do temporary bans, and can remove the user's content just like in the official UI.

When viewing comments under a post, or when viewing posts on a community you will now see a badge next to comments/posts made by moderators. Note: the moderator list needs to be loaded separately for each community, which is why you won't see the badges if you're viewing from the home/search pages (it's one server request to load a list of posts, if each list of post subsequently had to make 50 individual requests for communities that'd be pretty taxing on the servers so until you view a post from that community you won't see "Mod" there).

A few bugs that were fixed:

• If you ctrl+click (or cmd+click on Mac) to open a post in a new tab, it will now do that instead of opening it in the overlay/column
• If a thread is locked you won't be able to comment in the thread.
• Admins now can feature posts in Local
• Instances that have disabled downvoting (like Beehaw) won't show the downvote button
• If you're using Chrome, the "Reply" tooltip doesn't get stuck open anymore.

Anyone know if this is an instance or alexandrite thing? At first I assumed it was the lemmy.world instance not allowing certain words in comments, but I was able to post the same comment word for word directly on the instance. I've encountered this error several times.

I'd like to click the server logo or name in the top left to refresh the page. Not sure if it already does that, but it would be good to have some visual feedback so that it's obvious when it started loading and when it finished. Thank you!

Maybe I've missed it, but from what I can see cross posts aren't displayed.

Hopefully it isn't an issue adding them (don't want to stress you out too much), but I do find it a nice feature of lemmy for keeping things connected.

When viewing a post, I have to click the X in the little bubble at the bottom, or scroll to the top to get the close post button. I keep pressing the ESC key, expecting it to close the post. Can this be added?

EDIT: this has been released! Next I'm working on adding versions to the images published.

Self hosting support finally!

I have a branch up with self hosting instructions, a Dockerfile, and images published to Github's container registry. If anyone wanted to help test it out it's available on this branch (and the PR).

There are a few configuration options you can change as you wish to disable some of the login page links, change the default instance, and optionally only allow logins to a specific instance.

The published image is just slightly out of date since I changed the publish rules, but at the moment it's only missing some extra validation to check if an instance url is valid.

Let me know if you run into any issues or have anything you think I should change or better explain.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/2238542

alexandrite.app - !alexandrite@lemmy.world - Github

Some big updates just arrived!

First, the instance you're on is now in the page URL, which means now you can send links to posts on Alexandrite to friends without them having to set an instance first (or know anything about Lemmy).

That helps to power the next feature which is an account switcher. This lets you switch between all of your accounts on the instance you're browsing! You can also set a default account to use for that instance. Now you could be logged in on multiple accounts across multiple instances just in different browser tabs if you wanted.

Because the instance is now in the URL, if your main account is on lemmy.world but you have an account on programming.dev and a friend sends you a link to a programming.dev post on Alexandrite you'll be signed in as your programming.dev user in that browser tab.

Two clicks to switch which instance you're using (based on what accounts you have)

If you have accounts on more than one instance you can pick which instance you see by default when you go to https://alexandrite.app with no instance in the url, or chose to login on any of the accounts you've signed in as previously from the login page. (And in case anyone was curious, no it does not store passwords).

Another new feature I recently added is a little hint for what a comment is a reply to once you finish reading a deeper thread, easier to understand with a screenshot:

You can also favorite communities to make them show up on the top in the left hand sidebar.

Next I planned on working on stuff for self hosting, so stay tuned.

I just realized I never mentioned in yesterday's announcement that I improved the way searching in comments works earlier this week and thought I should mention it.

tl;dr: There's a search bar next to the comment sort options, typing in there will highlight all the comments that contain your search text, and a second floating nav bar shows up which lets you click next/previous buttons to scroll between search matches.

If you're curious: some technical background. Comments (and basically any other list in Alexandrite) are rendered using a "virtual list" or "virtualized rendering", this is pretty complicated but really common optimization used on sites/apps that let you scroll infinitely as it lets you show a huge list of stuff without the site getting really laggy. It does this by only actually rendering as many comments (or posts etc) as can fit on screen, and skipping the rest, adjusting what's shown to wherever you scroll. So if you're on a post with 1000 comments and you've scrolled down quite a ways, instead of all 1000 comments being on the page maybe only comments 220-230 are there. To an end user you should usually never notice this, but if you scroll really fast, or hit the "scroll to top" button you might sometimes notice the page is blank before a post or comment pops in to fill the empty space a moment later.

The only issue with that, is if not all of the comments are actually on the page you can't really Ctrl+f to search for something in comments, as only a few of the comments are on the page at once. So I needed an in-site way to search through comments, which is where this came in!

I love the added usability of Alexandrite but unless you can block entire instances in it either natively or via greasescript, it is unusable for me.

Thanks for your time!

I didn't know this ... just ran into the feature just now ... maybe it's been there since the beginning.

In the list of subscribed communities ... hover the mouse over the icon of the community ... a star will appear, unfilled if not a favourite, filled if already a favourite ... and click to toggle.

All "favourite" communities will appear at the top of the list in a separate section.

Very nice!!

EDIT: This is now released on the main site, enjoy!

Original post:

I've got some big stuff I'm planning on releasing either later tonight or tomorrow, and I wanted some testers if anyone's willing! ~~The link is at the end of the post.~~

The instance you're browsing is now in the page url, so if you're logged in on lemmy.world, you'll be (once released) on https://alexandrite.app/lemmy.world/.... Now you can share links directly to Alexandrite to friends and they can view it without needing to set a home instance anymore.

But the real cool feature is a new account switcher! This lets you switch between all of your accounts on the instance you're browsing! You can also set a default account to use for that instance. Now you could be logged in on multiple accounts across multiple instances just in different browser tabs if you wanted.

Two clicks to switch which instance you're using (based on what accounts you have)

If you have accounts on more than one instance you can pick which instance you see by default when you go to https://alexandrite.app with no instance in the url, or chose to login on any of the accounts you've signed in as.

You'll need to login again because it's a new url, but I wrote some code to migrate to the new way I'm handling accounts so you won't be logged out when this is all released.

Please let me know if you find any bugs!