As you likely know we are running several alternative web front ends for Lemmy. Currently they are:
Of these Alexandrite and Mlmym have not been updated and maintained for more than one year now and the original authors have likely lost interest. I also assume that once we upgrade to Lemmy 1.0 they will stop working properly.
In addition I think only Photon and maybe Voyager have added support for the Piefed API, should we switch to that in the future (but it seems like Lemmy 1.0 might solve our main technical concerns with it, and the memory consumption recently got quite a bit better).
So all in all, we will probably sunset Mlmym and Alexandrite soon.
There is also a new frontend called Blorp that we could set up. It seems quite nice, but also very similar to Photon. But let me know if you are interested in using this frontend.
Edit: I was made aware of an somewhat maintained fork of Mlmym that we are now using, so that one can stay a bit longer then.
Edit2: We switched to an even better maintained mlmym fork that even plans to support the Lemmy 1.0 api v4, so I think that one should be good to keep for a while.
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I’m not sure if it’s related to your two updates or not but, within the last week or so, my load time loading into this instance on mobile and on voyager have been cut in half. It was taking forever there for a bit. Now it’s the same as any other instance I load. So yeah, idk the tech answer but, things have improved!
Yeah the server the reverse-proxy runs on was overwhelmed dealing with AI scraper requests in a strange feedback loop with Anubis. I am almost a bit suspicious if this is intentional to discurage the use of Anubis, but for now these scrapers seem to be fine with ingesting the garbage that Iocaine serves them, so at least temporarily our instance behaves again like expected.
Can’t AI just leave one thing I like alone? 🤣😭
Is there a significant server load difference between the different front ends (including local ones like Boost/Jerboa on Android)?
PS: Also, looks like Fedihosting-Foundation-Forks is maintaining a fork “on limited life support” of mlmym to support the instance at old.lemmy.world, its last commit was 5 months ago.
They all call the same API, so it should be mostly the same.
I didn’t know that there is a fork, thanks for sharing. I’ll probably update to that one first then (Edit: done). I rather like to keep a version for old PCs or browsers available.
Hello! I just found this thread. I also have a fork of mlmym, based on the FHF version, at https://code.mschae23.de/mschae23/mlmym. I’m also working towards support for the v4 API of lemmy 1.0, but progress is slow :)
I hope you don’t mind this bit of self promotion.
Thanks for sharing and keeping it alive.
May I ask how much of it is LLM generated?
Everything I’ve done was written entirely by me, as I don’t use AI on principle. I’m fairly sure it was used by some people to contribute to the FHF fork (I’ve seen
CLAUDE.mdadded to gitignore), and the readme and docs did have that AI-generated “feel” to it, if that makes sense. That’s mostly why I reverted them to what it looked like in rystaf’s version in that commit. I couldn’t tell whether AI had also been used for code, so I left that unchanged.Ok great, that is what I hoped to hear 👍
I’ll try your fork later today and see if there are any issues. Thanks again.
Edit: Nice, seems to work quite well. I’ll also try switching to Iocaine in front (edit: done), so that we don’t have that Javascript barrier in front of it.
Nice! I don’t know if you’ve done so yet, but I recommend enabling some options by default:
SHOW_UNREAD_COMMENTS(this one is really useful!),LANGUAGE_TAGS,SHOW_CONTROVERSIAL, and, if you want it,EMBED_METADATA. They’re just environment variables, set to1to enable.If you have any questions or problems, feel free to reach out to me!
Ah, excellent, these are all good. Thanks for the heads up.
My experience is, I try the frontends out every month or so but always go back to plain (browser, on mobile and desktop) because some feature is missing or off
I like how they look though! And am frontend curious — just haven’t seen one I like more then default web experience yet
Lemmy ui in 1.0.0 is really good tho
I just peeked at your instance and it doesn’t look that different to me. 👀 of course that was just a casual glance
Aesthetically it isn’t, but I’m finding it a lot more usable on mobile
Blorp works very well.
I’m just using boost on mobile and am barely on desktop, so not many opinions from me.
Photon has never worked for me in mobile so having a similar alternative wouldn’t be bad.
Yeah it never really works for me either. I mostly only use it for access to my uploaded files, but even for that it hardly works.
On the normal lemmy UI, there’s a tab on the profile page that lets you see and delete uploaded images.
The normal Lemmy UI will not load for me on Safari on iOS or macOS and I have been instructed to use photon, which mostly does not load as well.
Ah, darn. Unfortunately I don’t have any apple devices to test, but does it load okay in a non-safari browser like firefox on MacOS? I’m guessing you’re kinda screwed on iOS since from what I recall, alternative browsers there are just Safari re-skins :(
I’ll try to see if Blorp has any upload management ability and report back, since that’s available on both iOS and Android.
Update: Blorp does not. At least, not the mobile app :(
If that was caused by Anubis, maybe try again now as currently we use only Iocaine on the normal UI?
So far, without Anubis, everything is loading correctly with the default webUI. Hopefully iocaine works at keeping out the bots.
Technically it is worse at it than Anubis and probably needs some additional scraper block like hapdash behind it to weed out the residential proxies that have become common, but for some reason Anubis was causing some scraper to go into some sort of reconnection loop and that heavily taxed our reverse-proxy. With Iocaine it seems to just happily ingest the LLM poison and that causes much less load on our server, so for now that solved the issue.
The problem I was having with Anubis was every link I clicked checked I was legit and after two or three the page html(?) stopped fully loading and I had a mess of a view. On my Mac I can force reload to purge my cache, but on iOS I have to clear my entire browsing history each time, and it only lasted a few clicks before I had to do it again.
