Photon is two years old now! (I missed the birthday which was 2 weeks ago. :< )

I've done these posts a few times during Photon's early days, and they've been helpful.

2.0 is almost out, I'm done with pretty much everything and it's stable enough. There's bug fixes in here that make it arguably more stable than the current "stable" release.

I ended up with a bit of a "RobTop and 2.2" situation working on this update.

if you're on phtn.app you're always on the latest commit, and if you're using lemdro.id, p.lemmy.world, or photon.slrpnk.net, you're on the latest 2.0 beta.

Ill make a big release note once it's out, but for now:

Are there any new features that you'd like?

Currently planned is:

• Piefed support (targeting v2.2.0)

Can't see my comment history... Using phtn.app

There has been a change to how the submission page works under profile. I used to see posts and comments one the same page, now it's separate and it needs an extra click to see my comments. I would love to have a setting where I can choose how to display that content: posts, comments, or both - and Photon would remember the setting. It's not a big thing, just a convenience and for my use case a regression to how it worked before.

That said, I love Photon. Thank you for your great work.

Sometime recently, the page that shows while the content is loading got changed to have a dark color theme, even on light mode. This is slightly surprising for my eyes every time I click on a button to get a flash of dark and then light.

In the window that pops up when replying to someone, the viewport that shows the original comment is obscured if it exceeds the size of the container that it's in. There is a sort of fade away effect towards the bottom, which is fine, but the problem is that there doesn't appear to be any way to scroll or expand the comment to view the full size.

Picture attached for reference:

I am currently working on alpha PieFed support for Photon.

The PieFed API is missing a lot of features from native PieFed, so not all functionality you'd expect will work (notably, the inbox.) I can't do anything about this until those features are added to the API.

The way I'm writing this will also allow Mastodon support in the future.

Status

I've already implemented basically the entire AVAILABLE PieFed API. You can try a beta here.

You can view my progress at via the pull request on GitHub.

Hello! As the piefed API has been released a week or so ago, i'm wondering of photon will ever support it? The APIs are very similar, so it would not need much modification to get it working.

For reference:

Tesseract, mlem, voyager and thunder are all interested in getting piefed support soon. Interstellar already supports it.

Tons of huge instances have decided to run a piefed instance, too:

• piefed.blahaj.zone
• piefed.world
• piefed.ca
• quokk.au
• slrpnk.net (potentially, in the future)
• dbzer0.com (potentially, in the future)

Thanks in advance!

see spoiler-formatted section in the post for a more detailed image altough its the same source.

looks like some images are lower resolution over photon than over other frontends for no reason. It bothered me so much, looks like its only this frontend, isnt it?

is there a way to use photon differently to get full res because clicking the download icon (open in new tab) doesnt do it neither.

Will this be fixed?

cross-posted from: https://feddit.org/post/12010107

full res, somehow image posts are always for ants

cross-posted from: https://slrpnk.net/post/20608572

Anyone else running into this issue?

I was seeing downvotes of hundreds of thousands and in some case even millions. But that's not the case when I log in from the standard Lemmy UI. (See left of picture) Also, tens of thousands of dollars are being solicited from the app (see right) Finally, some odd spam posts appear only via this app (middle right).

I don't know if this app is abandoned, but to the users: be warned. I've switched to alexandrite.app out of safety concerns.

Upon going back to the feed page from a post page, the feed tends to load in at a different point (higher up) than where it was before. This results in a lot of repetitive scrolling.

Also, I noticed that (when new content is being loaded in?) the scrolling gets stuck in the same spot. Scrolling kind of just glitches on the same spot until it gets past it and then resumes as normal.

Hey, I noticed that the expand/collapse button tends to block text sometimes. Is there any way that it could be made transparent when hovering the mouse over it? Also, the hover text should say 'collapse' when the text has already been expanded.

cross-posted from: https://feddit.org/post/9414466

See big red box on image attached (collapse as in the feature on reddit)

There is also a container feature already. I marked it at the bottom of attached image with a smaller red box

cross-posted from: https://feddit.org/post/9377399

I dont see any posts in this forum, is this a me issue? (sorry am new)

It's been on a separate URL for a while now but it is now on phtn.app.

It hasn't been merged to main yet and has not been put as stable release, but i believe it is stable enough to bring to my URL.

Once the stable release is out, I will write release notes. This is the svelte 5 version.

that's it

The post: https://sh.itjust.works/post/33016821

The spoiler is working on the post page but not the preview from the community feed.

I'm using Firefox desktop with phtn.app

So the overall layout won't change, and if you're using default navigation settings, you'll barely notice any difference.

Instances using Photon with SSR have rightfully complained that there's a layout shift between server load and hydration. This happens because the current navbar's position isn't determined by CSS, but by calculations in JavaScript. This is pretty messy and bad.

I rewrote it to be CSS based so that this shift won't happen, and it also simplifies the code quite a lot. However, there's one downside, you won't be able to manually customize the position: the navbar will be a top panel on desktop, and a bottom dock on mobile.

One new feature in this is that on mobile, the bottom dock will hide when you scroll down and re-appear when you scroll up at all. You can disable that in settings.

I consider Photon an opinionated client (of my opinion), but I also want to make sure this isn't a dealbreaker for anyone.

Github Link

Preview URL

I use Lemmy for bigger news and all that, but sometimes I like to showcase little things I've done in Photon or tweaked. Maybe even hold polls there.

Should I post mini updates there? Lemmy will still be reserved for the big ones.

@photonlemmy@mas.to

The Svelte 5 migration has progressed enough that I think it's safe to release betas now.

Docker tags are released for 2.0.0-beta.2, and you can access the latest beta yourself at https://svelte-5.photon-8na.pages.dev/.

I've made a few UX changes to match the new codebase, I hope that this release is good for you.

Please let me know of any major issues.

Photon I feel is a representation of my general ability to do software development, as it's my biggest project. I'm disappointed in myself for how it's been going so far suddenly.

I go through these switches in terms of my philosophy with software, and I guess right now I'm in the "it should do what it should well and expectedly, stop trying to do more and sacrifice the main functionality" phase.

I don't like where Photon ended up, I added too many """features""" that were half baked and just complicated the codebase and added more issue vectors. What people use the most: posts and commenting, have been suffering in their usability with random bugs and a non-seamless experience.

I've also been going much too slow on my promises for Svelte 5, and I can't change much until I've finished that or I'll get conflicts. I've been too lazy because of school and my life.

As soon as I finish the svelte 5 migration, I'm gonna change these things:

• No more features that are out of scope. The "translation", link shortcuts, etc, are going to be removed or gutted.
• I'm going to switch a lot more systems to be component based, no more one-off buttons and inconsistent interfaces.
• This app will focus on Lemmy and follow it more closely if it's not bad UX.
• I will switch to a lot more native systems instead of using cursed JavaScript powered ones. For example, I have to make the dock change via CSS instead of checking and changing dynamically in code.
• Most pages must work server side, and the entire app must be usable somewhat.
• I'm still conflicted on whether I should make photon run its authentication logic, etc server side or if that can stay client side.

I still am obligated to continue work on Photon, and I need to fulfill the promises I make. I hope Photon will be better in 2025.