this post was submitted on 15 Jul 2025
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Blorp is one of these. and Photon plans to support PieFed in the future.
Yeah sorry didn't notice
web
is also listed there. It's still kinda designed for mobile browsers though. I hope we can get a proper front-end for desktops in the future, like Alexandrite.Blorp dev here. I’m trying not to favor one platform over another. What about the desktop experience makes you feel like it’s not a proper desktop front-end? I know the stack routing is typically a mobile app thing, but I felt like it added to the desktop experience. Feel free to open a GitHub issue with suggestions if you haven’t already.
Hey. Not knocking on the blorp desktop version at all, it looks good! The main thing I'm looking for in desktop browser UIs is taking advantage of screen real estate and not leaving a lot of dead space. Similar to how old reddit is compared to new reddit and how the default UIs for lemmy and piefed really fill up the available space. One tab browsing is also a good feature IMO.
For example, Alexandrite can look like this:
And Voyager's tablet mode, while not really optimized for desktop, also works somewhat:
Yeah that’s totally fair. I think that’s a slightly different vision than what I’m going for, but a totally valid design. Personally the multi column feed and post at the same time isn’t for me, but I understand why people like it. I think Voyager is going to continue to optimize for larger screens. I’ve spoken to the voyager dev a bunch, and I’ve been really inspired by what he’s built.
I absolutely understand if multi-column view is not in your design plan. So yeah really, just maximizing space is what I'm after in a desktop UI. Great work on blorp, and I'm looking forward to see its progress! I also have the mobile client and I'm playing around with it on my piefed account.
I would not count on Alexandrite, as its last commit has been 5 months ago...
Maybe just try to use a default interface? PieFed's frontend is not so much separated from backend and remains a first class citizen among the clients.
Yeah I'm aware that Alexandrite hasn't been updated for a while. Anyways, I checked out Voyager on a desktop browser and the tablet mode view is pretty similar. And since the devs are working on piefed compatibility, I think this will do for now until a better one comes.
Just to add on to this, the web ui for piefed is the native client and basically every feature comes to the web ui first. The api that other frontends/clients is very much a work in progress and only exposes a subset of piefed's features (so far).
In addition to this, these other clients are basically only using the same api routes that lemmy has since that is what they were designed for. So, they don't really have many (or any) features that are piefed-only.
Edit: The PWA for piefed is quite usable and I have put a lot of effort into the UI changes I have contributed to make sure that the interface reacts well down to small screen sizes. So, give that a shot to get the full piefed experience.