Photon

Photon doesn't seem to support any of the common methods for a line break in markdown. Both "trailing whitespace" (2+ spaces at the end of a line) and "backslash" methods render the lines side-by-side without a space. <br> does render the text on separate lines but also renders the tag in the post.

Trailing whitespace seems to be the de facto standard in the Threadiverse. It works everywhere that I've checked (except photon and tesseract), whereas some clients just render the backslash in the second method. Oddly, photon doesn't display the backslash but also doesn't render a line break.

Would it be possible to support at least trailing whitespace in photon? Or, alternatively, I suppose someone could tell me the dumb thing I'm doing wrong in my posts. Thanks!

For example, if you open this page, it will look like you can edit the title and sidebar, and even add/remove mods: https://photon.lemmy.ca/c/onguardforthee/settings

It doesn't actually work, and nothing will happen when you press save.

I noticed it just now while using the UI to add some new mods to a community.

I installed the new android app and really enjoying it. Thank you so much for your work!

I couldn't get post sharing to work as a phtn link though. It creates a localhost url.

Still going!

I've been exploring other projects recently but I still enjoy maintaining and improving Photon.

Lemmy v1

Support for Lemmy v1 (API v4) is complete as for all currently existing functions. I've finished a few of the new Lemmy features (post tags, multi communities) but still have some others to add.

This update also comes with a lot of technical improvements and UX improvements, and should fix a few long standing issues. I'm quite excited to merge it.

The way I implemented this update was to rebase the entire client on the API v4 schemas and structures. While this was great for my overall code quality, and helps me future proof this client, it means I now have to write a compatibility adapter to support API v3. To make things worse, I have to rewrite the entire Piefed adapter (unless I do some cursed setup like Piefed adapter -> v3 adapter -> v4/base).

Android app

You can now install an APK for Photon! It has a few minor issues but should be pretty usable, and it has edge-to-edge support unlike the PWA. You can get it from https://github.com/xyphyn/photon/releases, going to the latest one, and downloading app-release.apk. You can paste the GitHub link into obtainium, too.

Future

I have a lot of UX improvements to make, but I'm waiting until after Lemmy V1 releases to make them (I don't want to bloat the PR too much). I want to make things more "reliable", by fixing the way pages are cached, keeping scrolling states intact, adding "drafts" everywhere in case you accidentally delete things, and overall keeping everything in sync. Some changes in the API v4 PR provide the first step to achieving this.

I'm planning to make a "demo" version of Photon that has a heavily curated default feed (not for standard use! phtn.app will remain untouched) so that I can show it in my resume or something.

Closing

Thanks to everyone who uses this app! It was an important pathway to me becoming a better web developer (as much as I dislike that title). I'm rather surprised how many Lemmy servers host it now, and even strange obscure non-fediverse websites using it inexplicably. (Related to recent events, did you know Tesseract began as a fork of Photon?)

if you'd like to donate to support my work, you can do so here.

Are we ever getting a video upload option from the media picker?

I've been getting Not Found all day

A few of the features are also available in Piefed. It might be helpful to implement them both at once :)

Hello 👋. I can't use Photon while RethinkDNS is active. I can log in to the website, but as soon as I do, the errors shown in the photo appear, and I can't use it.

cross-posted from: https://lemdro.id/post/38345798

I noticed these strange banners today.

But can't post photos here apparently

I've always thought that the photon project didn't receive enough money.

Very few lemmy instances actually proxy images, and this makes it impossible to run image transforms (compression and resizing). this leads to a lot of scenarios where some profile picture that gets rendered at 24x24px is actually downloading a full-size 4K image. additionally, you've connected to hundreds of domains in the process of scrolling your home feed, leaking your IP address to all of them.

i'm working on a centralized image proxy that solves these problems (though it's not locked into photon, it depends on environment variables). it'll roll out on phtn.app for now.

Comparison

Compact mode, loading 1 page on home feed

• Unproxied: 836 KB downloaded, 30 domains
• Proxied: 76 KB downloaded, 1 domain

Thanks to a PR from @Kehet https://github.com/Xyphyn/photon/pull/711 there are now keyword filters for posts. It's pretty easy to add comments next, which i will do soon

The reason I didn't like filters initially is that I dislike completely missing any information. This filter system has an option for "minimize" which tells you that a post was hidden, which I vastly prefer. If you want to completely hide posts, there's also a "hide" option. Regexes are supported too!

I turn off infinite scroll cause it bugs out sometimes, and there's always a page count and arrow buttons, except when I go to "saved." I know I've saved more than 10 things, and I don't think they've all been deleted, so I thought I'd report it.

• design: use common components for administration pages
• design: use common styles for vote buttons
• impr: add proper pageination to messages page, fix diffing desync
• feat: add autosubmit to URL autofill
• design: use Materials for highlights in comments
• fix: piefed poll vote api schema changes
• fix: markdown tables re-enable
• feat: add custom thumbnail option to PostForm
• feat: add piefed metadata generation
• design: redesign the profile block pages to not look awful
• fix: post polls causing a scroll to top
• feat: make comment guide borders clickable to collapse (like reddit)
• misc: skip client validation for linked instances
• feat: make command palette more obvious with a button in profile picture (ctrl + k guys) (or right click/hold on photon logo)

Full Changelog: https://github.com/Xyphyn/photon/compare/v2.2.1...v2.2.2

I get blank empty screen a lot when I'm in page inbox.

• when clicking mark all as read
• when going to messages or replies or mentions

[![](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/44/Narrow-banded_dartwhite_%28Catasticta_flisa_postaurea%29_underside_on_Mimosa_pudica.jpg)](https://github.com/Xyphyn/photon/)

Above is an image inside a link. The image is broken.

I poked at the source code and found that MdImage gets passed href of the parent link and not the image url itself. So the image component tries to display https://github.com/Xyphyn/photon/ instead of what its supposed to. It's probably caused by value meant for parent being sent to children via those ...rest params in MdTree, but I couldn't follow that enough to find out how exactly.

Bonus: This bug lets me embed a video straight into the post

[![](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/44/Narrow-banded_dartwhite_%28Catasticta_flisa_postaurea%29_underside_on_Mimosa_pudica.jpg)](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQw4w9WgXcQ)

It is recommended to install this update as soon as possible, it contains important security fixes.

What's Changed

• feat: add piefed polls and events
  • only supported on piefed v1.4.0 which isn't out yet
• feat: add piefed user notes
  • ditto
• feat: auto-detect server software type in login form
• impr: optimize theme css handling, decrease stylesheet size
• design: revolutionize modal animations by making them zoom out instead of zoom in
• feat: add a share target to the PWA
  • you can share a link with the app. it won't start a discussion with you unfortunately, instead it'll automatically convert the link to a photon compatible link (so you can open lemmy posts in the app)
• misc: enable sourcemaps in production for Transparency™
  • no security risk. in fact it improves security because you can see if the source code matches the actual photon source
• performance: optimize the virtualizer resizeobserver
• design: use EntityHeaders for instance and community cards
• design: make toasts look anywhere between 0% and 200% better
• design: improve the comment context UI, showing a +x more button and an all comments button
• fix: loading logo not appearing on firefox
• fix: separate password lengths on piefed and lemmy
• fix: make PostListShell parameters reactive to fix stubborn sorting
• impr: various behind-the-scenes improvements in codebase
• misc: make postbody collapse/expand button sticky so you dont have to scroll toe the bottom
• fix: moderation report id collisions

Full Changelog: https://github.com/Xyphyn/photon/compare/v2.1.1...v2.2.0

Since yesterday, scrolling is broken for me on Photon Web. The posts are jumping up and down so I lose what I was just reading, new posts are often not loaded and when they finally are, they jump a couple of posts down so I have to go back up to find where I was. Sorry, can't explain it any better. It does not happen on Lemmy.ml or other Lemmy web apps. Any idea what's going on?

Anyone having the same issue?

What's Changed

• design: make media embeds not look like garbage
• design: make error containers not look awful
• design: make big community cards not look awful (and make them fully clickable)
• fix: photon accidentally took inspiration from every article site ever and would autoplay videos from posts when you navigated. this was fixed
• fix: a poor, alone button was in the command palette. i joined it with the other ones so that you can actually navigate with arrow keys and it looks better
  • it also got a friend, an option to search communities.
• fix: i made a workaround for a svelte bug (i think). somehow, it would render an {#if} branch even if the condition was false, specifically if you had a dynamic component anywhere. this caused post feeds to have stale data when switching accounts.
• fix: automatically strip leading https:// from the login prompt, for people who interpret "server domain" as the full fwicking url
• fix: CommentItem had a shadow when it shouldn't've (that's a word?)
• fix: when you went to edit your post, it would crash. i fixed

Full Changelog: https://github.com/Xyphyn/photon/compare/v2.1.0...v2.1.1