Xylight

TLDR: after/if this is finished, Photon will support no-javascript usage a lot better with authentication and settings respected. It'll be more suitable as a default interface for Lemmy instances.

Photon currently is a client-side only app, with optional guest SSR. This works great as a web app, but not for SEO. While you can enable SSR for SEO, it is not authenticated and will lead to a flash of content from a guest user instead of your profile--making things clunky for actual users.

this pr aims to do the following:

• Rewrite app-side data to use a unified userHost object that can be filled with either data from a cookie, or localStorage.
• this will allow for a hybrid mode, where you can either use server-side user data or client-side user data.
• userHost data is stored in a JSON state, but can be loaded into reactive classes for the client/rendering.
• Instead of using global state in the form of profile or settings objects, use Svelte's getContext and setContext to access this data.
• Maintain a near-identical user experience for client-side instances, such as at phtn.app.

This will be relatively difficult, as I'll have to rewrite every instance of those globals being used, and I'll have to update all API calls to go through the server.

I'm using Arch currently and the following issues have been present on every install of Steam I've had:

• Controller inputs break constantly. If I use big picture mode, the games will be in some quasi state where it both detects my controller and doesn't.
• The menus take like 3 seconds to open.
• The right click menu in the system tray does not work 30% of the time.
• Worst of all, when I close a game, steam will not detect that it closes. Once this happens, no other page will load, no menus will open, and i have to killall steam -s SIGKILL, since no other signal works. It's also survived SIGKILL multiple times. How?
• In game, the shift+tab menu does not work; half the buttons are unresponsive and the game will crash upon closing shift+tab

The arch wiki had nothing on this.

Flatpak and native installs have the same problem, reinstallation does nothing, steam --reset does nothing.

These issues occur across multiple games with different engines.

It's very strange since I have a very generic system and most people seem to have great experiences.

Curious on the usage statistics.

Should I make a full survey asking about granularity so that app devs can see what to focus on?

Interesting article shared with me about the way Wi-Fi location services work.

Google has announced it is building a new way for 'experienced users' to install Android apps that haven't been verified.

test

Benchmarks look pretty good, even better than some of the text only models, make sure to take them with a grain of salt tho

Benchmarks

Qwen3 VL 30b a3b (No Thinking)

Visual benchmarks for Qwen3 VL 235 A22B (Thinking)

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

What's Changed

• feat: add piefed support
  • you can log into your Piefed account and browse all available features in the API
  • some piefed exclusive features are available too, like user/post flairs, feeds, and topics.
• perf: optimize code bundle size -- initial bundle from 780 KB -> 620 KB
  • cool, tf does that mean
    • ok bub this basically means that theres less code loaded initially so stuff loads faster.
  • I rewrote some bad libraries that were bloating up the javascript
  • yes im embarassed the bundle is this high. im getting it lower every update i swear
  • at least its still smaller than lemmy-ui
  • in addition i restructured the entire file tree of the app, and wrote nearly 3000 import statements manually because i have a human soul and i lowk felt filled with determination
• impr: rewrite feed handling, cache more things
  • post feeds, post pages, communities, feed feeds, topic fe
  • wait a second, feed feeds?? this naming is getting out of hand.
  • ok, in piefed there's "feeds". that's pretty cool. but now the "main feed" can either be the main feed or the main feed.
    • what?
• impr: use native css for more things
  • this is partially because i am embarassed that i use tailwind
  • i am migrating common components to use vanilla css but with some advantages of tailwind
  • like i can use a compile-time design system and it has nice @variant things
  • this also makes the DOM tree smaller so theres probably some benefit elsewhere...maybe
• impr: automatically mark inbox items as read when you click jump
• design: make the modlog not look like absolute buns
  • it actually fits on one screen now and looks nicer. you can now observe the insanity of Lemmy's moderation with more comfort.
• design: make the mobile navbar not look like absolute buns
  • i made the tap targets bigger too. next update i will make them cover the whole screen
• design: make the accounts page not look like absolute buns
• impr: i made the things that should be radio groups actually be radio groups. no problem
• impr: expandables and comments now use <label> so that it uses browser native html
• fix: admin detection is better. lemmy removed a property i used constantly for some reason. i fixed that though
• impr: this one makes me mad. for some reason, native CSS transitions absolutely ruin font rendering (on firefox at least). so i removed some animations or replaced them with svelte ones (js ew)
• impr: i preload a lot more things on hover/tap now. things will be like 100ms faster.
  • call me john locke in the way i be optimizing ts
• misc: the term "instance" has been replaced with "server". let's be real, talking about instances makes no sense

Full Changelog: https://github.com/Xyphyn/photon/compare/v2.0.2...v2.1.0

Try now on Photon™©️ (phtn.app) today! 🚀