(dev here) Sorry! The post forgot to mention Alexandrite is meant to be a alternate UI for desktop. There are a lot of issues if you try using it on mobile at the moment, because I haven't done the work to support it yet. I would keep using whatever you've been using on mobile.

I'm planning on adding alternate post styles in the (hopefully near) future. A more compact style is one of the styles I want to add.

I don't think so, at least when I scroll my pixelfed feed it loads images from various domains.

(dev here) I hadn't really considered it as a full replacement before, but hosting it alongside the instance like a desktop version of m.lemmy.world is something I think would be neat (at least one instance is doing that, with a custom Dockerfile because I haven't made one yet). I'd need to add some mobile support (which I'm not against doing in the future) and some admin tools probably before it could be a full replacement, both would probably not be for a bit still because I'm still working on feature parity for normal users. Also still waiting on a Lemmy issue to be fixed before I can add image uploading which is the most basic feature the site lacks at the moment.

(dev here) I totally understand that, I wish Lemmy had that or oauth, I don't like handling passwords just as much as you don't want me to!

Or find and replace all the periods with ones that are slightly larger font.

I recently got back into working on Alexandrite after a little more than a year of no activity/updates, and I've been checking out Photon. I'm extremely impressed with what you've managed to accomplish while I've been gone! I've already taken inspiration from your work with some of my recent changes, and will likely copy more of your homework. Like others are saying, don't sell yourself short! You've built one of the best Lemmy frontends out there and I've got a lot of catching up to do.

There's a slider in the settings for the hue used for all the background/borders/text etc, so you can change it from purple to other colors, like:

Eventually I plan on adding more customization so you can change the colors of links/votes, and I need to make a light theme because so many people want that too.

(dev here) I had an idea for how I'd build a profile switcher recently, it's something I want to implement soon.

I was feeling pretty bad about leaving it untouched for so long, but working on (any of) my side projects wasn't interesting me for a while. However with all the general social media turmoil out there (Meta trying to be more evil, US banning TikTok, and billionaires in general being just the worst) I figured I should do my part to improve the appeal of the fediverse. Seeing lots of things I want to improve, and I'm remembering how much I like making things look nice.

I use Imagus and it doesn't work well with Alexandrite, I was trying to find some documentation on if I could support Imagus from the website side somehow, like attributes to provide non-thumbnail image URL hints but I hadn't found documentation yet.

I've been meaning to try building something similar into Alexandrite at some point otherwise.

(I'm the dev of Alexandrite) Officially there isn't yet a way to self-host it without modifying the code (unless you host it on one of a few specific cloud providers like the official Alexandrite site does), but now that people are self hosting anyway I think adding support for it is going to be higher up on my priority list!

Thanks!

The username/password are just used once to login and get an auth token and that auth token is stored in a cookie. The username is also stored in a cookie, but the password is not. Here's the login code

Yes you can! However the production version currently uses Sveltekit's adapter-auto which just runs on various cloud platforms, so it might not be that easy to self host without changes. You can run the dev version of the site by cloning it, running npm install and npm run dev and viewing it at http://localhost:5173/ but that won't be as optimized so your page load would be slower.

If you want to self host, would a docker image make it easier?

I mostly browse on desktop, but wasn't a big fan of the main site, so I made my own one called Alexandrite that I think is more convenient to use. I use Voyager on my phone and I'm excited for Sync to release.

If anyone's curious here's one of my announcement posts, and another that includes mod tools.

Thanks!

Yep, I'm actually working on making those changes now.

This was the most glaring missing basic feature for so long, glad it's finally in, I don't have to go back to the default ui just to write my announcement posts anymore. It wasn't possible to upload images from third party websites last time I was actively working on Alexandrite, and I think it's been possible for quite a long time by now and I'm finally getting to it.

I would love to add this, but I'm hesitant at the moment as just adding this as an Alexandrite feature is only a half-fix. I'd just end up not showing posts for that instance, but Lemmy would still send all of the posts to Alexandrite regardless, so it'd be possible if you blocked enough instances that Alexandrite would have to load 5 pages of posts to show you one page of results (or worse), which could add extra load on the servers that wouldn't happen if it was officially supported by Lemmy.

It's a really popular feature request though, so I wouldn't be surprised if it gets added to Lemmy in the (hopefully not too distant) future, after which I will for sure implement it in Alexandrite. Relevant Lemmy Github issue

I didn't see anything about it, but I wish they would change how typing a message works. When my keyboard is open it's so big it covers the chat and I can't see the message I'm typing so I just have to hope I'm typing what I think I am.

Thanks! There aren't really any settings yet, but I would like to add different post views for the feed someday among other things.

The theme stuff is probably somewhat easy to add. All the purple tinted colors you see (borders/texts/background colors etc) are based on a customizable hue so I can change the whole hue of the website with one css variable. I'll throw that on my todo list.