whelp, there it is
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FYI, a lemmy iOS app, Mlem, is in active development, and we hope to be at 1.0 by July 1. It’s heavily inspired by Apollo, but, obviously, with changes for lemmy.
Stay tuned and subscribe to c/mlemapp for updates!
Edit: I want to note that, since one of the biggest sticking points with 3rd-party apps has been both accessibility for the blind and deaf and mod tools, they’re both on our minds as we design the interface. Getting both right will, of course, take time, but we want everyone to know that we fully intend to make our app usable for everyone.
Edit: I want to note that, since one of the biggest sticking points with 3rd-party apps has been both accessibility for the blind and deaf and mod tools, they’re both on our minds as we design the interface. Getting both right will, of course, take time, but we want everyone to know that we fully intend to make our app usable for everyone.
This is excellent to hear. If you’re still on reddit, you should post this to r/blind, as they’ve been in limbo about whether their tools will be granted an “exception” to use the reddit API and they may be looking into alternatives for their community.
I’ll consider it, but feel free to x-post this there or make your own post. We’re not exactly in PR mode right now since these tools and features are still in their conceptual stages and we’re still trying to figure out how best to implement them-- especially the accessibility features. We’re looking to bring on an accessibility specialist to the team to consult with us, so if anyone would like to help on that front Please let us know by joining our Mlem app chat on Matix.
We’ll also be making a wider recruitment post to expand our dev team in the next few days, so keep an eye out for that, too! We’re currently a tiny team of passionate volunteers, and there’s a LOT to do!
edit: Link to GitHub project iif anyone wants to get a feel for where we are now.
I have the Mlem app but I’m have problems logging in, during login it says I I’m logged into beehaw.org but then says can’t connect to beehaw.org. Am I doing something wrong?
it may have to do with the popular lemmy instances being slammed right now. Until very recently, they weren’t handling a lot of heavy traffic-- after Christian Selig’s initial announcement about the Reddit API changes, there was a massive spike in traffic from Reddexiters, and, now, again within the last hour since his latest post. Instance admins are expanding their capacity, but can only do so much, being independent volunteers running servers on their own.
Give it time. the servers are a bit bogged down right now.
I just tried it again and it’s now working. Can’t wait to test it out!
Good to hear. I’m kinda hoping the Apollo source will become public once it closes. Anything that gets us close to that kind of experience would be great.
I’m the UX designer on the app, so the idea is to get close in terms of usability and style while making the app “our own”. So, the app will, ideally, feel a lot like Apollo, but without outright copying it.
We want to take the best of Apollo (minus some things we don’t like about it), and make something that’s inclusive of how lemmy works and operates.
minus some things we don’t like about it
What don’t you like about Apollo? If you don’t mind me asking.
well, as a UX designer, there are some decisions he made, years ago, that were based on an older philosophy of iOS interaction design that have since been updated. An overreliance on list display modalities, for example, pull-up menus, and other minor things in the interface which make complex workflows tedious and which can be optimized using more contemporary workflow ideologies. Stuff that, as a solo developer, he didn’t have time to address but which, as a new team starting out, we can redesign from the ground up.
We’re starting fresh, so we don’t have to worry about changing some monolith this that already exists. We have a lot more freedom than Christian does/did. We want to set a foundation based on the best of what we’ve learned from the greats but with a path for growth for the future for ourselves and our users.
Can we expect these improvements to come to Jerboa as well?
I’m not involved in that project, but it’s an open community project. I’m sure you can go to them and voice your wishes.
Just want to say I found and installed your app mlem on ios. So far so good. One bug I noticed is on my first login, after I closed the app, it deleted my logged in account. Logged back in and now working well. Forgot to do a bug capture but it hasn’t come up again. Amazing work, and really appreciate you helping people get access to Lemmy as a community.
While I’m coping that Christian “ports” Apollo over to work with Lemmy, I love what you guys are doing with Mlem. I’m in the beta via TestFlight and what’s there works quite well (even though you can clearly tell it’s early days).
I’m very new to iOS development, but if I find the time and motivation I might put in the hours to contribute a feature or two.
Been using it for a few days, and it’s very nice. Not feature complete, obviously, but what’s there is great.
Glad you like it-- there will probably be many changes as soon as it gets updated (we’re still figuring out what works and what doesn’t). But, and everyone should be aware of this: v1.0’s goal is “be functional and stable”. Features will get added as we go (hopefully quickly). Apps like Apollo, RIF, etc, are mature, having been developed over years of work and user feedback. And while we can stand on the shoulders of giants like Christian Selig with regard to our direction and goals, we’re just getting started.
That said, we’re here to serve the community as we are also part of it, so we are doing all we can to build a great app!
Do you need beta testers?
the beta is currently open in testflight, I believe. we’ll be forming user testing groups in the near-future.
I’ll enable testflight on my new phone and try it out. Hopefully I can provide some useful feedback.
Good luck on that, and thank you for your work (saying this as an Android user, but every platform deserves a nice Lemmy client!)
there is also Jerboa on Android for folks who are on Boost, which is also going to inevitably disappear lol
Yeah I’m a Boost user and I’m using Jerboa. It’s not such a shock going from Reddit to here thanks to Jerboa.
While I appreciate the effort that can go into building a good app… Jerboa sucks. Going from something like RiF to Jerboa is like having some teeth pulled… and being aware of all the little gaps where your teeth used to be.
I hope this changes in the future, in the meantime, I’m planning to write my own, in the middle of everything else I’m doing.
Ye Jerboa could be better, but like with Mastodon I expect some improvements to arrive quickly and for new apps to appear as well in the near future. Such is open source development lol
beehaw admins prepare for another wave of users probably lol
Might be worth pointing people towards https://sh.itjust.works/ as they don’t have too much users yet and the admin claims to have a lot of compute at their disposal.
Definitely. Moreover, the domain name is just awesome
I’ve been recommending that people come here!
original post by Apollo’s dev: https://tedd.it/r/apolloapp/comments/144f6xm/_/
Also on https://apolloapp.io/
Don’t see it there what are you seeing
If you’re here and you have the technical skills, please consider running your own instance. Beehaw and lemmy.ml are getting slammed.
I do but dunno if I have the time or energy, as it would not only be the tech part, you’d have to also moderate the place yourself and I’m very averse to do that sort of thing again
If you don’t have time or energy, but do have money, consider donating to this instance or others that vibe with what you’re looking for! 💜
That’s really my main concern too. Also, I am already on call at my day job, I’d rather not sign up to do that for a passion project too.
One thing I’ve thought of is trying to set up a an instance that mirrors some subreddits via RSS. No comments though, because API access.
Skills and resources. The fact that Beehaw is slammed with only 451 users per day shows that running a Lemmy instance is pretty compute-intensive, so you’ll need some beefy hardware.
Are there any hosting providers for Lemmy yet, like Masto.host and Spacebear offer for other federated software?
There’s at least one mad scramble going on to create one. Probably several.
Would love to know if/when it happens
As an addition, this list can be interesting for potential new joiners looking for a smaller instance to register https://github.com/maltfield/awesome-lemmy-instances
Are there docs or docker containers out there already for this? Anyone with an unraid server could be offloaded to their own instances if it gets published in their community apps store (it just needs a config file to make it work on there IIRC).
There’s actually an Ansible playbook for it, that will deploy Docker containers. It’s pretty easy. Edit some configs, run the playbook and boom!
I’m working on getting my instance up and running. I’m worried that by the time I do, I’ll get slammed with new account registrations and won’t be able to get things running smoothly.
¯\_ (ツ)_/¯
God, I feel so bad for Christian. What a slap in the face….
Indirectly in the face of every user
You’re not wrong. A little more impactful for Christian though considering the time and effort he put in to arguably the best Reddit experience outside of old.reddit. Oh well… time for a new kid on the block.
So it begins…
Sync for reddit also confirmed to shut down
This is so sad to watch ☹️. Isn’t Reddit getting exactly what it wants, purging 3PAs?
Gonna have to bring some popcorn for this.
Really sucks for the dev, as he does seems to be (or had been) really invested in what he was working on.
I mean. That announcement might’ve convinced me to delete my account over there and dive in completely to Beehaw.
It might’ve done that 😉
I saw the announcement then purged all comments and posts from both of my accounts, then deleted the accounts.
I’m out.
I just deleted my account :)
Signed up for Lemmy a couple days ago and I now’s the perfect time for my first comment. I’d like to give Reddit a hearty “fuck you” for running an awesome dev out of business with your lying and defamation.
Multiple devs, but yeah…same here, I’m done with reddit.
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completely off topic but great pfp 👍🏾
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And with it goes me using Reddit, too. The official app is just sooooo bad and I barely check Reddit on my computer.
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RIF have announced they will shut down on the 30th too. No word from BaconReader yet (my time wasting app of choice) but I’m guessing they’ll go down as well. Such a sad situation all round.
The unfortunate underlying issue is the API pricing is by and large not sustainable. Even if a third-party application has not announced they cannot continue operations, the lack of announcement does not mean they plan to or continue. I can see the want of biding time and waiting in this circumstance, but ultimately I don’t see any third-party application staying active in an above-board manner if the API pricing is launched as is.
Apollo, RIF, and Sync announcing they are shuttering adds additional pressure to the matter.
I’ll use rif until the last day, but i’ve been spending much more of that time on reddit here, and less time on social media in general.
I’m honestly, sad for the developers who can no longer afford to keep their passion projects going, that’s awful and fuck reddit for that. But personally, this is such a positive change I need in my life as a consumer of social media.
