Hi everyone, sorry if the instance has been a bit dead lately. We’ve been hard at work on some new features! This is a small announcement post to bring you up to speed on what we’ve built thus far, as well as what’s coming in the near future. Feel free to share your feedback!
NOTE: the following changes only apply to you if you view our instance from your web browser. If you usually browse from an app then this doesn’t impact you.
TL;DR: we have published an update to the site which lays the groundwork for adding user flairs. Flairs will come in a few weeks.
While we are not quite yet ready to bring online our custom user flairs microservice (which is still in the final phases of its development), today I present to you Kaleidoscope, our very own fork of the lemmy-ui. It might not be very different from the previous UI at first glance, but it adds supports for the flairs microservice (meaning it will integrate and display user flairs seamlessly as soon as we add support for them), integrates various Fediseer features, includes an opt-in content filter to remove content posted by bad or untrusted actors from your feed and has a few other minor tweaks and fixes to things that bothered me in the legacy lemmy-ui.
But when are we getting flairs?
As I said the flairs backend is mostly done. It still needs some polish, which is why we aren’t rolling it out today. We expect it to be ready and operational in a few weeks.
At first flairs will only be available to users from our instance and only through the website. We also have plans to add flair support to third party instances, through the download of a browser extension, but that will come at a later date. Our local users remain our top prioirty.
At the moment we don’t plan on adding flairs support to any mobile app.
Is there anything bigger going on?
Yes! This is all in preparation to our official launch, which will feature multiple announcements on r/PCM and hopefully some people moving in from Reddit. Because of a deal we’ve made with the !pcm@lemmy.basedcount.com mods and in particular @NightLily@lemmy.basedcount.com, the two conditions for this were:
- better mod tools (namely the AutoMod I built a short while ago)
- user flairs
After we are done with the flairs we’ll start working on porting our two main bots, namely basedcount_bot and flairchange_bot.
We are also considering porting the long gone and dearly missed ChadGPT_bot, who had a very short lifespan of a few hours because of Reddit’s patented literally 1984 moderation policy. Over here we’d be able to run it in a bit more relaxed environment, without having to worry about the thought police.
Some images
Content filter
Instance ratings
Flairs (coming soon)
Anxiously awaiting the day when I can tell people to flair up again
Day 2 of asking for flairs in this post.
Day 6 of asking for flairs in this post.
Day 1 of asking for flairs in this post.
Oh ffs this is going to be a long one.
Not if you do your job.
Day 5 of asking for flairs in this post.
I’d love to see Chad GPT again. Have you considered forking one of the open-source lemmy apps and just adding the flairs microservice?
I’ve considered that briefly but I don’t think we can really afford anything of that kind right now.
The biggest problem is that none of us on the team have any experience whatsoever on developing mobile apps, so it’d be a matter of learning yet another language from scratch. Secondly, and perhaps more importantly, is that I’m not aware of any app that is available on both Android and iOS, so even if we were to build such an app, we would still need to throw half the userbase under the bus.
And of course there would also be the problem of keeping the app up to date with any breaking changes made to the Lemmy API which, even if it was as easy as just merging in the work of the original developer, would still take time.
I’d love nothing more than to have app support for flairs but right now I don’t think any of us has enough free time to tackle such a massive challenge. One day in the distant future I have plans to edit the Lemmy backend directly and inject flairs somewhere in there, that would make it easier to add cross client compatibility. But first I’ll have to learn Rust, so it will take loads of time.
Well I don’t want to make any promises, but as someone who has developed apps before I’d be willing to help. And Flutter would allow us to code one app for both Android and iOS. No paying for a license to get it on the “real” iOS app store is a bit of a no right now, but there are reliable ways to sideload even on iOS
Well that changes everything! If you’re serious on wanting to try this (or even if you aren’t and just wanna come say hi) you can visit our Discord where we can discuss this. We’d love to have someone with app development experience on board.
Day 4 of asking for flairs in this post.
Day 3 of asking for flairs in this post.
