Photon I feel is a representation of my general ability to do software development, as it's my biggest project. I'm disappointed in myself for how it's been going so far suddenly.

I go through these switches in terms of my philosophy with software, and I guess right now I'm in the "it should do what it should well and expectedly, stop trying to do more and sacrifice the main functionality" phase.

I don't like where Photon ended up, I added too many """features""" that were half baked and just complicated the codebase and added more issue vectors. What people use the most: posts and commenting, have been suffering in their usability with random bugs and a non-seamless experience.

I've also been going much too slow on my promises for Svelte 5, and I can't change much until I've finished that or I'll get conflicts. I've been too lazy because of school and my life.

As soon as I finish the svelte 5 migration, I'm gonna change these things:

• No more features that are out of scope. The

verification for lemmy apps: LemmyApps/#2

cross-posted from: https://lemm.ee/post/39906482

There was like 8 prereleases for this because i kept changing stuff. This is actually going to be from v1.31.1 and v1.31.2.

Biggest changes

Command palette

• 
• Press / or ctrl + p and start typing to instantly go to a page, switch themes, switch accounts, etc.

Theming changes

• You can now have multiple presets for themes, and there are 5 default presets. (Default, Classic, AMOLED, Catppuccin, Lightly)
• Admins can set their own default theme for photon with PUBLIC_THEME.

New markdown renderer

• Photon now uses svelte-markdown for markdown rendering, which lets me use custom components for markdown.
• Instead of only style changes, I can run actual code, meaning images can be made expandable and codeblock

There was like 8 prereleases for this because i kept changing stuff. This is actually going to be from v1.31.1 and v1.31.2.

Biggest changes

Command palette

• 
• Press / or ctrl + p and start typing to instantly go to a page, switch themes, switch accounts, etc.

Theming changes

• You can now have multiple presets for themes, and there are 5 default presets. (Default, Classic, AMOLED, Catppuccin, Lightly)
• Admins can set their own default theme for photon with PUBLIC_THEME.

New markdown renderer

• Photon now uses svelte-markdown for markdown rendering, which lets me use custom components for markdown.
• Instead of only style changes, I can run actual code, meaning images can be made expandable and codeblocks can be copyable.

Lots of languages

• There are a ton of languages thanks to the community.
• English
• Hebrew
• Bulgarian
• Chinese
• Dutch
• Estonian
• Finnish
• Fren

I've been messed around with random features in photon, and i tried something stupid today.

I was experimenting with an AI post summary feature, (just because i wanted an excuse to make a cool animation) but as I was using it, it actually ended up kind of useful.

If I were to implement this feature, it would only work like this:

• The user would have to opt-in manually.
• The user would need to specify what AI service they wish to use.
• The user would have to specify their own API key, if the service requires one.

In the end, I probably won't add this, since you can just copy/paste the content into an AI app. But it could also be slightly more convenient.

What do you think?

I just wanted to say thanks to all the translators of photon! Even if you only changed 1 word, translating this large app is not easy, especially because it's hard to find the context for certain actions.

With all of your help, Photon is now available in 13 languages!

English, Hebrew, Bulgarian, Estonian, Finnish, French, German, Japanese, Dutch, Polish, Chinese, and Portuguese!

If you want to help translate, you can do so at https://weblate.xylight.dev/. You can translate as little or as much as you want!

This is applicable to almost any piece of software with text in it. When starting your new app, you should make sure you are using a separate language file for the strings in your app. This makes text reusable, and you can change it all in one place.

Once your app gains a community, if you did this, you can also get translators!

With Photon i made the massive mistake of hardcoding everything up until the app became massive, and my PR for un-hardcoding all the strings looks like this:

It was worth it though! Because the community has translated it into 11 languages!

Photon has a feature on links which gets data from Media Bias Fact Check to determine its media bias. However, I've seen controversy on lemmy.world's bot with this, and I'm not sure if this is the best place to get the data from.

Should I use a different dataset? like allsides'?

A lot of admins trying to host photon have been unable to after i switched from Node to Bun server. Bun is a newer server that is significantly faster, but it seems to have caused issues when hosting for weird reasons when people try to host it.

Starting from v1.31.2, I will publish node images as well as bun images, it's very simple to access:

Instead of ghcr.io/xyphyn/photon:tag, do ghcr.io/xyphyn/photon:tag-node

When I changed the default theme I saw someone say I should name the classic theme "AMOLED". Apparently, the theme was so dark to a lot of people that it appeared black! I guess my designer's eye and working on photon for over a year made me not notice this.

The classic theme uses a very dark gray for the main background, and an even darker gray for the sides. There was never any black, except in very very early versions of Photon.

TL;DR: nonstandard community and user links should work properly now, when people waste their time by doing [[email protected]](https://instance.url/c/community) instead of [email protected]

::: spoiler rant ok so why do people, instead of using the proper syntax for users and communities, ([email protected] and @[email protected]) they take the EXTRA EFFORT to make it a NONSTANDARD MARKDOWN LINK which means linkify-it (which even the official lemmy-ui uses) won't work properly because its meant to make custom syntax like this to work very nicely BUT THEY MAKE IT A MARKDOWN LINK which means I SHOULDNT BE MODIFYING IT but they make it so i have to BECAUSE THEY TYPED EXTRA KEYSTROKES, USED MORE DB DATA, JUST TO RUIN THEIR LINK. JUST USE THE NORMAL LEMMY LINK FORMAT INSTEAD OF MARKDOWN LINK STUFF AAAA ok so get this right people are out here taking the PERFECTLY GOOD syntax for users and communities the one with exclamation point and at sign and whatever and blah

This will be a test post for markdown, as I'm switching to a faster markdown renderer that will allow me to do some cool stuff, like allow expanding images and running my code in markdown.

It might release with v1.31.2.

arguably a bigger update than v1.31, lots of backend changes for better speed

i've been using this command palette a lot because it makes doing everything so fast. let me know if there's any action or link you'd like added, since it's very easy to do.

What's Changed

• feat: add a command palette by @Xyphyn in https://github.com/Xyphyn/photon/pull/364
  • Press / or ctrl + p or right click the photon logo to bring up the command palette
  • Instantly start typing to find a link, or run an action
• design: Make compact mode even more compact
• misc: add infinite scroll to communities too
• code: rewrite how post feeds are handled, improving speed and cleanliness and allowing more opportunities for caching.
• misc: add support for upvoted/downvoted posts and uploaded media in the profile page
• strings: tweak some strings for better clarity
• Vertical postlink layout for mobile by @sevonj in https://github.com/Xyphyn/photon/pull/360

Full Changelog: https://gith

I'm working on a command palette for Photon, which will allow you to press ctrl + p or / to open a prompt where you can type and go to a page or a recent post instantly.

Are there any actions or links that you'd want me to add?

This update is currently available on phtn.app, with a tagged release coming soon. Post navigation is down by 65% and returning from posts is instant.

What's Changed

• feat: add infinite scroll
  • You can now scroll down infinitely without clicking next!
  • As a bonus, returning from a post page is now instant.
  • Of course, you can turn it off in settings.
  • A virtual list is also used so that infinite posts can be loaded with no performance impact.
• feat: parse tags from title
  • Tesseract dev and I had the same idea, [tags in brackets] in posts will automatically be converted to a badge/flair. You can click it to search for all posts with that tag in a community.
  • I added options which let you choose flairs to blur posts of or hide.
• tweak link design
• improve smaller screen support
• codebase: move $profile to a derived, immutable store to improve consistency
• i18n: add new languages/update languages
  • Chinese
  • English

This update is currently available on phtn.app, with a tagged release coming soon. Post navigation is down by 65% and returning from posts is instant.

What's Changed

• feat: add infinite scroll
  • You can now scroll down infinitely without clicking next!
  • As a bonus, returning from a post page is now instant.
  • Of course, you can turn it off in settings.
  • A virtual list is also used so that infinite posts can be loaded with no performance impact.
• feat: parse tags from title
  • Tesseract dev and I had the same idea, [tags in brackets] in posts will automatically be converted to a badge/flair. You can click it to search for all posts with that tag in a community.
  • I added options which let you choose flairs to blur posts of or hide.
• tweak link design
• improve smaller screen support
• codebase: move $profile to a derived, immutable store to improve consistency
• i18n: add new languages/update languages
  • Chinese
  • English
  • Estonian
  • French
  • Finnish

I'm working on adding a feature that will convert tags in the title to flairs, which you can add custom filters/rules to.

Hey, I've been working on a few changes to photon that make it a lot faster to open posts and return, and as a result of these changes I can also make infinite scroll work. If you go to this link, Vercel will have commented on the post with a preview link. Those are basically the beta links.

Preview Link

Let me know of any bugs and any changes you'd like!

Current roadmap

• Make this not duplicate posts in memory
• Make this work on all posts
• Use a virtual list for better render performance

all 0.19.4 features coming soon