I’ve been working on an alternative web UI for Lemmy for a couple weeks now and it’s got enough features I wanted to share it. I love that somehow people have found it despite me never having posted online about it until now (until a couple days ago it was called sx-lemmy, sx being an abbreviation of my username) so you might have seen it in a list already.
Alexandrite is a (for the moment) desktop-first Lemmy interface, I primarily use Lemmy on my computer and I wanted a more convenient way to view posts and comments without juggling tabs or losing my place in the feed (with infinite scrolling). It’s still very much in beta, and I have a lot of work to do still, but it’s got most of the basic features.
You can view a post and comments in an overlay without losing where you scrolled to:
A non-exhaustive list of things you can do:
- view home/community/user/communities feeds
- post/comment
- subscribe to communities
- vote
- save posts
- search
- inbox stuff
Noteworthy missing features:
- reporting
- blocking users/communities
- mod tools
- image uploading
- automatic linkifying of urls/communities/users in comments/posts
For those who care, it’s all Sveltekit which is a dream to work with. Alexandrite is the name of the kind of gem in my wife’s wedding ring, it looks cool and changes color in the light.
Oh, this overlay is fantastic. It reminds me of how Feedly integrates with Reddit. You’d get an overlay very similar to this where you can read the post content, article, or be funneled to Reddit to make comments. Very neat and tidy. Feedly is what I missed most about quitting Reddit. Feedly doesn’t have this sort of integration with Lemmy (yet), it just functions like a simple, but messy, RSS reader. This project makes me feel right at home and is such a quick and clean way to interact with Lemmy. Being able to post comments right in the overlay itself is even better than the Feedly/Reddit combo, too. Oh, and also the style for how comments are threaded is highly readable, it takes zero effort to understand or collapse comment chains.
I’ve mostly favored kbin (with a userscript) because I found it much easier to read and interact with than Lemmy, but your project is even better still.
Thanks for the high praise!! The idea for the overlay was the main motivation for making this site actually!