Alexandrite

alexandrite.app - [email protected] - Github

The main feature of this release is just for moderators. If you're the moderator of at least one community you'll see a new "Vibe Check" section in the sidebar when viewing a user page which is meant to help you identify trolls. When you're viewing a user's profile page, as you scroll (loading additional posts and comments) it will total up everything you've loaded so far, and the scores in various communities. This might be useful if you're trying to gauge the intentions of a commenter and you want to see if they're frequently upvoted in certain communities, or if they're frequently downvoted in other places.

I'm limiting this to just a mod tool, because I know incentivizing paying attention to scores is frowned upon on Lemmy. That's also why it doesn't total up everything (unless you happen to scroll enough to load someone's entire post history), as it's just meant to give a 'vibe check'.

Beyond that all that really changed was some theme changes. The frosted glass backgrounds on cards are more visible (especially in light mode where it did almost nothing), and in light mode the name of the user/community in the feed banner doesn't have a very out of place looking dark text shadow.

That's it for now! Let me know what you think, or if you have any other things that would help you as a moderator!

alexandrite.app - [email protected] - Github

Hey, got some new updates for ya!

I added instance blocking, and completely redesigned the page for managing blocks. For all three categories you're able to search, so you don't have to go to someone's profile or find a post by them to find a block button to click. Honestly this page looked awful before, the sizing was weird, if you blocked something with a long name the 'unblock' buttons would be huge. I mostly copied the features available on lemmy-ui (like the searching, and the fact that instance blocks are a thing now).

Tooltips in a couple places got some big upgrades!

User tooltips now show the full 'address' of the user (which it did before, but it wasn't super obvious what you were looking at), and you can now see when they made their account.

Community tooltips got the same address/origin date.

When you hover over a crosspost link it additionally shows the crosspost's title, who posted, when, the score, and comment counts. This should make it a lot easier to see where other discussion is actually happening.

The card layout has a new feature, a nice frosted glass background. This looks similar to how Photon renders its link previews. If you're not familiar with it, this is what I'm talking about.. The effect is fairly subtle because it stretches over the entire card and it could be distracting, I wanted to make sure a fully white image wouldn't make the text too hard to read.

It's on by default, but you can turn it off with the "Frosted glass background" checkbox in Alexandrite settings when your Feed Post Layout is set to Cards if you'd like. If you're curious how it's done, it loads a low resolution thumbnail, places it with a low opacity behind the card, and blurs it so it's less distracting and hides how pixelated it is. It works because all the gray background colors on the site (like all the gray backgrounds on cards) are transparent so when stacked on other gray backgrounds there's always a contrast in color without any extra work. If you don't want to load extra images just for this, or if the blur makes the site lag on a low spec device (didn't notice any impact on my pc), then you might want to turn this setting off.

Besides that, I bumped the node version the docker image uses, and I think that's about it.

Let me know if there's any features Alexandrite is missing that you'd really like! Especially interested in features you want that the default Lemmy UI has that I haven't added yet (like instance blocks until now, community creation/editing, emojis, user/community search when typing a @ or ! in the markdown editor, etc).

alexandrite.app - [email protected] - Github

This time it's mostly UI changes I really wanted to make, and some things people have asked for.

All toolbar toggles and dropdowns are now these nicer looking dropdowns. They look a lot more consistently sized, everything has a label I also added "Moderator View" into that new dropdown.

The search page looks way nicer now, here's the before:

And now:

Added an option that lets you toggle between relative and absolute dates

Added an option for completely white/black backgrounds

Smaller release, mostly focused on some styling changes and easy features.

In the settings you can now set a default comment sort, also added "Controversial"

Now in the community/user sidebar and community search results you will see the full 'address' of a community/user. Clicking the text or the button on the right side copies it to your clipboard. In search results this makes it a lot easier to see what exactly the community is, not just what the display name says it is.

When viewing the inbox, the "No More Messages" message has a "View Read" button, so if you wanted to view an already read notification you've got a nice big button to get there.

Buttons in the community header aren't transparent anymore so they're easier to see if the banner's image is busy.

alexandrite.app - [email protected] - Github

Finally added image uploading, so this is going to be my first update post with images I'll be able to write all on Alexandrite :D

As mentioned in the post you can now attach images to things, this means both on the post via the file selector like on lemmy-ui:

Or you can attach images by pasting or using the upload button to insert an image in the markdown editor (post text, comments, etc).

You can also set your avatar and banner on the Lemmy tab of Settings

Banners on communities and users now show in the feed header instead of a smaller image at the top of the sidebar.

The sorting of communities when selecting one to make a new post (both the alphabetization of your subscribed communities and the popularity sorting of the search results) is better.

Fixed a 400 error that was happening when viewing modlog actions on a user.

This was the biggest change in quite a while, so please let me know if you have any issues with the update! Thanks for all the support, love hearing people like the stuff I'm making :)

This release mostly is a redesign of the instance/community/user sidebars on the right side of those pages. Things are in clear sections, each in a collapsible section that remembers if it was open. So if you're tired of seeing your instance's description every time just close it and it'll stay closed.

Instances and communities now show their full stats, and there are now pages for the legal info and linked/blocked instances. The instance sidebar also shows the list of admins.

If you use the 'Redirect' feed layout setting added in the previous release it now responds to clicks directly on the image or the background of cards.

When looking at your own profile there will be an "Edit Profile" button at the top of the sidebar.

Hello, it's been a while!

I did most of this release like 6 months ago but never got around to finishing it up until yesterday.

There's a bunch of small theme changes, biggest being a slightly different header bar, and in general a lighter light theme and darker dark theme.

There's now a search field in the sidebar which lets you quickly search through your subscriptions, with a link to a full community search. You can search for a community by name, or for example @lemmy.world to see all from a certain instance.

By default now when using the "Card" layout the vote buttons are on the left now and all the buttons on this layout are a bit larger. If you prefer the vote buttons on the right like it was you can change it back in the settings.

On all the feeds there's now a refresh button on the bottom right so you don't need to refresh the whole tab.

There's a new "Feed Layout" option that makes it so clicking post links will bring you to that post page directly instead of opening it in the overlay or a second column.

That's about it for now! I hope to add some more missing features soon!

It took me way too long to get around to this, but with the release of Lemmy 0.19.0 I finally added support for how auth is done differently now. Everything should work the same, but you'll now be able to use Alexandrite again on 0.19.0 servers.

There are some more features that 0.19.0 added, I'll be adding those later, just wanted to make sure things still work first!

If you're self hosting Alexandrite, the docker image probably won't be available for another hour or so after this is posted, the build takes a while! The main Alexandrite site is already updated though!

At the moment, it's difficult to go to a community based on its link. For example, if I paste https://programming.dev/c/game_design into the search box, it shows some search results that mention that community, but no way to actually get there. I think the link to the community should appear prominently in the search results, or, even better, if you search for a community link, it should directly take you to that community. In my example, it would take me to https://a.lemmy.world/programming.dev/c/game_design

Hi :)

A small, not very important request, but at the moment if I want to edit the Sidebar of the Community I mod, I have to use the default UI to do so. Are there any plans to implement the edit button/link into the Alexandrite UI?

It would be great if there was an extra option under settings "Keep navigation sidebar open" that could hide the text and only showing the icons for subsciptions/settings etc. That would save a lot of space. Thanks for a awesome site!

https://i.imgur.com/RYLJbi5.png

alexandrite.app - [email protected] - Github

Just a few things this time, the biggest is mod team management. You can now add and remove mods from the "..." menu on posts and comments. You can also find links to the modlog to see what actions have been taken against that user.

You can also remove mods or leave the mod team of a community from inside the "Moderation" area of the sidebar (note: the "Modlog" link moved inside this section too as it's not useful to most people)

Alexandrite settings will now automatically update in every tab instantly, so if you change the theme in one tab, when you switch to another already open Alexandrite browser tab you'll notice it'll already be using your new theme.

When viewing reports, they will now be sorted by newest report first, instead of oldest post/comment first.

For the self hosters out there, Alexandrite should now have arm builds thanks to ismailkarsli on Github! (Thank you!) The image builds now take a little longer, and the build isn't quite done yet so you might have to wait a bit until it's available.

That's it for now. Next release will probably be Lemmy 0.19 support, and I believe I'll finally be able to add image uploading then too (it might be in the next release after 0.19 support).

Github release notes

When navigating posts in the feed, the URL is changed to each active post. This means that when the page is reloaded, Alexandrite goes to that page instead of the active feed. In the above screenshot, I was browsing all, but refreshing the page left me on the post that was active.

Perhaps a fix might be to append the active post to the URL? Something like:

https://alex.lemmy.ca/lemmy.ca/all#post/5936117

The linked post and discussion from the Photon dev re: the lemmy 0.19 release got me thinking about how Alexandrite will handle the migration since the release includes breaking changes.

@[email protected] thoughts?

Am I misremembering or didn't there used to be a way to block users in Alexandrite...from their profile I think? I don't see a button for it now. I can block them in Eternity on mobile though.

While I appreciate being able to block individual communities, I feel like being able to block while instances would be really helpful.

I've been away on vacation but I'm back with a new release of Alexandrite!

The mod log is now implemented! At the moment you can see a community's modlog from the top of the community sidebar, and the instance modlog from the bottom of the instance sidebar (I'll likely change where these links are at some point). Now moderators should be able to do even more stuff without leaving Alexandrite.

Additionally there's a link to the modlog when viewing a user's profile (also in the sidebar), which lets you see the mod actions that have been performed on them. This should help moderators identify problematic users.

In both cases, you will see a content warning screen before being redirected to the actual modlog, but you can disable this for either all communities or for the ones you moderate in the settings.

Icons for NSFW communities will now be hidden unless you have "NSFW Thumbnails" set to "Show" in the settings. Previously it would just always show icons.

Moderators looking through reports will now see the post or comment's score (and vote breakdown on hover) so you can see at a glance what the community thought about something. Additionally it also shows how long ago a report was made.

Then just some random improvements. The community header's buttons now collapse into a "..." menu if the screen isn't wide enough to fit them all, and the header at the top of the page is now darker (in dark mode) and lighter (in light mode) which I think looks a lot nicer.

I'll soon release 0.8.5, but that'll just be a quick bug fix, as I realized when writing this post that the "No" button on the modlog content warning doesn't redirect to the right place sometimes. Edit: Nevermind it was 0.8.7, still that's the only fix, I just kept messing up and releasing without the actual change.

The site itself is up, but it says 'Network Error' when I try to access it through alexandrite.app

One of the interaction menu options (where "Cross-post / Send Message / Report Post / Block user / Block Community" live)
OR (preferably)
perhaps even one of the external buttons (next to Comment / Save / Original Post -OR- next to Upvote / Downvote)
should be the ability to either hide or collapse a given post so the things you've already seen take up less screen space
(but shouldn't be permanently lost to you so you can go back to something if you decide you want to look at it again)

Also, apologies if this is already suggested, I tried to search, and either it isn't there or the search function isn't very good.

Just some quick features!

When creating a post there's now a button to suggest a title based on the URL you entered. Just enter a URL then click "Suggest Title"

Then if you want to use that title hit the button!

You can create a post without first visiting the community by clicking the new "+" button in the header. The menu looks a little bit empty right now, but I'll add more stuff here later.

Also:

• Added the ability to edit/delete/report private messages
• Links to external sites in markdown now open in a new tab
• If you have the "Keep navigation sidebar open" setting enabled, it will now open by default

I've been loving Alexandrite, it's my go-to recommendation for Lemmy on desktop. Keep up the great work!

Question for @[email protected]:

What's your preferred way to receive feature requests?

I see people making posts here, which is nice because it allows community discussion, but you also have a github issue tracker, which may be handier for you to actually follow up the request. I have some ideas I'd like to put forward, and I would like to use the way that's the least burdensome for you to manage.

Alexandrite now has cross-posting! You can cross post from the '...' menu on posts:

You then pick a community from your subscriptions, or search for any other community, or directly enter the full name like [email protected] if you want a very specific one and don't want to bother with searching.

And links to cross-posts will now show when viewing a posts:

Alexandrite now matches Lemmy-UI handling taglines. If an instance has any taglines set it will now pick a random one instead of showing all of them.

Lastly if you have NSFW thumbnail handling set to "Hide" or "Blur", it will now hide/blur thumbnails when a post is in a NSFW community, even if the post itself isn't marked NSFW, as the post is probably actually NSFW anyway and it's better to be safe than sorry.

Github release notes

This looks like the future of using Lemmy, very beautiful UI

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/3256777

You're now able to theme Alexandrite a lot more, I'm excited to see what color schemes you all can come up with!

alexandrite.app - [email protected] - Github

There's now a light mode! Alexandrite will now detect your system's default color scheme and use that, but you can force dark or light mode in the settings. This is the default hue/saturation on light mode:

You can also change the saturation to make it as gray or as colorful as you want, plus you can customize the hues of links and up/downvote buttons (downvotes in screenshots just for demonstration!)

Here are the settings for themes now. There are numbers next to all the sliders to make it easier to share customizations! I might add a few presets in the future.

Posts look a little nicer. The content on them shows using similar styles to the previews on the cards. The "View Source" button is now a small button in the top right corner of the post.

Some 0.7.0 features I didn't mention here before:

There's an option when using the "List" post layout that shows a preview of the post content like the card layout does.

Oh speaking of version numbers Alexandrite now releases with version numbers! You can find the version number in use on the "About Alexandrite" page. You can read more on the version number announcement.