About
Tesseract is a Lemmy UI that is designed to be sleek, responsive, mobile friendly and media-rich.
Feature Highlights
The following features are unique to Tesseract:
Full Media Support in Feed and Posts
- Spotify
- YouTube/Invidious/Piped
- Soundcloud
- Vimeo
- Bandcamp
- Odysee (as of 1.2.8.1)
- odesli Song Link / Album Link (as of 1.2.8.1)
Community Browser / Enhanced Discovery
- Browse the communties of other instances and seamlessly load and subscribe to them. No more of that obnoxious copy/paste, search, wait, search again, subscribe hokey-pokey dance.
- Post and comment menus let you browse the communities of the originating instance
Code Syntax Highlighting
Code blocks and inline code can be syntax-highlighted.
Image/Media Proxying and Caching
Privacy conscious users have long requested media be proxied through Lemmy. While I can't add that to the API, I can add it to the UI. Additionally, since the media is already flowing through Tesseract, it made sense to optionally cache the proxied media for re-use.
- Enhance user privacy, reduce bandwidth to other instances, and speed up serving content to your users.
- Can cache any media proxied through it. Tesseract can act as a caching proxy for your instance as well as cache media originating on other instances as well as outside resources (Giphy, Catbox, Imgur, Yarn, etc).
- Administrators must explicitly enable this module, and users must enable media proxying in their app settings.
Fediseer Integration
- See any endorsements, hesitations, and censures given to instances you're interacting with.
Highlights
Check out [email protected] or [email protected] as seen through Tesseract.
Take a Test Drive
If you want to connect Tesseract to an instance of your choosing, we host a public instance at https://tesseract.dubvee.org. It loads to DubVee by default, but you can change the guest instance or login to any Lemmy server you want.
Additional Features
Designed for desktop and mobile.
Install as a PWA on either or just use it through the web.
Multiple Account Support
You can add multiple accounts and easily switch between them. Accounts can even be on different instances if the administrator chooses not to lock Tesseract to theirs.
Multiple Hosting Options
If you host your own Tesseract instance, you can use it as a frontend for any Lemmy instance. Instance admins can host Tesseract on a subdomain or even replace Lemmy-UI with it. You can even run it on localhost if you want, though image uploads will not work due to CORS.
Highly Configurable
- User-configurable image/video sizes in feed and posts
- Full Lemmy server config options.
- Most aspects of the UI can be configured by the end user. Server admins can set default preferences via
envvars.
Better Moderation Tools than Lemmy-UI
- Can access moderation actions from the feed without having to click into the post as with Lemmy-UI
- Local instance admins have full moderation control of the instance as with Lemmy-UI
- Modlog support on both desktop and mobile.
- Can simply click "reply with reason" when taking moderation actions to send the user a message with the removal details. Template is user-configurable.
- Enhanced modlog filtering.
- Community- and user-specific buttons that will pre-filter the modlog automatically.
Awesome!
I used Alexandrite and Photon before I started this, and Tesseract is something of a blend of what I liked about both, minus some things I didn't like, plus some unique features I wanted but didn't see implemented elsewhere.
If you have any questions, feel free to ask or open a Github issue/discussion. The docs are fairly comprehensive but still a little scatter-brained at the moment. I'm slowly getting them refined.
Hey! So some quick comments based on a couple of minutes of playing around the UI and settings. Note that this is coming from the perspective of someone using it primarily on desktop and not mobile.
Overall it's a nice and sleek UI! I'll start using it regularly and see how I feel about it in a couple of weeks. Congrats on the UI and great work! I'll definitely keep an eye on further development.
Thanks for the feedback!
It's forked from an older version of Photon, yeah. We've both kinda gone in different directions since then. Tesseract used to be my custom build of Photon until it was easier to just fork it and do my own thing.
Yep. They're also optional so hopefully everyone's happy. lol. I like them since they make it easier when using it as a PWA. Glad someone else appreciates them :)
~~That's a good idea. I'll add it to my to-do list. Will be easy to implement.~~ Implemented in 1.2.8.3
~~I think there's a hard limit of 50 posts per page from the API, and Tesseract returns 20. I've thought about either increasing that and/or letting it be a user option but just....haven't I guess. lol. Either/both of those is easy to implement. Infinite scroll has been on the backburner for a while, but it's certainly doable as well. When I work on that part next, I'll probably work on adding both and letting the users decide.~~
Added user option to set number of posts per page. Can choose 20 (default), 30, 40, or 50. Implemented in 1.2.8.3. Infinite scroll still in workshop.
Yeah, I hear ya, and you're right: that's exactly why things are how they are. I've tried to minimize dead space best I can, but trying to have one interface for both kinda limits what I can reasonably do. I've got a "list" style in mind which would be kind of like Alexandrite's but, like you said, mobile is the stumbling block. I'm going to try some CSS tricks to only allow that on desktop and let mobile be compact/card only. I'll have to play around with that and see what works.
Agreed. I just ran out of domain names that aren't for other projects. I'll work on budgeting for a dedicated domain and virtual server for the public instance of it. I still recommend users either host their own if they can or ask their instance admins to offer it as an option.