I'm making an App for Lemmy and I'm planning on adding that feature. I also want to make it so you only have to register once and the App can register you to all the instances you choose automatically.
Edit: The Webapp is Nemmy, also the Community [email protected]
Edit2: Please note that Nemmy is early Alpha, so not really useable as a daily driver yet.
Edit3: Changed Community link to proper format
I would also like to add that there are PWAs (Progressive Web Apps).
PWAs can be installed on most devices and share even more similarities with native apps (Native app = usually installed through app store). For example installed PWAs can be viewed in Fullscreen or work offline, even though they are still technically a webpage.
So the advantage here is that you don't need to use an App Store to have an app installed on your phone.
And the main disadvantage is that the PWA can't access most of the device's APIs, that you could access through a native app. This means worse performance usually, no support for theming beyond dark/light (like Material You), no good access to on-device databases etc. This is also the reason why most apps aren't PWAs.
Actually, I'm guessing wefwef is using the Js client, which usually returns a 503 or 500 when something goes to shit on the instance.
I'm also developing an app for Lemmy and the only solution I found was to just keep request the data until the instance finally gives in to the pressure and works.
So it's less about "server is taking too long to respond" and more like "server responds instantly with a 503" because it's overloaded and can't handle any incoming requests.
I'm also guessing a lot of traffic comes from comments since the way of loading those is kinda stupid. (You load only the top layer and then for each comment you request the children, which sums up to a huge number of requests).
Lemmy should add more convenient APIs to reduce the amount of requests being made, maybe I'll do that myself once I'm done with the app.
Sorry for the long ass text.
Here is the first web-version. Please note this is extremely work-in-progress and nothing on there is representative of the final product :). I literally just got done coding that.
As for OS dependency, I will make this a Progressive Webapp compatible with most OS's (IOS, Android, Windows etc.).
Edit: That Website is basically just me testing out the APIs and laying groundwork.
Edit 2: I have also posted a Dev Update
Haha, thanks for the laugh. I'll take a look at that.
Thanks for giving it a try :)
Edit: So apparently you can upvote/downvote anything indefinitely if you're not signed in.