[ New TestFlight Beta ] Mlem for Lemmy 2.0 Public Beta
Hi Mlem Community,
We are thrilled to announce the launch of our 2.0 public beta!
Please be aware that this is an early beta build, may be missing features you consider essential. See the "Roadmap" section further down for a full list.
We’re trying out a new TestFlight structure with two groups:
Weekly: this group gets a weekly build with the latest state of our development branch. Changelogs for these builds will be posted to the new Beta Feedback Megathread
Stable Pre-Release: this group receives curated manual releases that have been tested by the bleeding edge group. Each release represents a coherent development scope, and changelogs for these builds will get their own “New Beta Release” posts.
If you prefer the most stable, feature-rich Mlem experience, we encourage you to stay on our v1 until 2.0 is ready for the App Store.
What’s New
Markdown Support
Full Markdown rendering powered by our custom cmark-gfm fork
Rich Markdown editing tools built right into the keyboard
Tiled Posts
The new “Tiled” post layout renders posts in a 2-column grid, giving you the content density of Compact mode with much larger thumbnails.
Keep Place on Account Switch
You can now switch accounts without losing your place in feed, perfect for saving a post to a different account. This behavior can be toggled in Settings -> Accounts; you can also long press an account in the quick switcher to choose your refresh behavior.
Updated Middleware
We rebuilt how we communicate with and manage instances from the ground up to address the challenges of a federated platform and give us a clean, strong base to build future updates on. Backend changes aren’t very visible (for now--we’ve got some very exciting features planned to take full advantage of the new architecture), but they support a lot of the new features in this list.
Guest Accounts
You can now add guest accounts to any instance and browse its content without creating an account!
Performance Improvements
We’ve also refactored our entire UI structure to cut out a lot of inefficiencies present in the v1 codebase. The result is a noticeably snappier app.
Color Themes
Or, properly, a framework to support color themes. Right now you can choose between Default and Monochrome, but more are on the way!
UI Upgrades
We’ve kept the majority of our v1 UI/UX, but taken the opportunity to spruce some things up. See if you can spot what’s new!
Misc
Improved cross-instance resolution—opening content not accessible from your instance now opens the content in-app using a guest session on the host instance, rather than in the browser
The subscription list can now be sorted alphabetically or by instance
Post creator is now hidden by default in aggregate feeds. This behavior can be changed in Settings -> Posts.
Roadmap
This is by no means a complete list of everything we have planned, but it’s the major outstanding items we have mapped out. If there are v1 features missing from this list that you’d like to see prioritized, let us know and we’ll work that into our development plan!
Post/comment improvements
Inline image uploads in comments
Create posts
Crossposts
Moderation/administration tools
Mod mail
Moderator, administrator actions
Moderated feed
Media improvements
Improved image handling (all backend work, but should improve performance)
Proper video handling
Post and comment searching
iPad support
Keyword filtering
Settings icons
Mark read on scroll
Known Issues
You will need to sign back into your accounts. This is an unfortunate consequence of migrating the app from Lionel Hanners' account to my own. We apologize for the inconvenience.
The tile layout can be a little stuttery. We’re working on a fix with the “Improved image handling” item.
Navigation and tab bar accents remain gray after closing the composer sheet
Tall images in website previews don’t get appropriately cropped
Mlem is a free and open source project. 100% of our funding, which pays for things like server time, comes from our generous donors; we do not, and will never, run ads or sell data. If you'd like to help support Mlem, you can donate here.
So this is one feature I really like from Voyager that I think would be nice to implement. Accounts that are 30 days old or younger can have a tag applied to their comments to show you that. I find it pretty helpful. Here's an example:
The other thing that's a much more minor refinement, is that I think you should be able to just paste a URL in the search box as well. I know the button is there, but it disappears when the search box is activated, including by double-tapping in the tab bar, which means backing out to click it. I think this would just make the flow a little better and mean people can choose which suits their muscle memory better.
Also, if I can put in a theme request for Dracula? 😅 Hell, point me to the right files in the repo and I'll make a pull request.
Edit: Oh, a comment/post preview button in the editor would be nice :)