What's Changed

• feat: add a static site option by @Xyphyn in https://github.com/Xyphyn/photon/pull/622
• design: improve comment experience by @Xyphyn in https://github.com/Xyphyn/photon/pull/623
  • better spacing, and separation, as well as easier and more readable font size
• perf: optimize bundle size by @Xyphyn in https://github.com/Xyphyn/photon/pull/627
  • stuff is now more dynamically loaded which should improve load speed
  • other misc performance improvements
• security: add a content security policy
• misc: add a User-Agent for API requests
• design: use a unified common list component
• misc: use gradients for placeholder avatars
  • I use placeholder avatars a lot since it's easier to distinguish users based on color/shape rather than username, and this makes it even easier to distinguish
• feat: add a vote ratio bar option
  • when enabled, if a post is more controversial, a bar will be overlayed behind it to visualize it
• feat: browse communities of specific instances
  • the available instances are only that you have accounts/guests on as i consider them "trusted"
• feat: add an SSG adapter
  • admins can build the app with ADAPTER=static and then a build folder will be generated with just the shell. There will be no server side rendering available with this.
• i18n: sync translations with weblate
  • Bulgarian: salif
  • Polish: gapetto

Full Changelog: https://github.com/Xyphyn/photon/compare/v2.0.0...v2.0.1

Direct Link

On the 16th of July, at around 8pm UTC+2, a malicious AUR package was uploaded to the AUR. Two other malicious packages were uploaded by the same user a few hours later. These packages were installing a script coming from the same GitHub repository that was identified as a Remote Access Trojan (RAT).

The affected malicious packages are:

• librewolf-fix-bin
• firefox-patch-bin
• zen-browser-patched-bin

The Arch Linux team addressed the issue as soon as they became aware of the situation. As of today, 18th of July, at around 6pm UTC+2, the offending packages have been deleted from the AUR.

We strongly encourage users that may have installed one of these packages to remove them from their system and to take the necessary measures in order to ensure they were not compromised.

Follow up

There are more packages with this malware found.

• minecraft-cracked
• ttf-ms-fonts-all
• vesktop-bin-patched
• ttf-all-ms-fonts

What to do

If you installed any of these packages, check your running processes for one named systemd-initd (this is the RAT).

The suspicious packages have a patch from this now-inaccessible Codeberg repo: https://codeberg.org/arch_lover3/browser-patch

The Arch maintainers have been informed of all this already and are investigating.

cross-posted from: https://lemdro.id/post/25562194

This is a very big release since v1.31.4. If you've used phtn.app, you won't notice a difference, since that runs on the latest commit.

TL;DR

• Photon has been completely rewritten to use Svelte 5
• This brings significant performance improvements
• The UX has been changed to fit Photon's philosophy more closely
• Many issues have been resolved and bugs fixed
• 60% of changes are under the hood, but there's many visible ones too

What you'll notice

Snappier performance

• Svelte 5 optimizes a lot of the reactive parts of the app
• I've also spent a lot of time on a new virtualizer, which runs a lot faster

Design changes

• While the overall layout is relatively the same, I've reworked a lot of pages to fall more in line with my design philosophy.
• The design across (most) pages is much more consistent
• There's a new default theme
• Compact mode is now the default (if you've used photon before, this will not affect your setting)
• Comment layout is slightly different and more intuitive
• Modals now create a backstack so you can press the back button on your browser

New features and options

• More moderation features
  • Quickly view users'/submissions' moderation logs
  • View the users' votes n a post
  • Grouped reports for many reports on the same post
    • you can resolve many at once
• Options for more granular control over how links work in posts
• Option to reverse the action row
• Option to use absolute timestamps
• lemmy language tagging support
• Command palette now has contextual navigation options
• Contextual warnings for certain actions (like missing languages in posts)
• Messages page has been overhauled with markdown, contextual actions, etc
• Better view and options for modlog page
• Donation dialog as Lemmy requested

Optimizations

• Uses CSS animations more often which are faster
• Uses svelte context API to reduce prop drilling
• Navbar uses CSS rather than JS for positioning
• Uses optimized svelte $state rather than stores

Languages

Thanks to the community making translations on the Weblate, Photon has support for 18 languages!

• English (100%)
• Hebrew (58%)
• Arabic (33%) (fxomt)
• Bulgarian (72%) (salif)
• Chinese (Simplified) (91%) (qiancsf, CDN, binary3141)
• Chinese (Traditional) (21%) (binary3141)
• Dutch (81%) (qaz)
• Estonian (24%) (pewgar)
• Finnish (94%) (sevon)
• French (87%) (Blisterexe)
• German (64%) (poVoq)
• Hungarian (55%) (myedition8)
• Japanese (84%) (Rentlar)
• Polish (83%) (gapetto)
• Portuguese (78%) (tmpod)
• Russian (83%) (WerySkok, mudkip)
• Spanish (81%) (acidrums4)
• Turkish (91%) (ikanat)

In the future

• Piefed support is targeting v2.2.0
  • With the way it is being written, Mastodon support may as well come sometime around v3.0.0

There's a lot more in this release, as well as more to come. I'm trying to make Photon closer to its design philosophy, which can be summarized as:

It should not take more than 3 seconds to identify an action you wish to perform within a given container or page.

This covers a lot of reasons why I design stuff the way I do, for example, you'll never find more than 5 buttons (minus links) in a single container. Additionally, specific types of actions will usually look different, like primary actions on a page versus sub actions.

I hope you enjoy this release!

Full Changelog: https://github.com/Xyphyn/photon/compare/v1.31.4...v2.0.0

This is a very big release since v1.31.4. If you've used phtn.app, you won't notice a difference, since that runs on the latest commit.

TL;DR

• Photon has been completely rewritten to use Svelte 5
• This brings significant performance improvements
• The UX has been changed to fit Photon's philosophy more closely
• Many issues have been resolved and bugs fixed
• 60% of changes are under the hood, but there's many visible ones too

What you'll notice

Snappier performance

• Svelte 5 optimizes a lot of the reactive parts of the app
• I've also spent a lot of time on a new virtualizer, which runs a lot faster

Design changes

• While the overall layout is relatively the same, I've reworked a lot of pages to fall more in line with my design philosophy.
• The design across (most) pages is much more consistent
• There's a new default theme
• Compact mode is now the default (if you've used photon before, this will not affect your setting)
• Comment layout is slightly different and more intuitive
• Modals now create a backstack so you can press the back button on your browser

New features and options

• More moderation features
  • Quickly view users'/submissions' moderation logs
  • View the users' votes n a post
  • Grouped reports for many reports on the same post
    • you can resolve many at once
• Options for more granular control over how links work in posts
• Option to reverse the action row
• Option to use absolute timestamps
• lemmy language tagging support
• Command palette now has contextual navigation options
• Contextual warnings for certain actions (like missing languages in posts)
• Messages page has been overhauled with markdown, contextual actions, etc
• Better view and options for modlog page
• Donation dialog as Lemmy requested

Optimizations

• Uses CSS animations more often which are faster
• Uses svelte context API to reduce prop drilling
• Navbar uses CSS rather than JS for positioning
• Uses optimized svelte $state rather than stores

Languages

Thanks to the community making translations on the Weblate, Photon has support for 18 languages!

• English (100%)
• Hebrew (58%)
• Arabic (33%) (fxomt)
• Bulgarian (72%) (salif)
• Chinese (Simplified) (91%) (qiancsf, CDN, binary3141)
• Chinese (Traditional) (21%) (binary3141)
• Dutch (81%) (qaz)
• Estonian (24%) (pewgar)
• Finnish (94%) (sevon)
• French (87%) (Blisterexe)
• German (64%) (poVoq, Tywele)
• Hungarian (55%) (myedition8)
• Japanese (84%) (Rentlar)
• Polish (83%) (gapetto)
• Portuguese (78%) (tmpod)
• Russian (83%) (WerySkok, mudkip)
• Spanish (81%) (acidrums4)
• Turkish (91%) (ikanat)

In the future

• Piefed support is targeting v2.2.0
  • With the way it is being written, Mastodon support may as well come sometime around v3.0.0

There's a lot more in this release, as well as more to come. I'm trying to make Photon closer to its design philosophy, which can be summarized as:

It should not take more than 3 seconds to identify an action you wish to perform within a given container or page.

This covers a lot of reasons why I design stuff the way I do, for example, you'll never find more than 5 buttons (minus links) in a single container. Additionally, specific types of actions will usually look different, like primary actions on a page versus sub actions.

I hope you enjoy this release!

Full Changelog: https://github.com/Xyphyn/photon/compare/v1.31.4...v2.0.0

Photon is two years old now! (I missed the birthday which was 2 weeks ago. :< )

I've done these posts a few times during Photon's early days, and they've been helpful.

2.0 is almost out, I'm done with pretty much everything and it's stable enough. There's bug fixes in here that make it arguably more stable than the current "stable" release.

I ended up with a bit of a "RobTop and 2.2" situation working on this update.

if you're on phtn.app you're always on the latest commit, and if you're using lemdro.id, p.lemmy.world, or photon.slrpnk.net, you're on the latest 2.0 beta.

Ill make a big release note once it's out, but for now:

Are there any new features that you'd like?

Currently planned is:

• Piefed support (targeting v2.2.0)

I am currently working on alpha PieFed support for Photon.

The PieFed API is missing a lot of features from native PieFed, so not all functionality you'd expect will work (notably, the inbox.) I can't do anything about this until those features are added to the API.

The way I'm writing this will also allow Mastodon support in the future.

Status

I've already implemented basically the entire AVAILABLE PieFed API. You can try a beta here.

You can view my progress at via the pull request on GitHub.

It's been on a separate URL for a while now but it is now on phtn.app.

It hasn't been merged to main yet and has not been put as stable release, but i believe it is stable enough to bring to my URL.

Once the stable release is out, I will write release notes. This is the svelte 5 version.

You have become the very thing you swore to destroy