Yeah, the subscriptions feed has a lot of useful shortcuts, but it can be easy to neglect due to its placement.

I’d love to add alphabetical sorting, however I’m limited to the options provided by the API. The only way I could offer alphabetical sorting as of now, would be to load all communities from the instance and then sort them. This would be a lot of API requests and I don’t want to put that strain on servers.

As of right now I don’t have a very intuitive system for this unless you are logged into the instance in which you can ant to browse communities.

1. If you are logged into the instance you wish to browse, you can open the Browse section in the Subscriptions list. From there you set the filter mode to Local. This will provide a list of communities on local to the instance.
2. If you are not logged into the instance you wish to browse, then you can go to the search tab and open Lemmy Explorer from there you can search for the instance you wish to browse i.e. lemm.ee and browse communities for that instance.

I’m hoping to implement better search filtering in the future so you can actually filter by criteria like the instance, community, user, etc.

Thanks for posting this! It helped me find a bug in my app where it would download that entire file into memory while attempting to fetch metadata for the link. Whoops.

This is a longer term goal. I definitely want to go open source, but I’m holding out until I do some major refactoring, things are a bit messy in here right now. I never planned on Arctic becoming such a big project, and it’s grown a bit out of hand. I’m planning to do some major rewriting before open sourcing.

I actually just managed to fix video playback for videos hosted on Lemmy. Turns out it was not due to the video codec, but rather the server not responding correctly, so video players on Apple devices never realize the video finished downloading. Really dumb issue, but I have it fixed now.

Also I added support for PeerTube playback (no uploads yet). It works well, however it’s a little difficult to determine what links are PeerTube links, so it does not catch all PeerTube videos. Right now I have a large list of PeerTube instances that I check against, but that is a little impractical. I’m looking into better ways to handle this.

Yeah, I’ll be adding some new settings to log into different upload services. I added an option for catbox.moe today (you can still use it without logging in, but you won’t be able to deleted the image latter). I also added an option for choosing your upload destination. So you can choose where your media is uploaded. This includes an option to ask each time so that if you want, you can choose the destination every time you upload something.

PeerTube shouldn’t be hard to manage, they have a well documented API, so it should be simple to add support for this.

Also, yes you can use catbox.moe for uploading images as well as videos.

This is a great idea! I rewrote most of the image upload handling today and I added support for uploading to catbox.moe as an alternative to Lemmy.

I’ve been planning to implement the PeerTube API to support viewing PeerTube videos in the feed, I might take it a bit further and add support for uploading there as an alternative.

PixelFed a little fragile at the moment. I looked through their API and it seems to be completely undocumented. I think I understand how to add support for uploads there, but I’m not sure how frequently they may push breaking changes to the API. I’ll have to look into this further. On the other hand, Arctic does support playing videos on PixelFed, they are hosted as H.264 .mp4 which is fine.

Anyway, thanks for the suggestion, I’ll be adding more hosting providers soon.

Also, I just noticed that I disallowed selecting videos for upload in Arctic, since playback is not supported for videos hosted by Lemmy. I’ll enable selecting videos, though I suggest using Catbox or another service to host them on for now.

This has always been a goal for Arctic. Most direct links to videos will play in the feed without issue. There is also a setting in the Media options to embed YouTube videos, this is not very reliable and will fail on a lot of videos. There is another option to convert YouTube videos to Piped, this tends to work better, but can also fail. YouTube specifically is a struggle do to how much effort they put into preventing 3rd party access to content.

Now for videos posted directly to lemmy, they are re-encoded as vp9 and packaged in a mp4. Now this is a big issue for Apple devices. vp9 is the same encoding used for webm, and for whatever reason, apple does not offer any decoders for this format except in Safari, or if you’re YouTube. I’ve looked into integrating VLCKit to play these videos, I may end up adding this as an option, but it’ll be bad for battery life. It would be nice if we could get videos in a different format. Even if we could get an HLS stream in the same format, apple devices have no problem playing vp9 if its in a HLS stream.

A little update on this, I spent most of yesterday working on theme support, and I made a lot of progress. I have everything working, just a few details left to polish, and some work left on the editor.

It’s written in Swift. Originally I had planned to write it in Go, but I decided to try out Swift as a backend since I had never used Swift for web development. This allows me to share the same Lemmy API library and networking between both Arctic, and it’s notification server.

Exactly, I was actually planning to add a theme browser. I’m going to setup a service on Arctic’s website to host themes. Then you’ll be able to browse community themes in Arctic, and install them. I’ll also setup a community for arctic themes, so users can share their themes with screenshots etc.

That’s great to hear, and I hope you’re enjoying Arctic so far. I actually started out using Memmy as well, it was one of the first apps available with a good set of features. I hadn’t realized that support had ended for the project though, That’s a shame.

I hadn’t really thought about it before, But it only took about 5 minutes to add support for a lighter variant of dark mode. I’ll include this in the next release.

I am however working on customizable theme support. It’ll allow for creating custom themes and changing just about any color you want in the app. This is taking me some time to build though, and it likely won’t be ready for a while.

My pleasure! I did not plan on such a long list of changes, I got a little carried away. I had a list of issues I had noticed over the last couple of months, and I was just planning to address those with this update. After such a long break from the project, I wasn’t in a huge rush to release this update. That gave me the time to work on bigger features like Mac support, and embedded content.

Always a pleasure, I’m excited to be working on Arctic again after such a long break!

To be fair, that feature list was completed before the surgery. I just had surgery on Monday. I figure if I’m going to be mostly bed bound for the next month, I could put that to some use and work on Arctic.

I definitely burnt myself out towards the beginning of summer, that’s what started my taking a break from development. Then between work, summer heat, and my injury, it took me a while to get back into the groove.

Sorry, it was late when I replied and I didn’t notice exactly what you were referring to. I got sidetracked by the post not showing for you.

This is about the link preview in the post not being blurred. This is not exactly a bug. The issue with blurring content in comments is that there is no way to mark a comment or a link as NSFW on Lemmy. What I could do is add an option to blur all links and images in comments on NSFW posts. To be honest, I hadn’t really thought of this scenario before.

I did some work on this issue last night. I improved the logging a bit so that the error message actually shows the failure reason provided by lemmy rather than just the generic network error.

As for the issue, I can’t seem to track down why that would have happened. I’m on lemmy.world as well, and I have no issue uploading images. I ran some tests today, and I was able to upload some large images. There are some dimension restrictions as well of (10,000 x 10,1000) and (40,000px).

Do you happen to be using a VPN? I know lemmy.world had disabled uploads when using a VPN to help with illegal content being uploaded. If not, then there must be some issue I’m not noticing / experiencing and I’ll have to look into it further.

I did take a long break from Arctic development over the summer and I’m just getting back into it over the last couple of weeks. I’m excited to be back at it, and thankfully the surgery is not too much of an interruption so I can use some of my time off to push out some updates.

That’s possible, it could have just as easily been due to the maintenance I was on the notification server the last few days. I had the server offline several times during maintenance. I believe it is working as expected now.

No worries about the late response, hope you’re feeling better!

Sorry, I noticed this post a little late. I usually get notifications for new posts here, but I believe I was doing maintenance on the notification server when you posted this.

Anyway, it looks like you figured this out already. I would love to include an option to toggle this account setting in Arctic, however it goes against the AppStore regulations. I’m allowed to have a toggle for client side filtering and blurring, but not for changing the account setting. I’ll see about adding a status message in settings to notify users if NSFW content is disabled on their account.