this post was submitted on 13 Mar 2025
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Tesseract

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Tesseract: An Advanced Lemmy Client

The goal of Tesseract is to address as many things in Lemmy that annoy me as I can. I also trawl various "is there any way to [blank] in Lemmy?" posts to get feature ideas. Both of those lists are pretty extensive, so Tesseract has accumulated quite a few features.

Github: https://github.com/asimons04/Tesseract/

Hosted / Demo Instance: https://tesseract.dubvee.org/

Note that the hosted instance defaults to Lemmy World, but it is unlocked to be able to connect to any Lemmy server.

Announcements, support, and guidance for the Tesseract UI.

All instance rules apply here. Beyond that, just be civil and constructive.

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Late January, I had to step away from the project for a while to deal with some family stuff. That's resolved, but try as I might, I just cannot force myself to get back into development mode on this.

I've got other projects I want to work on, both hobby and home improvement. I need to focus on the latter, and really want to focus on the former. Like anyone else, my time is finite.

The Hard Truth

Tesseract was written for Lemmy, and I'm tired of porting it to Lemmy over and over again because the Lemmy devs keep breaking the API. Yes, yes, pre-1.0 technically means they can shred the API and break everything from release to release. But when a project is widely used, in perpetual beta, and has lots of other developers developing against it, it's disrespectful to them to constantly introduce so many breaking changes when it can be avoided. And it CAN be avoided; they just don't bother.

So where does that leave the project?

Well, potentially completely broken once instances start updating to Lemmy 1.0, and I don't know that I have it in me to continue. At least, not without help. So if you're fluent/proficient with Svelte, please drop me a line.

The original plan was to pivot to Sublinks, but development on that project has stalled. Piefed also has an API that also seems to be fairly stable. I may pivot there and leave Lemmy to its own devices. If there exists a somewhat painless way to convert a Lemmy database to Piefed, I am also looking to transition my instance to that.

Bottom Line

I've grown disillusioned with Lemmy as a platform and flat out despise its developers. I'm tired of the uphill climb just to keep the basic functionality working because the Lemmy devs don't care about anything except Lemmy UI. I've got other things I need to do, a finite amount of free time, and the Lemmy devs picked the worst time to pointlessly break the whole goddamned API. If you want Tesseract to continue, I'm going to need direct help in maintaining it.

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[–] [email protected] 2 points 5 days ago

I think I made a turtle go in a circle once in 1993

Tess wouldn't not benefit from some spinning turtles lol.

Please let us know if you set up a patreon or the like

Probably not going to ever do that, but thanks. I'm even still directing donations to the Photon dev since Tess is a fork of an early version of that.