I'm tired of dealing with the arrogant, tone-deaf Lemmy developers and their utter disdain for moderators and anyone else working within the ecosystem. To that end, development of and support for Tesseract for Lemmy has ceased.
The latest release version, 1.2.9, is available here for posterity and if anyone would like to adopt and fork it. If you do, please re-name it so I will not be associated with it.
As of the date of abandonment, 1.2.9 has "backwards compatible" support for both 0.18.x and 0.19.x but does not support any new 0.19.x features as it is still using the 0.18.x JS client.
The Lemmy devs refused to provide any backwards-compatible support in the 0.19 client despite encouraging alternate frontend devs to provide backwards-compaible support (which they themselves do not). This is one of many reasons I'm done developing for Lemmy.
Tesseract for Lemmy may be dead, but the project is not. There is another Lemmy-like platform being developed, and I'm excited to announce that all future Tesseract development will be focused there. One of the goals of that project is initial Lemmy API compatibility, so Tesseract may still work with Lemmy for a while, but that will only be a side effect.
I may also rename the project to further distance it from Lemmy, but that is yet to be determined.
Thank you all for your support, awesome suggestions, and for sharing my dream of an awesome client. I hope to see you in the future once the Lemmy-like platform is released (it's not public yet, so I do not want to reveal anything further at this time).
Tesseract was Lemmy client designed for media-rich feeds and content. It was probably the best Lemmy client no one was using :-P
It started out as my personal, custom build of Photon, but it got exhausting porting over my bells and whistles each release. To that end, I finally decided to make it an official fork.
You can't really call this a Photon fork anymore. Deep down, yeah, there's still some Photon left, but much of it has been re-implemented as I've added new features and rewritten various components.
The full list of changes can be found in the change log.
The following features are unique to Tesseract:
- Spotify
- YouTube/Invidious/Piped
- Soundcloud
- Vimeo
- Bandcamp
- Odysee
- Song Link
- Streamable, Imgur, and any source that provides an embed video URL in the metadata now render inline.
- Browse the communties of other instances and seamlessly load and subscribe to them. No more of that obnoxious copy/paste, search, wait, search again, subscribe hokey-pokey dance.
- Post and comment menus let you browse the communities of the originating instance
Privacy conscious users have long requested media be proxied through Lemmy. While I can't add that to the API, I can add it to the UI. Additionally, since the media is already flowing through Tesseract, it made sense to optionally cache the proxied media for re-use.
- Enhance user privacy, reduce bandwidth to other instances, and speed up serving content to your users.
- Can cache any media proxied through it. Tesseract can act as a caching proxy for your instance as well as cache media originating on other instances as well as outside resources (Giphy, Catbox, Imgur, Yarn, etc).
- Administrators must explicitly enable this module, and users must enable media proxying in their app settings.
- Acts like a CDN in a box. You can even set up regional instances of Tesseract to move the heavy data closer to your users.
Read more: Media Proxy/Cache Docs
Posts with URLs can have a MBFC badge in the corner which will lookup the publisher in the MBFC database and return their bias and credibility information. The MBFC results are also integrated into the reporting and moderation tools.
For Users:
- Easily see where the news stories in your feed are coming from and what their sources' credibility ratings are.
- Optionally, automatically hide posts that link to non-credible sources.
- Seamlessly report posts that are from non-credible sources while including a copy of the MBFC results.
For Moderators/Admins:
- Quickly and easily identify and squash posts from disreputable sources.
- MBFC is integrated into the mod tooling allowing you to populate removal reasons / replies with the results of a MBFC lookup.
- Perfect for those who are moderating a news or political community.
- See any endorsements, hesitations, and censures given to instances you're interacting with.
- Code syntax highlighting in code and inline code blocks.
Mods/Admins can distinguish and sticky comments. Comments that are distinguished will always display at the top of the comment list regardless of sort order.
The handling of the distinguished flag is different in Tesseract than in Lemmy-UI:
Tesseract
- Distinguished comments will be given a green background and border
- Distinguished comments are pinned at the top of the comments list.
- Any comment can be distinguished by a mod/admin.
Lemmy-UI
- Distinguished comments just have an "admin" badge next to them.
- Only admin/mod comments can be distinguished with the "Speak as moderator" option. (which is redundant because mod accounts already have moderator badges).
Note that the way distinguished comments are handled only applies to Tesseract. The comments will be marked as distinguished at the API level, but it's up to individual clients/UIs to handle how to render comments with the distinguished flag set.
Sick of hearing about a particular topic? Add keyword filters to keep posts containg those terms from appearing in your feed. By default, keywords are compared case-insensitively, checked as whole-words, and only checked for presence within the post title, body, or embed description.
You can add modifiers to fine tune this somewhat:
!term: Prefixing a keyword with an exclamation mark will compare it as case-sensitve. Useful for filtering acronyms.^term: A carat tells the filter to check that the post elements start with the provided term.*term: An asterisk disabled whole word checking will filter a post if the keyword is contained within other words.
At this time, modifiers cannot be combined. Perhaps that is something that will be implemented later.
Install as a PWA on either or just use it through the web.
You can add multiple accounts and easily switch between them. Accounts can even be on different instances if the administrator chooses not to lock Tesseract to theirs.
If you host your own Tesseract instance, you can use it as a frontend for any Lemmy instance. Instance admins can host Tesseract on a subdomain or even replace Lemmy-UI with it. You can even run it on localhost if you want, though image uploads will not work due to CORS.
- User-configurable image/video sizes in feed and posts
- Full Lemmy server config options.
- Most aspects of the UI can be configured by the end user. Server admins can set default preferences via
envvars.
- Can access moderation actions from the feed without having to click into the post as with Lemmy-UI
- Local instance admins have full moderation control of the instance as with Lemmy-UI
- Modlog support on both desktop and mobile.
- Supercharged modlog with enhanced filtering
- Communities and users have "moglog" links in their action menus. Those will take you to a pre-filtered modlog for just actions related to them.
- Can simply click "reply with reason" when taking moderation actions to send the user a message with the removal details. Template is user-configurable.
Tesseract is maintained by someone who is simultaneously a Lemmy user, administrator, and moderator.
For Youtube (and Invidious/Piped), Spotify, Bandcamp, and Soundcloud, you don't need to use any special embed links; just the regular URL from your browser. Tesseract will take care of generating the embed URLs based on your preferences.
-
Odysee videos
-
Direct video links (e.g .webm, mp4, etc) will embed a player in the feed/post. Right now, these are not toggleable as most do not have thumbnails and the bare links are ugly AF; they're treated basically like fancy image posts. However, they only downoad enough to show the first few frames, which is acceptable from a performance/bandwidth perspective.
-
YouTube and all known Invidious and Piped links are detected as "Youtube-like" embeddable videos. These will embed using the user's preferred YouTube frontend which can be configured in settings. Currently, YouTube and Invidious are supported frontends, and the Invidious instance used can be chosen from your settings. You can even define custom Invididious and Piped instances.
-
Vimeo videos are supported with their native URLs (e.g. vimeo.com/{videoID})
-
Soundcloud track links will be detected and a player embedded. Playlists don't seem to be supported on Soundcloud's end, so unfortunately, only track links can be embedded.
-
Spotify tracks, albums, and playlists will embed a player right in the feed or post.
- (Optional) To enable full track playback rather than previews, you will need to either allow 3rd party cookies for the Tesseract domain or whitelist cookies for
open.spotify.com. This is to allow the Spotify iframe to detect your login.- On mobile browsers, Spotify will only allow track previews regardless of login state so don't bother allowing 3rd party cookies.
- (Optional) To enable full track playback rather than previews, you will need to either allow 3rd party cookies for the Tesseract domain or whitelist cookies for
-
Bandcamp tracks and albums.
-
TikTok is not currently supported. I don't have TikTok, and no one has asked for it, so I'm content not supporting that unless there's demand and someone is able to provide me some sample links (TT does have an embed API, so at least limited support possible).
I created a public Matrix support space you can join. General discussion, flesh out ideas, or ask for support. Tesseract Support
There is also a Lemmy community where you can get the latest announcements and post questions related to Tesseract. Find us at https://dubvee.org/c/tesseract
The "to do" and roadmap has been moved to a dedicated file.
Completed "to do"s have been moved to the change log.
The changelog also contains an informal list of items I hope to add to the next few upcoming releases.
An open, public demo instance is available at https://tesseract.dubvee.org. Feel free to try it out with your favorite Lemmy instance.
Tesseract is designed to be self hosted. You can even run it from localhost if you want and connect to any Lemmy instance out there. (Note that image uploads can't work from localhost due to the CORS handler, but everything else will)
Replace example.com in the line below with the base URL of your instance.
Additional environment variables for configuring Tesseract can be found further down in the README.
docker run -p 8080:3000 -d -e PUBLIC_INSTANCE_URL=example.com ghcr.io/asimons04/tesseract:latest
- Clone the repo from a release branch
- docker build -t tesseract:latest ./
docker run -p 8080:3000 -d -e PUBLIC_INSTANCE_URL=example.com tesseract:latest
Running Tesseract Alongside Lemmy-UI
Use this example config to get you started if you want to run Tesseract alongside Lemmy-UI (e.g. under a subdomain). Adjust the server_name, SSL cert paths, and proxy_pass upstreams with values applicable to your deployment.
server {
listen 80;
server_name tesseract.example.com;
location / {
return 301 https://$host$uri?$args;
}
}
server {
listen 443 ssl http2;
server_name tesseract.example.com;
ssl_certificate /etc/letsencrypt/live/tesseract.example.com/fullchain.pem;
ssl_certificate_key /etc/letsencrypt/live/tesseract.example.com/privkey.pem;
ssl_dhparam /etc/nginx/tls/dhparams.pem;
ssl_protocols TLSv1.2 TLSv1.3;
ssl_session_cache shared:SSL:10m;
ssl_session_timeout 15m;
location / {
proxy_pass http://127.0.0.1:8080;
}
}
Running Tesseract In Place Of Lemmy-UI
If you want to run Tesseract in place of Lemmy-UI, just replace the proxy pass that goes to your current Lemmy-UI with the IP/port of Tesseract.
The following environment variables can be set to override the default settings. Note that all environment variables must be prefixed with PUBLIC_ to be picked up by SvelteKit.
| Variable | Values | Default Value |
|---|---|---|
| PUBLIC_INSTANCE_URL | URL | lemmy.world |
| PUBLIC_LOCK_TO_INSTANCE | bool |
true if PUBLIC_INSTANCE_URL is set |
| PUBLIC_SSR_ENABLED | bool |
false |
| PUBLIC_THEME | system|dark|light | system |
| PUBLIC_DISABLE_MODLOG_USERS | bool |
false |
| PUBLIC_MARK_READ_POSTS | bool |
true |
| PUBLIC_SHOW_INSTANCES_USER | bool |
false |
| PUBLIC_SHOW_INSTANCES_COMMUNITY | bool |
true |
| PUBLIC_SHOW_INSTANCES_COMMENTS | bool |
false |
| PUBLIC_SHOW_COMPACT_POSTS | bool |
false |
| PUBLIC_DEFAULT_FEED_SORT | SortType |
Active |
| PUBLIC_DEFAULT_FEED | ListingType |
Local |
| PUBLIC_DEFAULT_COMMENT_SORT | CommentSortType |
Hot |
| PUBLIC_HIDE_DELETED | bool |
true |
| PUBLIC_HIDE_REMOVED | bool |
false |
| PUBLIC_DISPLAY_NAMES | bool |
true |
| PUBLIC_TAG_NSFW_COMMUNITIES | bool |
true |
| PUBLIC_NSFW_BLUR | bool |
true |
| PUBLIC_OPEN_LINKS_NEW_TAB | bool |
false |
| PUBLIC_ENABLE_EMBEDDED_MEDIA_FEED | bool |
false |
| PUBLIC_ENABLE_EMBEDDED_MEDIA_POST | bool |
true |
| PUBLIC_YOUTUBE_FRONTEND | YouTube|Invidious |
YouTube |
| PUBLIC_CUSTOM_INVIDIOUS | Comma-separated string | '' |
| PUBLIC_CUSTOM_PIPED | Comma-separated string | '' |
| PUBLIC_ENABLE_USER_MEDIA_PROXY | bool |
false |
| PUBLIC_ENABLE_FEDISEER_BADGES | bool |
false |
| PUBLIC_ENABLE_MBFC_BADGES | bool |
true |
Descriptions of the config options and what they do are covered in the Media Proxy Cache module documentation.
| Variable | Value | Default |
|---|---|---|
| PUBLIC_ENABLE_MEDIA_PROXY | bool |
false |
| PUBLIC_MEDIA_PROXY_LEMMY_ONLY | bool |
false |
| PUBLIC_MEDIA_PROXY_BLACKLIST | String | '' |
| PUBLIC_ENABLE_MEDIA_PROXY_LOCAL | bool |
true |
| PUBLIC_ENABLE_MEDIA_CACHE | bool |
true |
| PUBLIC_MEDIA_CACHE_DURATION | Integer (minutes) | 720 |
| PUBLIC_MEDIA_CACHE_MAX_SIZE | Integer (MB) | 1000 |
| PUBLIC_MEDIA_CACHE_HOUSEKEEP_INTERVAL | Integer (minutes) | 5 |
| PUBLIC_MEDIA_CACHE_HOUSEKEEP_STARTUP | bool |
true |
| PUBLIC_MEDIA_CACHE_KEEP_HOT_ITEMS | bool |
true |
The values for SortType, ListingType, and CommentSortType are defined by the lemmy-js-client library. All of the values are case-sensitive and must match as they are defined in the type definitions of the lemmy-js-client
https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy-js-client/blob/main/src/types/ListingType.ts
- All
- Local
- Subscribed
- Moderator View (not implemented in Tesseract)
https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy-js-client/blob/main/src/types/SortType.ts
- Active
- Hot
- New
- Old
- TopDay
- TopWeek
- TopMonth
- TopAll
- MostComments
- NewComments
- TopHour
- TopSixHour
- TopTwelveHour (Not implemented in Tesseract)
- TopThreeMonths (Not implemented in Tesseract)
- TopSixMonths (Not implemented in Tesseract)
- TopNineMonths (Not implemented in Tesseract)
- TopYear (Not implemented in Tesseract)
https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy-js-client/blob/main/src/types/CommentSortType.ts
- Hot
- Top
- New
- Old (not implemented in Tesseract)
- Controversial (not implemented in Tesseract)
These screenshots are quite out of date, but they'll give you an idea (haven't had time to replace them yet). You can also see it live at https://tesseract.dubvee.org.
| _ | _ |
|---|---|
 YouTube videos playing inline |
 Beehaw c/Music as it was meant to be |
 Community sidebar added to post view. |
 Post cards are much more Reddit-like |
 Spotify playlist embedded |
 Running as a desktop PWA |
Donate to Xylight, not me. It's their baby, and I'm just building on top of it. You can donate at Buy me a Coffee
