I’m still putting the finishing touches on the release candidate, but it’s feature-complete and stable enough for general use. To that end, I’m happy to announce that 1.2.9 has been released to beta and is live at the hosted instance (tesseract.dubvee.org).

New Features

Community Groups and Custom Feeds

Organize your Lemmy experience by creating groups and adding communities to them. Groups are accessible and managed from the sidebar. Each group can be turned into a custom feed showing only posts from the included communities.

Example Uses of Groups

• Add your news and politics communities to a “News & Politics” group to keep up to date on current affairs.
• Put all of your music communities into a “Music” group
• Add the communities you moderate to a group, sort it by new, and quickly keep tabs on new posts that could be problematic.
• Sort your communities by topic and make browsing by “new” less whiplash inducing.

Favorite Communities

“Favorites” started off as a separate feature before being folded into the groups. Right now, there’s nothing really special about it other than it is a top-level option to add a community to your favorites list. As part of the final polish before the final release, I’m going to make the communities in the Favorites group quickly accessible and separate from the Groups list.

Emoji Picker

This has been a “to do” for what feels like forever. It supports the custom emojis of your home instance in addition to the bundled pack.

New Buttons in the Post Actions

There are now 3 menu buttons on each post (4 if you’re a moderator/admin). These are available in the feed as well as in the post, so common actions are now easier to access than ever.

Post Actions (Refreshed/De-Cluttered)

This is the same as it was with actions relevant to the post: crosspost, save, mark read/unread, report. What’s different now is all of the other options have been broken out into two other menus.

Community Actions (New)

This is a new menu with actions relevant to the community the post belongs to. It has options to create a post in that community, browse the community feed, see the modlog for that community, add the community to your favorites, add it to a named group, or subscribe/unsubscribe.

Explore (New)

The Explore menu is there to help you discover new communities or to view additional data about the instances of the community or post creator. At present, you can browse the communities hosted by the home instance of the community or those of the creator’s home instance. There are also options to view a Fediseer report for the instances involved.

Sidebar Powerup

The sidebar has gotten an upgrade. Communities shown there now have context menus for quick access to common actions: Create post, add to favorite, add/remove to groups, and unsubscribe (no subscribe since only your subscriptions are shown in the sidebar).

Export/Import Your Settings

Since your groups and favorites are stored in your local profile, I needed to make some way to be able to transfer those to another device. From the settings page, there is a new panel called “Import/Export” where you can export your settings to a JSON file and/or import them from one you upload.

Settings Cloud Sync

There’s also an option in the Import/Export panel to save your settings to Lemmy. There is also a corresponding warning about how I’m horribly abusing the API to make that work.

In short, Tesseract can upload it’s settings as JSON string and store them in the theme field of your user profile. This works wonderfully, but it will also break the CSS in Lemmy-UI since it expects a valid string value to be in that field.

If you don’t use Lemmy-UI, then there’s nothing to really worry about; sync away. If you use Lemmy-UI and need to fix the CSS, you can restore a valid theme value by using the reset function at the bottom of the Import/Export page of the app settings.

UI Polish

The main layout of the UI is largely unchanged, but there’s been quite a bit of polish throughout. Margins/padding more consistent, buttons flattened, transparency effects, etc. Couldn’t get all the rough edges in this release, but some are due for a re-write anyway.

Wrap Up

That’s the gist of the new features you’d actually notice. There’s a LOT of stuff new and cleaned-up under the hood, but such minutiae are best left for the change log.

Please report any bugs to the Github issue tracker or reply to this post with them. Again, this is an initial beta release, so there may be some bugs I haven’t shaken out yet.