The other day I started making a UI for lemmy with a different framework than is used by the official one as a way of getting some hands on experience with SolidJS. I considered making a clone of the existing UI, but I started thinking that I could make it look different. Since lemmy doesn’t tie you to a specific UI, it could be nice to give instances another option. At the moment, the only web UIs I know of for lemmy is the official one and the bulletin board one. Does anyone have any ideas about this?
Well, this is not true of all image boards, some require to create an account, and I guess it wouldn’t be a bad necessity to require this after all, so maybe it’s an improvement over the original idea. And the other thing you mentioned, I think it could be camouflaged in the GUI without the necessity to modify the back end, although I’m not sure. The pingin works in chans is that you basically get a hyper link to either a user’s comment in a post, or another post by the number it has, if there is some kind of identification for posts/comments on Lemmy, it could work in a way that you’d only need to ping someone and it brings a hyperlink.
Fair point about requiring an account possibly making it better. Regarding the other point, that may be possible. I’m wondering how that would work for federation. I already see users from Mastodon having replies handled by @ing someone. My main concern is how it would be handled on federated instances. While I probably could put all of the comments in a single thread and use links to go between them to make it work on the instance using the chanlike frontend, the way that replies to posts/comments are handled on the backend makes me unsure of how to make sure comments are saved in a way that other Lemmy instances could understand them.
To better explain, here is what the JSON response of your comment that I’m responding to looks like:
JSON
{ "id": 399554, "creator_id": 99615, "post_id": 647564, "content": "Well, this is not true of all image boards, some require to create an account, and I guess it wouldn't be a bad necessity to require this after all, so maybe it's an improvement over the original idea.\nAnd the other thing you mentioned, I think it could be camouflaged in the GUI without the necessity to modify the back end, although I'm not sure. The pingin works in chans is that you basically get a hyper link to either a user's comment in a post, or another post by the number it has, if there is some kind of identification for posts/comments on Lemmy, it could work in a way that you'd only need to ping someone and it brings a hyperlink.", "removed": false, "published": "2023-05-17T18:34:44.600427", "updated": null, "deleted": false, "ap_id": "https://lemmygrad.ml/comment/399554", "local": true, "path": "0.399459.399469.399554", "distinguished": false, "language_id": 0 }The property that’s important here is
path. Each number after the 0 is the id of a comment in a reply, i.e. 399459 was your comment on my post, 399469 is my response, and 399554 is your comment which this comment of mine is responding to. This allows multiple comments to respond to the same comment. Another response to my response might have the path 0.399459.399469.69420. However, this doesn’t lend itself well to having one comment respond to multiple other comments. That said, I do wonder if something like that would make sense to add to Lemmy. I’m not too familiar with a lot of the other fedverse