I saw someone ask what Photon is, so I decided to make a sticky post for this.

Photon is an alternative client for Lemmy.

You probably have heard of “clients” like Sync for Lemmy and Jerboa, Connect, etc. Photon is another client, but instead of being an app, it is a web app. You can essentially use it as a website, by going to https://phtn.app . It’s like the client Voyager.

The part that confuses a lot of people is that some people self-host Photon for their instance. Instances can host their own version of Photon if they wish, and can set a setting to add some flair for that specific instance. This is still “photon”, it’s just on a different domain and linked to that instance essentially.

Photon is currently one of the only clients with full feature-parity to the default interface, lemmy-ui.

Link to this post if someone asks what Photon is.

  • kewko@lemdro.idEnglish
    1·
    1 year ago

    I’ve never seen a (web)app slow down my phone (SD 8 gen2). Just scrolling the feed dropped FPS to <10 using Firefox focus.

    • Xylight (Photon dev)@lemmy.xylight.devOPMEnglish
      0·
      1 year ago

      Photon uses svelte which is pretty fast. Not sure what&#x27;s going on with your phone. It could be Firefox, as I have a very smooth experience with Chrome on a Google Pixel 6.

      Edit: tried it out on Firefox and it’s slow as heck. It could be that Firefox is just slow? It seems vger.app is fine though…

      Next update will be a big optimization update.

      • kewko@lemdro.idEnglish
        1·
        1 year ago

        Thanks for looking into it! Chrome is superior in more ways than one, not gonna lie. But since Goog announced they’re dropping certain api support a few years back I just knew it’s time to drop it, we can’t have single entities control too much of what we hold dear about our internet. (I don’t expect it’s hard to find Lemmy users that’d be supportive of this rhetoric)

        Tldr please support FF (and eff on an unrelated note) even if it’s not the easiest!