37

Hello, I'd like to build a mobile client for mastodon, lemmy and pixelfed that would be video/image focused with a scrolling ui similar to tiktok or the reddit video viewer.

You would have a sortable/filterable feed with contents from different activitypub networks and would see it full page with a like/voting button on the right and the comments under.

Does anyone know if such a client already exists, and if not, could any dev share starter point links for building such an app ?

top 9 comments
sorted by: hot top controversial new old
[-] poVoq@slrpnk.net 13 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago)

You should get in contact with the people behind: https://loops.video/

The main dev is the one that also does Pixelfed and he needs developer help and also asked for it specifically for Loops.

[-] Transform2942@lemmy.ml 8 points 5 months ago

I'm a dev but not very good at mobile.

I can promise you that a lot of engineering work went into making the tiktok scrolling experience so smooth. Part of the trick is having a good enough algorithm that the user wants to watch the majority of served videos.

Another huge part of it is having lightning fast content distribution and aggressive "prefetching" of the next videos in the feed.

I don't want to discourage you but I also don't want you to be caught off guard by the difficulty. Do you want to make this bad enough to give it your nights and weekends for a year?

[-] QuantumSoul@lemmy.dbzer0.com 6 points 5 months ago

Thanks for answering

I am not planning on the algorithm part as it is too far for me and lemmy one is sufficient. That means you won't be scrolling for hours when you have catched up news, but I think it's a good thing since I don't want the addiction part. I was thinking about a very simplistic app with only the feeds we get in other clients, simpler than current clients.

I might have considered it too easy though looking at what you say

[-] Transform2942@lemmy.ml 7 points 5 months ago

You're welcome!

So if you didn't care about having to wait for the video to buffer on every scroll, it becomes an easier problem. I kind of think that defeats the purpose of a tiktok-style interface though.

I agree that you wouldn't necessarily need to build a new algorithm, but like I said, it's part of the smooth scrolling magic

[-] underscores@lemmy.dbzer0.com 8 points 5 months ago

The creator of pixelfed is working on a tiktok alternative loops, although for now it's in private beta.

For a starting point that is available now, you could look at Pixeldroid, an open source pixelfed app.

[-] QuantumSoul@lemmy.dbzer0.com 4 points 5 months ago

Thank you that's interesting

[-] ademir@lemmy.eco.br 3 points 5 months ago

please make it work with akkoma/pleroma

this post was submitted on 12 Jun 2024
37 points (97.4% liked)

Fediverse

28388 readers
139 users here now

A community to talk about the Fediverse and all it's related services using ActivityPub (Mastodon, Lemmy, KBin, etc).

If you wanted to get help with moderating your own community then head over to !moderators@lemmy.world!

Rules

Learn more at these websites: Join The Fediverse Wiki, Fediverse.info, Wikipedia Page, The Federation Info (Stats), FediDB (Stats), Sub Rehab (Reddit Migration), Search Lemmy

founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS