Raccoon for Lemmy

A Kotlin Multiplatform Mobile client for Lemmy.

Raccoon for Lemmy is a client for the federated aggregation and discussion platform Lemmy.

The project started as an exercise to play around with Kotlin Multiplatform (KMP) and Compose multiplatform and gradually grew as a fully functional client with many features.

Main features

• view post feed and comments with different listing and sort types;
• possibility to upvote and downvote (with optional swipe actions)
• community and user detail;
• user profile with one's own posts, comments and saved items;
• inbox with replies, mentions and direct messages;
• global search on Lemmy with different result types (all, posts, comments, user, communities);
• create and edit new posts (with optional images);
• reply to post and comments (and edit replies);
• mark posts as read and hide read contents;
• custom appearance (color scheme, font, text size, post layout);
• custom localization (independent of system settings);
• block users, communities and instances (the latter requires Lemmy >= 0.19);
• report post and comments to moderators;
• support for multiple accounts (and multiple instances) with account-specific settings;
• lazy scrolling (referred to as "zombie mode");
• explore all the communities on a given instance in guest mode;
• multi-community (community aggregation);
• community moderation tools.

Most clients for Lemmy currently offer the first points (with various degrees of completion), so there is nothing special about Raccoon for Lemmy, whereas the last ones are less common and are directed to more picky users (like me) who like to explore the Lemmy ecosystem and want to be able to group feed contents arbitrarily.

I like to be able to customize the appearance of my apps, so the ability to change font face or size and colors was of paramount importance to me. Similarly, I like when I can use an app in my native language and change the UI language independently from the system language, so localization is a first-class citizen in this project too.

If you are a moderator of a community, it is also good to be able to moderate content from your mobile device instead of using the web interface, but in-app moderation is rare in the existing clients (and even more so in open source clients). Raccoon For Lemmy is trying to bridge this gap and offers some extent of moderation tools (feature post, lock post, distinguish comment, remove post/comment, ban users and the ability to revert any of these actions).

The application is under active development, so expect new features to be added and the layout is going to change and evolve (hopefully for the better) over time.

For this, speak up and use your voice if you have feedback, suggestions, requests and so on.

Why was the project started?

Because raccoons are so adorable, aren't they? 🦝🦝🦝

Joking apart, one of the main goals was to experiment with KMP and learn how to properly deal with the challenges of a multiplatform environment.

Secondly, as a means to dig deeper inside Lemmy's internals and become more humble and patient towards other apps whenever I found anything lacking or not implemented in an optimal way (according to my taste).

In the third place, I felt that the Android ecosystem of Lemmy apps was a little "poor" with few native apps (fewer open source), while the "market" is dominated by iOS and cross platform clients. I️ ❤️ Kotlin, I ❤️ Free and Open Source Software and I ❤️ native app development, so there was a "niche" that needed to be filled.

Moreover, developing a new client was an opportunity to add all the features that I needed and that were "scattered" across different apps, e.g. I liked the feature richness of Liftoff (e.g. the possibility to explore all the communities of an external instance), the multi-community feature of Summit and the polished UI of Thunder and I wished I could have them all in the same app. If I saw a feature of Lemmy (e.g. sorting by "Controversial") that not all apps offer, I could add it myself, etc. This involves a high level of discretionality and personal taste, I know, but this project is all about experimenting and learning.

Technologies used:

• Koin for dependency injection
• Voyager for screen navigation
• Ktor and Ktorfit for networking in conjunction with kotlinx-serialization for JSON marshalling
• Moko resources for resource management
• Kamel for lazy image loading, but later switched to Coil on Android because there was a major bug
• Multiplatform settings for encrypted preferences
• SQLDelight and SQLCipher for local persistence
• for Markdown rendering, the initial approach involved using Markdown for parsing in conjunction with custom rendering but this approach proved difficult to extend and maintain so on Android the Markwon library was chosen insted.

Credits:

• the core-md module in the common flavor is heavily inspired by Multiplatform Markdown Renderer but the Android implementation with Markwon is adapted from Jerboa for Lemmy
• the UI is inspired by the really great Thunder app

Acknowledgements:

This project would not be what it is were it not for the huge amount of patience and dedication of early adopters who sent me continous feedback and ideas for improvement after every release.

A special thank to all those who contributed so far: rb_c, OverfedRaccoon, Jailbrick3d, everdred…

(if you want your nickname removed reach out to me).

Want to try it out?

You can use Obtainium by simply adding this repo https://github.com/diegoberaldin/RaccoonForLemmy.

If you are interested in pre-prod releases, please enable the "Include prereleases" switch in order to install versions not marked as stable.

Alternatively, you can use the Play Store. The app is currently only available to a group of selected testers (because how closed test channels work on Google Play) so if you want to be added please write to me specifying the email adress you are logged in on the Play Store with or, if you are on Lemmy reach out to me and send me a message with the email address.

Once we get to at least 20 testers for >= 14 days I'll be able to publish to an open test channel and, later, release a production version.

Want to leave your feedback or report a bug?

• open an issue on this project's issue tracker to report bugs or request new features
• create a post on the project's community on Lemmy.world for broader questions, opinions, personal feedback, suggestions, insults or whatever you feel like writing
• if you are a translator and want to help out with l10n or submit some corrections but you don't feel confident with repository forks, pull requests, managing resource files, etc. feel free to drop an email.

Every contribution is welcome, everyone's opinion matters.