Yeah, the subscriptions feed has a lot of useful shortcuts, but it can be easy to neglect due to its placement.

I’d love to add alphabetical sorting, however I’m limited to the options provided by the API. The only way I could offer alphabetical sorting as of now, would be to load all communities from the instance and then sort them. This would be a lot of API requests and I don’t want to put that strain on servers.

As of right now I don’t have a very intuitive system for this unless you are logged into the instance in which you can ant to browse communities.

1. If you are logged into the instance you wish to browse, you can open the Browse section in the Subscriptions list. From there you set the filter mode to Local. This will provide a list of communities on local to the instance.
2. If you are not logged into the instance you wish to browse, then you can go to the search tab and open Lemmy Explorer from there you can search for the instance you wish to browse i.e. lemm.ee and browse communities for that instance.

I’m hoping to implement better search filtering in the future so you can actually filter by criteria like the instance, community, user, etc.

Thanks for posting this! It helped me find a bug in my app where it would download that entire file into memory while attempting to fetch metadata for the link. Whoops.

Sounds like your looking for Keychains. Keychains act as a secure key-value store that can be synced via iCloud. This would be suitable for storing login credentials, or authorization tokens. However if you need to sync less secure data, I’d recommend looking at NSUbiquitousKeyValueStore which is another key-value store without the security of a Keychain. Note however, the storage for NSUbiquitousKeyValueStore is limited to 1mb. For more than that, you’d need to implement CloudKit.

This is a longer term goal. I definitely want to go open source, but I’m holding out until I do some major refactoring, things are a bit messy in here right now. I never planned on Arctic becoming such a big project, and it’s grown a bit out of hand. I’m planning to do some major rewriting before open sourcing.

I actually just managed to fix video playback for videos hosted on Lemmy. Turns out it was not due to the video codec, but rather the server not responding correctly, so video players on Apple devices never realize the video finished downloading. Really dumb issue, but I have it fixed now.

Also I added support for PeerTube playback (no uploads yet). It works well, however it’s a little difficult to determine what links are PeerTube links, so it does not catch all PeerTube videos. Right now I have a large list of PeerTube instances that I check against, but that is a little impractical. I’m looking into better ways to handle this.

Yeah, I’ll be adding some new settings to log into different upload services. I added an option for catbox.moe today (you can still use it without logging in, but you won’t be able to deleted the image latter). I also added an option for choosing your upload destination. So you can choose where your media is uploaded. This includes an option to ask each time so that if you want, you can choose the destination every time you upload something.

PeerTube shouldn’t be hard to manage, they have a well documented API, so it should be simple to add support for this.

Also, yes you can use catbox.moe for uploading images as well as videos.

This is a great idea! I rewrote most of the image upload handling today and I added support for uploading to catbox.moe as an alternative to Lemmy.

I’ve been planning to implement the PeerTube API to support viewing PeerTube videos in the feed, I might take it a bit further and add support for uploading there as an alternative.

PixelFed a little fragile at the moment. I looked through their API and it seems to be completely undocumented. I think I understand how to add support for uploads there, but I’m not sure how frequently they may push breaking changes to the API. I’ll have to look into this further. On the other hand, Arctic does support playing videos on PixelFed, they are hosted as H.264 .mp4 which is fine.

Anyway, thanks for the suggestion, I’ll be adding more hosting providers soon.

Also, I just noticed that I disallowed selecting videos for upload in Arctic, since playback is not supported for videos hosted by Lemmy. I’ll enable selecting videos, though I suggest using Catbox or another service to host them on for now.

This has always been a goal for Arctic. Most direct links to videos will play in the feed without issue. There is also a setting in the Media options to embed YouTube videos, this is not very reliable and will fail on a lot of videos. There is another option to convert YouTube videos to Piped, this tends to work better, but can also fail. YouTube specifically is a struggle do to how much effort they put into preventing 3rd party access to content.

Now for videos posted directly to lemmy, they are re-encoded as vp9 and packaged in a mp4. Now this is a big issue for Apple devices. vp9 is the same encoding used for webm, and for whatever reason, apple does not offer any decoders for this format except in Safari, or if you’re YouTube. I’ve looked into integrating VLCKit to play these videos, I may end up adding this as an option, but it’ll be bad for battery life. It would be nice if we could get videos in a different format. Even if we could get an HLS stream in the same format, apple devices have no problem playing vp9 if its in a HLS stream.

A little update on this, I spent most of yesterday working on theme support, and I made a lot of progress. I have everything working, just a few details left to polish, and some work left on the editor.