This is a very big release since v1.31.4. If you’ve used phtn.app, you won’t notice a difference, since that runs on the latest commit.

TL;DR

• Photon has been completely rewritten to use Svelte 5
• This brings significant performance improvements
• The UX has been changed to fit Photon’s philosophy more closely
• Many issues have been resolved and bugs fixed
• 60% of changes are under the hood, but there’s many visible ones too

What you’ll notice

Snappier performance

• Svelte 5 optimizes a lot of the reactive parts of the app
• I’ve also spent a lot of time on a new virtualizer, which runs a lot faster

Design changes

• While the overall layout is relatively the same, I’ve reworked a lot of pages to fall more in line with my design philosophy.
• The design across (most) pages is much more consistent
• There’s a new default theme
• Compact mode is now the default (if you’ve used photon before, this will not affect your setting)
• Comment layout is slightly different and more intuitive
• Modals now create a backstack so you can press the back button on your browser

New features and options

• More moderation features
  • Quickly view users’/submissions’ moderation logs
  • View the users’ votes n a post
  • Grouped reports for many reports on the same post
    • you can resolve many at once
• Options for more granular control over how links work in posts
• Option to reverse the action row
• Option to use absolute timestamps
• lemmy language tagging support
• Command palette now has contextual navigation options
• Contextual warnings for certain actions (like missing languages in posts)
• Messages page has been overhauled with markdown, contextual actions, etc
• Better view and options for modlog page
• Donation dialog as Lemmy requested

Optimizations

• Uses CSS animations more often which are faster
• Uses svelte context API to reduce prop drilling
• Navbar uses CSS rather than JS for positioning
• Uses optimized svelte $state rather than stores

Languages

Thanks to the community making translations on the Weblate, Photon has support for 18 languages!

• English (100%)
• Hebrew (58%)
• Arabic (33%) (fxomt)
• Bulgarian (72%) (salif)
• Chinese (Simplified) (91%) (qiancsf, CDN, binary3141)
• Chinese (Traditional) (21%) (binary3141)
• Dutch (81%) (qaz)
• Estonian (24%) (pewgar)
• Finnish (94%) (sevon)
• French (87%) (Blisterexe)
• German (64%) (poVoq, Tywele)
• Hungarian (55%) (myedition8)
• Japanese (84%) (Rentlar)
• Polish (83%) (gapetto)
• Portuguese (78%) (tmpod)
• Russian (83%) (WerySkok, mudkip)
• Spanish (81%) (acidrums4)
• Turkish (91%) (ikanat)

In the future

• Piefed support is targeting v2.2.0
  • With the way it is being written, Mastodon support may as well come sometime around v3.0.0

There’s a lot more in this release, as well as more to come. I’m trying to make Photon closer to its design philosophy, which can be summarized as:

It should not take more than 3 seconds to identify an action you wish to perform within a given container or page.

This covers a lot of reasons why I design stuff the way I do, for example, you’ll never find more than 5 buttons (minus links) in a single container. Additionally, specific types of actions will usually look different, like primary actions on a page versus sub actions.

I hope you enjoy this release!

Full Changelog: https://github.com/Xyphyn/photon/compare/v1.31.4...v2.0.0