Voyager

Hi there! I thought I should give you all an update on Voyager as a newsletter format. This may become a regular thing, maybe not, I'm still not sure. :)

Voyager is now on F-droid!

https://f-droid.org/en/packages/app.vger.voyager/

Voyager joins Jerboa and Lemmur [discontinued] as the third Lemmy app on F-droid. However, Voyager is the first Lemmy app on F-droid to have reproducible builds! I'll let Izzy from F-droid explain why this is so cool:

[Reproducible builds] proves to you that the developer confirmed: „this is what I intended to publish, this was built from my code“. And that it’s distributed by F-Droid tells you: „F-Droid confirms, too, that this is the APK built from the very code the developer provided“. So neither of the two could have „sneaked in“ something not contained in the app’s source code repository.

https://f-droid.org/en/2023/09/03/reproducible-builds-signing-keys-and-binary-repos.html

I've been having a lot of fun learning about reproducible builds for the past week. Android users are really lucky to have such a great option for app distribution. Meanwhile, Apple users are forced to trust that the developer doesn't sneak anything into compiling binaries (thanks Apple)

The road ahead

There's a ton of stuff to work on. Many of these things are already tracked in Github, such as internal linking to posts (one of the next major features I'm working on!) or full width swipe back. Which reminds me...

Help me prioritize tasks

On Github, you can sort issues by most 👍 reactions. This helps me prioritize work, and it's become more and more useful over time. So if you you have time, help me out and upvote tasks that are important to you!

Better onboarding

You already have a Lemmy account logged in to Voyager, so this doesn't really affect you, which is probably why it's not currently requested in Github. But for newcomers, Voyager may be their first encounter with Lemmy.

Right now, the new account creation flow is very rough. I'd like to improve onboarding and hand-holding through the signup process and instance selection. If you have any thoughts on this, please let me know below! This will likely be long term task with lots of brainstorming and mockups before writing code.

New icons?

I'm hoping to continue adding community-driven icons into Voyager on a fairly regular basis. (However, I can't add everything, since they all need to be in the bundle!) Maybe a snow/winter themed icon next? We'll see. You can download the Affinity Designer file for Voyager's logo if you want to play around. :)

Mod tools

Mod tools are coming, but I'm still determining how best to integrate this into Voyager's roadmap. I expect Lemmy's moderation API will significantly improve over the next year or so, so I'm still thinking timelines.

Anything else? AMA

This is probably the best opportunity to discuss Voyager at a high level. So AMA!

Thanks to my Sponsors 💙

Finally, thanks to my Github and Liberapay sponsors. Your donations TRULY help! Build infrastructure and hosting runs ~$75/mo, and then there's one time costs like the various Android phones I've purchased for testing (yeah, I still need to tweak Android haptics).

If you're interested in sponsoring, head over here. You can donate monthly or one-time in any amount.

If it's not the right time to donate, you can also show your appreciation by leaving a review on the app stores! 💙

• Google Play: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=app.vger.voyager
• Apple App Store: https://itunes.apple.com/app/id6451429762?action=write-review