Blorp is released to the App Store!
This is just the beginning! Hoping to launch Android very soon.
giving it a try, looks nice so far
this post was submitted on 08 May 2025
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Is this a Lemmy only app? Or does it support piefed and mbin/kbin too?
Lemmy only for now. You're not the first person to ask that. Tbh I have no idea how similar piefed or mbin/kbin are to the Lemmy API. I'm not ruling out expanding support, but I would likely prioritize supporting all platforms (e.g. Android, Linux, Windows) for Lemmy before expanding support to other APIs.
With the lemmy donation push recently and the problematic views of the main devs being talked about again I am sure you will hear more people asking about piefed and *bin.
Ok I got Piefed sort of working. I didn't realize they only have 2 api severs – that are listed, maybe there are more? They also say their API is 95% the same as Lemmy, but I'm noticing immediately that that 5% is going to be annoying (e.g. they seem to use post.title instead of post.name). Other random things are broken.
I know nothing about Piefed, but why didn't they just fork Lemmy? I think I'm going to have to pick one of the API's to optimize towards. Likely Piefed would always feel a little more broken in my app compared to Lemmy. Unless they make their API 100% compatible.
I'll try to get you a link to a branch build of Blorp later today that you can mess around with Piefed on it.
I would love to support every feature people ask for, but I fear committing to Piefed support would 1) negatively impact Lemmy support in the app and 2) spread me too thin to maintain this app. I think I would rather have someone fork Blorp for Piefed support. I think it could be done pretty easily.
I'm a PieFed dev.
Thanks for looking into it. I totally understand why you'd want to prioritize Lemmy at the moment.
The API is 99% ready to be enabled on all instances but we haven't pulled the trigger on that yet.
Recently the developer of Intersteller, an app that does Lemmy, Mbin and PieFed, has been working with us. So yeah it's doable but you have to really want to, obvs.
I’m considering turning on support but placing a warning on my app that says “not officially supported” or similar. I ran a quick test, and it seems I can almost drop in your API in place of Lemmy. Post names and community counts were broken, but much of the app was working.
What I don’t wanna commit to doing is changing tons of my app to make it Piefed compatible. But I don’t see the harm in letting users connect to a Piefed API.
Here is a build of Blorp with Piefed.
Idk if it was tongue in cheek or not, but I think they mentioned being able to make new features faster using Python than rust.
I didn’t mean it to be tongue and cheek. Again I wanna emphasize I don’t know the history here, but lots of developers will tell you “ah let me just rebuilt this massive codebase in this language to fix this problem” only to discover new problems. I could just as easily see people say “we’re rewriting Piefed in Rust to address performance issues and lower hosting costs”.
This is coming from me who just spent 6 months building a Lemmy client from scratch instead of leveraging an existing code base like voyager. So I’m just as guilty as the next person :)
Idk what the point of this is other than, be skeptical whenever someone tells you they are going to rewrite something from scratch.
Cool. I'll give it a try with the android release.