Great job jabronis - attached picture is what the site looks like on an old phone. All the buttons are broken and do nothing, except for the Modlog which somehow is still accessible. Tried different browsers on the phone, tried clearing all the cookies and cache, still doesn't work.
EDIT: This came off a bit hot and aggro - it just sucks since pre-migration the site worked fine on my dinosaur phone, so I'm pretty frustrated. Makes me appreciate communist web-design (like marxists.org and redsails.org) even more.
Please stop blaming our beautiful devs, shit sucks but Apple fucked you over by forcibly breaking their own shit, it's not our devs fault that your phone is on a platform that apple has made out of date for your phone in particular. They genuinely put in a herculean effort to get this thing merged back into Lemmy so that they aren't stuck doing completely unpaid dev work just for us forever.
bad take
it is a communists's duty to make shit accessible to the poorSerious question, do you have any idea what you're even asking for? You gonna mail Layla an Iphone 6 from a decade ago to see if our site works on a shitty outdated version of safaris rendering engine?
if that's what it takes, yes
i will fucking steal one if i have toGreat, you're asking for a large amount of labor and testing on old hardware that doesn't work solely because of a decision Apple made. This is an insane attitude about technology as complicated as this particular website.
If you're not meming, and I were actively working on dev for this, this shit would piss me off. Appreciate shit, for the love of God, unless you wanna go make us a shit posting site that works on this one guys phone.
We have a guy posting his homeless in Chicago diary on here for fucks sake, I think we're pretty goddamn accessible to the poor.
i imagine old phones are easy to emulate, although in this specific case it sounds like that's not even necessary as disabling js in any browser should have a the same problem
Do you think the devs just don't give a shit? Being a communist involves actually understanding labor and it's conditions, not just demanding ready-made commodities, contrary to what Republicans say.
I think a big part of the problem is that the Lemmy UI (and by extension, the Hexbear UI) doesn't work properly with Javascript disabled. There are some people who would have the same issue as OP because they deliberately turned off JS even on a device that can support it.
Making the UI work without JS will be a lot of work, but also worth it.
JS is really the only way live updates can work. Like getting pinged with a notification instead of refreshing the page and seeing one pop up.
Having a barebones fallback UI that doesn't require JS would be good though.
tbh I really don't see the need for live updates on a Reddit-style website. I don't need to instantly respond to a comment or reply, and I don't normally stay on the same page long enough that updates would be significantly delayed anyway.
I'm just explaining how the current frontend works, I think building a script less alternative interface is actually in the cards. There's just more important things to work on right now
The main obstacles are that there's suddenly a bunch of other issues being brought up for the UI since the reddit exodus. There's also plans to rewrite the frontend in a different UI framework because infernoJS is a pain in the ass. The rewrite is just close enough to consider but far away and vague enough to not have a solid idea of when to shift to that.
Well, at least we have Hexbear's old react frontend lying around that we can cannibalize if we want to shift towards a more mainstream framework.
Funnily enough, the framework the maintainers have in mind is (currently) less mainstream: Leptos. Dessalines and Nutomic seem to be more comfortable working in rust, so I think that's a big factor in the decision.
I can't even imagine how bad 10 year old safari would be handling the site. I definitely don't have any way to test or debug it myself. If you are savvy at all, try and open the safari debugger console and screenshot what errors come up in there.
It actually handled pre-migration fine, I don't know what it is about the lemmy code that it doesn't like - maybe it's a javascript thing? That's what someone else said. I sadly don't have the code chops to know how to effectively use the debug console.
this looks like a decent guide: https://www.lifewire.com/activate-the-debug-console-in-safari-445798
If you get me a good list of errors, i can probably take a look at mitigating them for iphone. We recently fixed a bug for old safari around using regex.
There's a little message under the "Web Inspector" toggle that says in order to use the web inspector I need to connect my phone to a computer with a cable and use the "Develop" menu in the menu bar ... so that's a Mac only thing apparently. :-(
Your phone is old enough, it might be worth looking into flashing some sort of open source ROM that replaces your old iOS and gives you a newer browser and security updates. It's actually a bit of a security issue that apple puts on you by not updating their shit.
Also, I saw your edit, so please disregard my post about treating the devs right. I get being aggro and frustrated. This is just a really hard thing for to actually work around usually. The web is a mess.
It could be, but it might also give your shit some new life if you've kept the hardware in good shape. I know on Android at least it can work well, I'd assume there are similar open source options for iphone.
Looks like the most you can do with an iPhone is jailbreak it. That might open up access to an alternative web browser (e.g. one on which this site works), though, so it might be worth a shot.
There are no alternatives on iOS since the jailbreak community is so small and apple only allows webkit browsers.
This means that all browsers are just safari wrappers, truly 1984.
I’ve unfortunately noticed a handful of mobile performance issues with vanilla lemmy in general. hopefully this is something the team here is doing their best to improve, but I also know a lot of that is probably upstream issues.
Related, I still think for a community like this, needing javascript to be enabled is a big issue opsec-wise.
yeah I've literally had someone else's username/pronouns randomly pop up in the top right corner (on desktop) when I load a new page. As though I was logged in as someone else. Usually it switches back but I also see upvote data and thread titles and other such stuff randomly get substituted for the data that is supposed to be loaded. I only ever experience these kinds of weird glitches on javascript-heavy websites. to this day idk why javascript has this problem but it's very disorienting and bizarre
Almost the entirety of exploitable flaws in browsers these days go through javascript; and it's all of them if considering only the ones that can actually allow you to execute code (in or outside the sandbox).
JS can also be used to fingerprint you far far more precisely than without it.
Not inherently so. It can be used maliciously, and it can be used usefully. Web browsers are designed to at least contain potential damage by sandboxing the browser processes and by limiting how the javascript can speak to the rest of the computer.
That said, basically 95+% (I make this number up but it's probably correct) of user ad tracking, which is a nicer term for legitimized spyware, will be written in javascript. The mitigation strategy on desktop is to use the ublock origin extension. The mitigation strategy for cellphones is a big fat "it depends."
On one hand, I love the devs who keep this leaky boat afloat. On the other hand, my ancient cell phone absolutely chokes when trying to check hexbear with it, too.
I guess I;ll have to do something else while I poop... like read the news or theory or something.
Haha, exactly what I decided to try, but listening to pods while reading redsails.org kinda hurts my brain ... I maybe have to go back to r*ddit while I poop and pod in the morning.
Somewhat related, I don't think hexbear works with lemmy related apps yet. I tried logging in to Mlem and it didn't work. But that might be a potential workaround eventually, if any apps support older phones. Have you tried Jerboa? https://join-lemmy.org/apps
Oh cool, Jerboa is Android (I have Iphone 6) and the iOS app is a "closed beta".
Can you get another browser for your phone? The old site used React and the new one is using Inferno.
If it's an old safari, then it might just not support some of the new frontend. If you can get your hands on something like Firefox it might work better.
So what has been deduced is that any browser on old iPhones is just safari in disguise, and that it appears to be a javascript thing, so there's no point in trying to attempt different browsers and update capability has been terminated by Apple.
Damn. Apple really fucking sucks. Even jailbreaking it won't give you the ability to install anything else?
Jerboa fails to log into Hexbear last time I tried (a day after the Hexbear relaunch on Lemmy)
I'll give it a try and report back - lemmy sites don't seem to work well in general, lemmy.ml looks all messed up, but at least it kinda loads.
oops I guess you're on an iPhone so it would be Mlem. Says it requires iOS 16 or later :/
i saw this and thought
maybe i could make a lemmy-lite or something that doesn't require javascript and has minimum css (for expanding/collapsing posts) but then i realised itll take quite some time. but this is what i started with.i think instead of having client browser run the js it would be better if server did it (atleast for old devices).
Nice! I wonder how much of the old site could be stripped of js and used to present lemmy api calls.
Idk shit about iphones, but if you haven't already you may need to clear your app cache. This is distinct from clearing your cache inside of a browser, presumably as a cruel joke
Closest guide I could find was for the iphone 6s instead of the 6, but maybe it'll be better than nothing https://www.techjunkie.com/how-to-clear-cache-on-iphone-6s-and-iphone-6s-plus/
"Other" browsers on iOS are actually just Safari in disguise when it comes to actually rendering the page (as in they are forced to use safari's engine). Unfortunately this means you're stuck on the old version of Safari Apple stopped updating for your device. The site could probably be made to work with this old version, but unfortunately you're eventually screwed.
Wow, thanks for the answer. That really sucks. So I guess I'm just screwed. Great.
It's honestly one of the saddest things about Apple devices that they have a baked in expiry date.
I hope the migration and access to all the lib lemmy communities was worth it to bork the only worthwhile site on the internet for people who can't afford new phones. :-(
I'm really sorry this is happening to you but I want to urge you to understand the undertaking of managing this site that the admins are doing. Its an incredible amount of free labor that the devs are doing, both from upstream lemmy and the hexbear devs and admins.
Developing for 100% compatibility is basically an impossible task. The iphone 6 is nearly 10 years old and stopped receiving updates 4 major IOS versions ago. To a point, getting compatibility for most devices is more urgent than getting compatibility for an old device that most people have long let go of.
I love keeping old hardware around and I understand that phones are a significant expense and you can't just go buy a new one without serious effort, but this really is not the devs fault.
When you are able, I recommend getting an android device that has community support for custom roms. Finding a slightly older flagship with community support will get you the most longevity.
Once again, i'm sorry, this really sucks. But don't take this out on the devs. They're doing their best. Shitting on them will only discourage further development.
Seriously, the devs are great and the technology of the internet is a fucking nightmare. It's legacy code and deprecation all the way down. A few people making this thing run and look decent is hard enough with the most up to date version of everything.
And to top it off, this guy isn't even being fucked over by our devs decisions, it's that apple won't update their old shit.
Thanks I appreciate it, I wasn't meaning to shit on the devs, it just sucks and I was/am venting frustration.
The fact that the web browser's capabilities and updates on iPhones are tied to major OS releases has always been and will always be incredibly stupid.
I agree, but also the browser is pretty integrated into ios so it might make it pretty hard to separate. Wouldn't be a problem if they allowed other browsers.
might want to post in !feedback@hexbear.net
i support making the site accessible to old phones as someone that had to use a galaxy s4 most of last yearI'll do that, I just wanted to be able to post a picture of what it looks like.
I got a new as hell phone and the site falls apart on it (along with all lemmy instances).
It has to be possible to dump the output of a query into a static page and serve it to a user, every website since just after the beginning of time has done it.
E: just read through the thread. Op: if you can render kbin.social I think their site doesn’t need JavaScript. There’s got to be a lemmy that isn’t based on a web tech we were explicitly blocking twenty years ago.
Wow yeah, kbin.social actually works ... so it is a javascript thing, dang.
Well there you go. A lemmy compatible wrapper for api calls that doesn’t use javascript. The start of hexbear light gift wrapped.
In the intervening time, federating with kbin would give this functionality to hexbear users.
Or if we don't want to federate with everyone, a dummy Hexbear instance that we whitelist just for that purpose.
Is https://voyager.lemmy.ml broken on your phone too? If so, definitely submit an issue on the Lemmy UI repo.
Definitely submit an issue then. If I had to guess, it's because the site doesn't work properly without JavaScript enabled.
Memmy works on some older devices, like iOS13/14 and is updating frequently, though still limited functionality. Mlem requires iOS16 since v2 so it's stuck not working on my phone, and the beta is closed anyway. Memmy's beta might still be open to try. Logging in and viewing has been working but images and upbears were borked last I tried on the phone but it's getting regular updates to fix functionality so might eventually help closer to an actual release.
https://testflight.apple.com/join/6jaRU6rD
https://github.com/gkasdorf/memmy
