Blorp

Blorp is announced to be a caching client for Lemmy but the first thing that should be cached IMO is Saved posts for offline reading.

Currently Saved does not open in full Offline situation. Is it a bug?

I registered an LLC that I own, which will own Blorp.

Before

• Myself --(owns)--> Blorp

After

• Myself --(owns)--> Blorp Labs LLC --(owns)--> Blorp

This is mostly for some additional liability protection for myself. But I think this is a great opportunity to setup a new GitHub organization called Blorp Labs, which may eventually own multiple projects under the Blorp brand.

Here is the moved repo for Blorp:

• https://github.com/Blorp-Labs/blorp

I'll also be moving this community soon:

• https://lemmy.zip/c/blorp

Sorry there will be a little bit of chaos as I reorganize, but I'm especially excited to have the freedom to launch more repos under Blorp Labs.

I feel like LLC is a thing that could sound scary, even though it's just me, Blorp makes no money, and it's entirely funded as a hobby project of mine. I'm happy to answer any questions in the comments.

I think I’m going to migrate this community to Lemmy.world or Lemmy.zip. I love PieFed, but I’d rather wait until things are a little more stable before I consider PieFed.social.

I think world and zip are both fantastic options. Lemm.ee leaves me a little worried that any instance can shut down at any point. I’d prefer to pick whatever instance is least likely to shut down. I do think Lemmy.ml is pretty safe from shutdown, since it’s run by Lemmy maintainers, but I’m worried I’m reducing my audience since many people block ml.

Any thoughts?

Unable to login on blorp v1.9.12 today (Thursday, 21 August 2025) after updating to iOS 18.6.2 last night.

Deleted, reinstalled app, turned phone off/on and still had nothing. When opening the app, it pulsates as if it’s trying to load feed but remains blank.

Usually, when I log in it will populate a list of instances as I type, again it remains unresponsive. Anybody else with login issues?

v1.9.13 fix PieFed

PieFed was broken if you

• Block a person
• Block a community
• Moderate a community

That has all been fixes in v1.9.13

Next up!

• Here’s an early preview of the search overhaul I’m working on
  • https://search-overhaul.blorp.pages.dev/
  • What do you think of the keyboard shortcuts (only on larger screens)
• Make Blorp more accesible
  • https://speed-run-accessibility.blorp.pages.dev/
  • These changes will be pretty invisible if you don’t use a screen reader

Give those a try, and let me know if you like seeing early previews like that.

I’m trying to formulate a long term plan

• Lemmy V1 is going to ship later this year. I suspect a lot of clients that aren’t maintained are going to break. I would like to get Blorp to a place where I can be a home for all those new users.
• Anyone here who’s first language isn’t English? Interested in Blorp being translated into your language?
• I have no idea how to market this app. I’m estimating I may have 400ish users. I honestly have no idea. Could be much higher or much lower. My marketing mostly consists of me annoying people on Lemmy into using Blorp. At least that’s how I percieve it, and I cring a little at myself.
• I have no idea how to build out a team, but if you have any skills that you feel could contriute to this project, please don’t be shy. I would like Blorp to be bigge than myself.

After submitting this to the App Store, I somehow managed to corrupt my installation of the app. I’m rushing a bit to lock down security, and I’m sorry if I corrupt anyone’s installation in the process. A reinstall will fix it.

I’m not able to corrupt the local database a second time, so I’m hoping it’s a one time fluke. I’m constantly switching between dev and production builds. I’m also running iOS26 which is a bit unstable.

I don’t think reinstalling the app is a huge deal, unless you use user tags, which I do. Then it kinda sucks. I clearly need some sort of backup feature.

I still have the ability to cancel v1.9.12 to iOS if anyone else notices an issue. If you’re in TestFlight, please let me know if v1.9.12 is working.

So I just downloaded the Android app from F-Droid. If I log in, where are my credentials going? Is it actually accessing a web app somewhere? Or is the web app being hosted locally on my device?

I wanted to ask if there is a list of features missing from piefed support as I’m not sure what is a bug and what is simply not implemented (for example the list of subscribed communities)

Someone raised an issue with login, but I’m not sure if it’s login in general or to their specific instance. Anyone noticing any issues on version 1.9.11?

I’m not personally seeing an issue with login, but logout seems to crash the app. But I’m more concerned about login.

Regardless, this makes me think the next version should be purely focused on bug fixes and stability with no new features.

Edit: the bug only seems to happen when logging into a PieFed account with an unverified email address.

In this release:

• New way to browse posts. Just click on an image in the feed. I’m calling this the light box feed. ALSO you can zoom into photos from this view.
• User tagging
• Lots of bug fixes

Lightbox feed

• Zoom into photos!
• Yes you can use vim h/j/k/l to navigate. Finally a sophisticated way to browse Lemmy
• As of right now, this feed makes it slightly more difficult to engage with the comments.
  • If you click the comment button (to the left of the voting buttons) you can see the full posts
  • Eventually I’m going to make it so you can swipe up when browsing via the light box feed to view comments

User tagging

• As of right now there is no way to backup or export your tagged users. I’m planning on adding a way to export data from the app

Upcoming

• It’s not looking too promising, but I’m experimenting with MBin support
• F-Droid!

v1.9.11

• New content embeds
  • Spotify
  • SoundCloud
  • PeerTube
  • I would like to eventually support all content embeds that Tesseract supported
• Resolve activity pub ids
  • Say you host Blorp as a frontend for you instance (e.g. blorp.lemmy.zip), when you visit blorp.lemmy.zip/post/123, it will look up lemmy.zip/post/123 automatically based on the domain hosting the frontend
  • It will take a long time to have full feature parody with the official Lemmy frontend, but this is a baby step
• Favicon will now match the instance you are using
• Images will be automatically compressed to 1mb and max 1000 width/height
• Better error messages on image upload failure
• You can now edit bio, avatar, and email from settings
  • Lemmy only for now, but will add PieFed soon

Upcoming in v1.9.11

• User tagging

Looks like I broken 2FA login, probably in the last release. Expect a fix in v1.9.9 later today, with iOS rolling out over the next couple days.

While I have you, wanted to give a quick update. I have a medium sized update in the works that is a visual cleanup and also improves comment loading. You will be able to continue reading into deeper threads by clicking “read more”. PieFed will also get a bug improvement to how comments are loaded under the hood. Expect this as part of v1.9.9.

I’m hosting my own private Lemmy server now, and I’m going to be building out support for private servers in Blorp. 1) it will better handle when a server is marked as private and 2) I want to move towards being a complete alternative UI for Lemmy (and PieFed). Likely I won’t add moderation features yet, but you should be able to update your account settings without leaving the app.

PieFed pushed some changes that will require v1.9.8 of the app. iOS may take a day or two to see this update. As of writing this, only piefed.social is affected, but other PieFed instances will require Blorp v1.9.8 as they update their PieFed backend version.

Sorry it’s been a bit of a rough week:

• 1.9.4 accidentally locked it so you could only login to Lemmy.zip. Any previously logged in accounts were unaffected
• 1.9.5 was rolled out, but I canceled the iOS and Android deployments as I realized they were almost completely broken. If you use Obtainium to install Android, you should skip 1.9.5 and wait for 1.9.6 later today
• 1.9.6 is being rushed out to iOS and Android later today to fix bugs from the previous two version

As you can see, my development process is a little chaotic. My time is pretty limited, so I don’t do as much testing as I should. I’m trying to write more automated tests and establish a process that will prevent these type of sloppy errors. Thank you for your patience.

I want to ship features and bug fixes quickly, but if more mistakes happen, I may need to slow down and setup a proper beta track. It’s really up to you all if you prefer quick updates or slower with lower risk of breaking things.

It’s also not all bad news. There were a few bugs I identified this week which will be fixed in 1.9.6. Hopefully things are trending towards a more stable app.

I click it, and nothing happens...

There really needs to be a way to copy a link to any post or comment (as the origin url) so as to respond with another fediverse app by pasting that link in the search on Mastodon etc

I assume this is a bug but its quite weird. There are only two options when I click the user icon in the top right hand corner, Login, or Add account and they both load the login sheet for Lemmy.zip and don't allow you to change the instance

(I installed through Obtanium though I have never seen that result in missing features)

Of the following, what would you like to see next:

• Rewriting private messages
  • The current implementation is kinda terrible, and I think I could make it a lot more robust
• Notifications
  • This is a pretty big time sink. If you vote for this, note that this could potentially lock up my ability to work on other things for awhile. Due to iOS limitations, it’s possible notifications could be delayed 15ish minutes, so I’m not sure how worth it this is
• F-Droid support
  • Lots of people have asked for it
• Progressive web app
  • I really don’t want to do this, because I feel it will be a lot of effort for very little benefit. I think the native iOS and Android app provide a better expierence as is. But I would like to eventually make the PWA work
• Auto image compression
  • Voyager has a lot of nice things like auto compressing the image if it’s too big. Likely I could lean on the work Voyager has already done.
• Mbin support
  • I haven’t looked that deeply into it, but I suspect I would need some API changes from Mbin to make this possible.
• Moderation feature inside of Blorp
• More content embeds
  • Currently we have YouTube, Loops, articles, images, and videos. My goal eventually is to expand that (e.g. PeerTube)

If none of those matter to you, I can focus on general bug fixes and small feature reqeusts as they pop up.

If you wouldn’t mind commenting which of those is most interesting to you, or add your own feature request. If you want multiple of those, maybe rank them.

Installed on a Pixel 6a on the latest GrapheneOS

I haven't push anything to the App Stores yet, but you can try PieFed on the web version of Blorp.

1. Go to https://blorpblorp.xyz/home/ in the browser
2. Login/add account by clicking the user icon in the top right corner
3. Select PieFed and choose a server

Likely I'll be pushing PieFed support to TestFlight next.

This might be the biggest PR I've ever written. It took a month of work and thousands of lines of code updated. There s a very high chance that random things will be a little broken, but I'll fix the bugs as I find them. That being said, it's very usable. Please let me know if you encounter any issues.

PieFed is still pretty unstable. They could push a breaking change at any point that would require me to make an app update for PieFed to work again.

There are known issues that I'm solving with the help of the PieFed devs:

• Private messages don't load your reply messages to other users
• Comment loading is a little broken. You will see "missing comment" a lot

I hope you like the update, and I'm pretty confident this work will unlock the next chapter for Blorp. I might even look into mbin support, no promises.

I broken the automatic update mechanism in 1.8.1. It's fixed in 1.8.3.

If you are on 1.8.1 or 1.8.2 and want more automatic updates, you can download 1.8.3 manually

After downloading 1.8.3, automatic updates should start to work again. If you happen to still be on 1.8.0 you shouldn't have to do anything.

Sorry for the inconvenience. PieFed support is coming soon. If you're interested, I encourage you to opt back into automatic updates.

See button at the top of the screenshot that says “New posts ⬆️”.

Basically I wanted to indicate if there are new posts at the top of the feed. But I don’t want to throw you to the top of the feed without you confirming that you want that. So this button says “hey, there are new posts to see if you’re interested”.

I like the idea, but I also don’t love that it eats into the screen real estate for your feed.

For context, you can consider current Lemmy pre V1 and the upcoming update V1.

Lemmy has some big updates coming soon. Initially, when I wrote Blorp, it made sense to keep things simple and coupled to Lemmy since Lemmy is what I’m personally the most interested in. However, supporting current Lemmy versions and future Lemmy versions is going to require me to decouple Blorp from a specific version of the Lemmy API anyway.

A bunch of people have asked about PieFed support, and I’m realizing the groundwork I’m going to need to lay to support Lemmy v1 will likely make PieFed support much easier. I haven’t looked into MBin, but I imagine it may be similar.

I’m not really sure what the point of this is, other than a routine update post and bouncing ideas off you all. Likely, Lemmy will always be my top priority, but my plan is to update Blorp so it allows you to write adapters to plug into different but similar projects like Lemmy, PieFed, etc.

This is a combination of a bunch of releases from the past week. iOS updates have been a little delayed, but as of today this is all on the App Store.

• updated settings page look and feel
• manage blocks from settings page
• add button to block community
• indicate when a post has been cross posted
• default create post to most recently visited community
• confirm before leaving community to prevent accidentally leaving
• make sidebars a lot better
• improve inbox notification indicators when using multiple accounts
• make markdown rendering more closely match official Lemmy UI
• fix scroll jumping when collapsing comments

We're also now listed on

• https://join-lemmy.org/apps
• https://www.lemmyapps.com/

I only have so much time to text other Lemmy apps, but I'm pretty confident that you aren't going to find a cross platform Lemmy app that handles account switching as smoothly as Blorp.

If you're enjoying Blorp, please take a moment to leave a comment, star us on GitHub, or share it with a friend ❤️

That's all for now. Keep Blorping

Basically Ctrl+K or Cmd+K would trigger a menu that would let you search for pages, communes, users, maybe more without touching your mouse. The goal would be for you to say “I want to jump to this community” and be able to do that in less than 3 seconds and without touching your mouse. This would be more of a power user feature.

It would be powered by this library https://cmdk.paco.me/

I’m not really sure how many people are using Blorp on mobile vs desktop/web as I don’t collect any analytics data. But likely this would primarily benefit desktop and web users.

Btw, I’m starting a Matrix Chanel if you’re interested in joining. I would love your feedback in helping to shape Blorp. https://matrix.to/#/#blorp:matrix.org