Hi Mlem Community,

We are thrilled to announce the launch of our 2.0 public beta!

Please be aware that this is an early beta build, may be missing features you consider essential. See the “Roadmap” section further down for a full list.

We’re trying out a new TestFlight structure with two groups:

  • Weekly: this group gets a weekly build with the latest state of our development branch. Changelogs for these builds will be posted to the new Beta Feedback Megathread
  • Stable Pre-Release: this group receives curated manual releases that have been tested by the bleeding edge group. Each release represents a coherent development scope, and changelogs for these builds will get their own “New Beta Release” posts.

Join the weekly beta

Join the stable beta

If you prefer the most stable, feature-rich Mlem experience, we encourage you to stay on our v1 until 2.0 is ready for the App Store.

What’s New

Markdown Support

  • Full Markdown rendering powered by our custom cmark-gfm fork
  • Rich Markdown editing tools built right into the keyboard

Tiled Posts

The new “Tiled” post layout renders posts in a 2-column grid, giving you the content density of Compact mode with much larger thumbnails.

Keep Place on Account Switch

You can now switch accounts without losing your place in feed, perfect for saving a post to a different account. This behavior can be toggled in Settings -> Accounts; you can also long press an account in the quick switcher to choose your refresh behavior.

Updated Middleware

We rebuilt how we communicate with and manage instances from the ground up to address the challenges of a federated platform and give us a clean, strong base to build future updates on. Backend changes aren’t very visible (for now–we’ve got some very exciting features planned to take full advantage of the new architecture), but they support a lot of the new features in this list.

Guest Accounts

You can now add guest accounts to any instance and browse its content without creating an account!

Performance Improvements

We’ve also refactored our entire UI structure to cut out a lot of inefficiencies present in the v1 codebase. The result is a noticeably snappier app.

Color Themes

Or, properly, a framework to support color themes. Right now you can choose between Default and Monochrome, but more are on the way!

UI Upgrades

We’ve kept the majority of our v1 UI/UX, but taken the opportunity to spruce some things up. See if you can spot what’s new!

Misc

  • Improved cross-instance resolution—opening content not accessible from your instance now opens the content in-app using a guest session on the host instance, rather than in the browser
  • The subscription list can now be sorted alphabetically or by instance
  • Post creator is now hidden by default in aggregate feeds. This behavior can be changed in Settings -> Posts.

Roadmap

This is by no means a complete list of everything we have planned, but it’s the major outstanding items we have mapped out. If there are v1 features missing from this list that you’d like to see prioritized, let us know and we’ll work that into our development plan!

  • Post/comment improvements
    • Inline image uploads in comments
    • Create posts
    • Crossposts
  • Moderation/administration tools
    • Mod mail
    • Moderator, administrator actions
    • Moderated feed
  • Media improvements
    • Improved image handling (all backend work, but should improve performance)
    • Proper video handling
  • Post and comment searching
  • iPad support
  • Keyword filtering
  • Settings icons
  • Mark read on scroll

Known Issues

  • You will need to sign back into your accounts. This is an unfortunate consequence of migrating the app from Lionel Hanners’ account to my own. We apologize for the inconvenience.
  • The tile layout can be a little stuttery. We’re working on a fix with the “Improved image handling” item.
  • Navigation and tab bar accents remain gray after closing the composer sheet
  • Tall images in website previews don’t get appropriately cropped

Cheers,

The Mlem Group

Mlem is a free and open source project. 100% of our funding, which pays for things like server time, comes from our generous donors; we do not, and will never, run ads or sell data. If you’d like to help support Mlem, you can donate here.