I love Voyager, it has all the things I need, except for push notifications. Is that a planned feature in the near future?
I would find this useful even if it was polling only once per day. Also, this may be a separate issue but it would be nice if it polled for new trending stories as well.
Since that, I have moved to Arctic which has notifications. https://getarctic.app/
It’s planned via https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/2631 once lemmy supports.
Without that, there’s two ways to do this with major drawbacks:
- Background tasks (android supported-ish with iOS support only with app open): Apps like Thunder are doing partial implementations by essentially polling the lemmy server in the background. I don’t think this is very neighborly because it puts a strain on Lemmy instances with the polling per account every 15 mins. It also consumes more battery. And is not consistent depending on Android device manufacturer.
- Storing JWTs on a server: Some apps do this, but this is a nonstarter for me due to security/liability reasons
So IDK. Right now I feel pressure to do this because other apps support but the ways they are accomplishing this are pretty questionable.
How much would this actually increase the load of a Lemmy instance?
I’d imagine that when I’m actually browsing Lemmy, I consume so much data that the polling probably wouldn’t cause even a tenth of a percent of that load. But, I don’t know the technology, so I could be completely wrong with my understanding of how much it would strain the Lemmy instances. How big would the strain be in proportion to how much a Lemmy user strains the instance’s server anyway?
I have no specific data. But I consider polling in the background to be abuse, especially for a free service hosted by volunteers. Once lemmy implements actual push (which is scheduled soon!) I will implement.
Right now I feel pressure to do this because other apps support but the ways they are accomplishing this are pretty questionable.
Don’t take too much pressure because of this. Most of us are happy with the app as it currently is and will happily wait for proper push notifications to be supported by lemmy.
