this post was submitted on 23 Feb 2024
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Thunder App
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An open-source, cross-platform Lemmy client for iOS and Android.
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Hi there, thanks for the question! I think MentalEdge pretty much answered the question, but I’d like to give some clarifications!
By default, Thunder will only grab thumbnails that come back from the instance. If the instance doesn’t provide a thumbnail, then Thunder will just show the URL link. This is what I’m experiencing as well with the link that you provided.
There is an additional option in the settings which allows Thunder to attempt to get thumbnails when none are provided. This is “Scrape Missing Link Previews”. This option is off by default, so you’ll have to manually enable it to turn it on. In order to get the thumbnail, Thunder has to retrieve the metadata information of the link (which means that it’ll have to “connect” to the site to do so)
I believe this option came from a time where Lemmy had an issue with thumbnail previews not being populated which meant that most posts were not showing up properly.
As for why you’re seeing the thumbnail even when the option is turned off, I’m not too sure. If you’d like, you can submit a new issue on our GitHub page with some more details and I can take a look into this for you!
Ok, I'll submit an issue on GitHub. What should I share other than the screenshot of the app showing the image of the link and the setting for Scrap Missing Link off?
Also, do you mind commenting about privacy and security concern about this feature on?
I would try to share as much detail as possible for us to be able to reproduce the issue. If we can’t reproduce it, then it’s very unlikely that we’ll be able to find the cause of it (and therefore fix it). The best way to do this is to start from a clean install of Thunder and perform the minimal steps to get the issue to show up.
Aside from steps to reproduce, I would also suggest putting the version of Thunder you’re using, and any other relevant information! (Android/iOS version)
Of course! I’ll try to give the best summary based on what I remember, and all the source code is available on GitHub if you’re interested to take a look.
If you have the setting turned on, Thunder will attempt to fetch missing thumbnails for posts that don’t already have one (in particular, posts that contain an external link). If the instance already contains a thumbnail, then it will prioritize that one and won’t try to find thumbnails even with the setting turned on.
If there is no thumbnail (which is generally pretty rare now), then Thunder will make a request to the external URL (linked from the post) and attempt to fetch any metadata information from it. This metadata sometimes contains a link to a thumbnail which Thunder proceeds to use.
This process would be no different than if you were to tap on the link yourself to view the site. This does mean that Thunder will connect to the site in order to retrieve the metadata from it. The only difference here is that Thunder changes the “user agent” when performing the request to fetch information from the site to a more generic one. The user agent often contains information about the application and version being used to contact the external URL, so this alleviates some (but definitely not all) privacy concerns associated with this.
This is the extent of what I can remember, and as always, feel free to suggest any feedback that you see fit (whether it be privacy/security concerns or otherwise)! I’d be happy to take a look at them and see if it’s feasible to do. Thunder is still mainly maintained by a only a few people, and we all do it on a voluntary basis so there’s definitely always room for improvement.
I hope this answers your questions!