It was forked around a year or more back I believe. They are completely different projects now imo. Photon aims for the best UX and speed, while Tesseract aims to be super feature-rich.
I really want to rewrite my API code to make it server agnostic, so I can support many fediverse platforms at once. If I add Piefed support the quick way, there'll basically be a bunch of checks saying "if server = Piefed, hide this button".
I could do it the quick and dirty way right now if that's what people want.
edit: quick and dirty method will take less than a week, proper method will take months
I don't want phtn links to pollute things, because a lot of clients handle lemmy URLs in their own way, and phtn links would disrupt that. Instead, I could make the PWA open lemmy links in the app
Not sure why some UIs don't show it because the data is given straight to you anyway, and it actually takes more code to hide it under certain conditions
You can access Photon at https://phtn.app/ to use any instance, or selfhost.
Additionally, some instances I'd recommend that use photon are
I'm curious why your instance, sh.itjust.works, hosts Tesseract but not Photon. They have diverged so much they cannot be considered similar.