Mastodon v2.4.3 (Patreon)

Medium started nagging visitors to sign up with big pop-ups, making my previous blog posts quite unreadable, so I decided to finally invest time in a custom blog. I used the Hugo static site generator and coded up a design for it. Having a blog on my own infrastructure has been very liberating psychologically, and as a result here are some of the recent blog posts:

- How to implement a basic ActivityPub server 

- How to become a successful artist on Mastodon 

- Why we must oppose the new copyright directive 

- Why ActivityPub is the future 

- How to make friends and verify requests 

The blog is also available through the dat protocol using the Beaker browser under dat://blog.joinmastodon.org

New code repository

I have acquired another Hetzner machine to host Gitlab, an open-source alternative to GitHub. Moving the main Mastodon repository is not easy due to a lot of cross-references, the ecosystem of forks, and missing organizational functionality in the Community Edition of Gitlab, however, I was able to move some of the orbiting repositories over. The Mastodon Bridge, the Mastodon Blog, the JoinMastodon.org website... As an added benefit the blog and the website are now built automatically through Gitlab CI.

Here is our Gitlab 

Updated bridge

I have once again invested time into the Mastodon Bridge (the thing that lets you find Twitter friends on Mastodon). It now displays a progress bar while working and does not break for large amounts of friends. And also has a convenient "follow all" button.

See the bridge 

What's new in 2.4.3

The main two things in this release are muted words (text filters) and a more granular OAuth scope system for API developers to reduce unnecessary access for 3rd-party apps. Read the full changelog here.

I wrote another full overview of all of Mastodon's anti-abuse features, including the new muted words feature, as a comparison to 2017:

Cage the Mastodon: An overview of features for dealing with abuse and harassment 

Aside

An interview I've done with Sean Tilley of We Distribute 

What's next

I am currently working on the federation relays concept for v2.5. Relays are supposed to solve the problem that small Mastodon servers have very slow federated timelines because local users are not yet following a large number of people from other servers. A relay would be an opt-in system for servers to subscribe to a larger number of public messages.

See v2.5 roadmap 

Group messaging and automated follower migration when switching accounts remain long-term goals past v2.5. Mastodon has a very good set of features right now, and the focus is increasingly on bug fixing and UI improvements, as well as public relations work to promote the platform.

Thank you to everyone supporting the project and thank to everyone using the platform! (List of sponsors)