Maintenance updates (Patreon)

The last few days I've been busy cleaning up existing code, fixing up small issues and adding small improvements:

- Improved username validation on registration (this hasn't been a priority before)
- Deleted statuses disappear from the UI in real-time
- Following/unfollowing somebody alters your home timeline, this is also reflected live in the UI
- When a user action results in an error in the UI, a notification is shown. For the time being, the messages are somewhat arcane (such as "422: Unprocessable Entity" for when the submitted information is invalid, like an empty status or empty follow request)
- Query optimizations ensure that a lot of pages now load much faster, although work here is not yet complete

My next area of work is adding a "detailed view" to the UI, which should handle all functions not fit for timelines, such as displaying the settings page, subscriptions page (from which you would be able to manage who you follow), profiles, and expanded statuses. Obviously this has been on the todo list since the very beginning and it is quite an ambitious undertaking... Little steps!

More importantly, and I emphasize this again, you can try Mastodon on https://mastodon.social already. A lot of the basic functionality is already in. Probably the biggest hurdle to people unfamiliar with the fediverse right now is the discovery of people to follow -- an empty home timeline is an extremely boring sight no matter how much I try to make the UI look pretty. I have ideas how to build "who to follow" suggestions but it does not seem like a functional priority to me. You can follow me (Gargron@mastodon.social) for a start and look at who I am following for pointers.

I have also recently purchased a logo design from Fairpixels, participating in their Pixels4food campaign ($75 for a logo design and they donate some of it to charity as I understand). Apparently I will hear back from them in 5 business days. I'm not very happy with the SVG logo I made for Mastodon myself, so I think a professionally designed one will lend this project some more credibility.