User discovery, responsive layout (Patreon)

I've had to add a new dependency to the stack: the graph database Neo4J. I tried to keep dependencies as slim as possible since the start, however, this is more or less an optional one (Mastodon won't break if you don't install it). With Neo4J, Mastodon is able to calculate who the most influential users are (PageRank) and who you might know (triadic closure) to generate follow suggestions. This answers one of the top requests since the HN launch - the ability to discover people to follow.

The other most requested feature was the ability to use the site on a mobile device. Previously the layout was locked to being 4 columns wide. Now the layout is responsive and switches to 1 column and tabs when the screen gets too narrow to display all 4 columns. So it's now usable on phones.

Links in statuses are now truncated (e.g. the protocol and www are stripped out, full URL is truncated to a reasonable amount of characters) so that statuses with links in them take up less visual space.

You can now set e-mail preferences to disable e-mail notifications for new followers, mentions, reblogs or favourites!

Performance was improved all around. There is now a feature for instance admins to block an entire domain from interacting with your instance. That is a harsh measure that should only be used with rouge instances, and it's only the first and the most blunt one in a series of tools I want to implement for dealing with abuse.

Compatibility with Friendica instances has been improved, albeit there are some issues on the Friendica end that I'm waiting on their developers to debug.

The 2nd ever Mastodon instance is running on https://kickass.zone

To my Patrons: Thank you for supporting me!

To others: Current pledges are nowhere near to being enough to pay my rent, so if you have a disposable $1 to spare, every contribution would be most welcome. I've been working hard on this platform since the end of August and I really want it to succeed. However this is an open-source project, and it will never generate a profit (as I will not monetize it). So I rely on public donations to keep me going.

Regarding Patreon rewards: I'm really not sure what I can offer. I thought I would reward with access to a private Discord server, however, current Patrons were not interested, and meanwhile I've started a public IRC channel over at #mastodon on Freenode, so that didn't pan out. So if you have ideas for rewards let me know.