Hashtags, more user lists and scaling up for the Netherlands (Patreon)

A lot has happened since the last Patreon post! After Aral Balkan  tweeted out about Mastodon to his more than 36.000 followers, we had an immense surge in interest and users trying it out. And the following day, #Mastodon became a trending topic in the Netherlands. We now have more than 9000 registered users on mastodon.social, 3300 signed up just over the last 7 days.

As a consequence, I spent considerable time tuning the production server for mastodon.social and setting up a more serious deployment than a simple docker-compose - I moved to two dedicated VPS, one for the databases, and one for the front-end, while splitting the background workers between both. This has allowed us to withstand the high traffic. If we'll see even more traffic, with this setup I'll be able to relatively easily scale up accordingly by adding more frontend servers and doing some load balancing between them. I have updated the hosting milestone on Patreon to reflect that - it's now $40/mo. Thankfully with all the new Patrons (hey!) I can afford that.

Now to the fun stuff, features!

Firstly, the sudden interest from people who had no prior context to what the project was revealed to me some important bits that could be improved about conveying that context. So now the landing page contains a screenshot of the UI and a link to the GitHub project page.

You can now click on the number of favourites or reblogs that a status received to view the list of people who favourited/reblogged it.

Some important security-related headers have been added to the code, as well as Cross Origin Request Security (CORS) headers on the API, allowing the API to be used from client-side JavaScript applications. Of course, before the big 1.0 release the API is not finalized. I am still working out what the best structure for everything is.

There's been a boost to the UI performance as components get re-rendered a lot less. That together with adding your own submitted statuses to the UI as soon as you submit instead of waiting for the home timeline to receive it makes it feel a lot snappier.

Added web app manifests should now allow you to add the website to your iOS home screen (though as I own no Apple devices myself I can't confirm this).

Finally, the really really big one - hashtags! They hashtag links work for both local and remote statuses, as expected. Hashtag timeline works, aka receiving updates for a hashtag in real-time. Moreover, as always with links in statuses that get federated, there needs to be a static/public version of the resource. And there is! E.g. #mastodon 

And as always, various bug fixes and improvements.

Thanks to all new Patrons who are making this possible, as well as those who donated via BTC and PayPal!

Bonus content

Everyone who joins the platform wonders what a post on Mastodon is called, or what the activity is called. The contestants so far are "mastadoon" ("redoon"?), "meep" ("remeep"?) and "tetter" (apparently it's the sound elephants make in Dutch). Of course I doubt that we'll ever find a word good enough to become official. For now I'll keep the UI wording neutral, aka "status", "publish" and "reblog". But I do enjoy the funny words people come up with!