Post-birthday log (Patreon)

• Added "boop" sound for new notifications (sound courtesy of jk)

• Hide unneccessary loading bars (when re-loading things in the background) to increase felt snappiness

• Links in toots are now crawled to display a preview card with thumbnail, title, description

• Instance-wide domain blocks now more granular: instead of treating accounts from blocked domains as non-existing, admins can choose between auto-silencing (optionally also rejecting all remote media), or auto-suspending (for reference, suspension prevents accounts from creating anything, and removes all but technical data; silencing removes accounts from public timeline and doesn't allow them to interact with anyone who isn't following them)

• Added error pages

• Moved documentation from GitHub wiki to a folder in the repository instead, allowing anyone to submit pull requests to improve it (also: improved documentation)

• Fixed issues with notifications sometimes erroring out

• Improved conversion of URLs in toots into links

• Selecting and copypasting toot text will now copypaste full URLs despite the shortened version being displayed

• All colors in stylesheets have been extracted into Sass variables to allow simpler color scheme customization for instance admins (this process isn't completely finished since a lot of colors are still set inline from React.js components)

• When following a user, the merging of their toots into your home timeline will now respect the usual home timeline filters that are applied when toots are distributed live

• Merging and unmerging of timelines now happens in the background, making follow/unfollow/block API requests significantly faster

• Infinite scroll improved: will start loading next batch of content when within 250px from the bottom (instead of exactly at the bottom), will prevent re-requesting when a request is already in progress, number of items in subsequent batches slightly smaller to improve speed. An explicit "load more" button at the very bottom to fallback on if scrolling doesn't work for some reason.

• Selecting text of a toot will not open the toot

• Content warnings for toots

• Animations for "favourite" and "boost" icons (boost animation courtesy of blacklemon67)

• Avatars now have disabled animations normally, play on hover

• Contrasts improved

• Special layout for extremely wide monitors

• Used Google Fonts are now hosted locally

• Added optional two-factor authentication

• Redesigned the settings area

• Profile view now scrolls the header part along with the content (toots, followers, etc), which solves the biggest usability issue of Mastodon on mobile phones

• Public pages for toots now contain an "open in web" link, which allows you to open it in the columnized web UI to interact with the toot

• Added Capistrano to the project to allow admins to deploy more easily (this is now my method of deploying to mastodon.social servers)

• Vagrant configuration has been added so developers can get started more quickly if they don't want to install all dependencies manually (documentation for Vagrant development and deployment on Heroku has also been added)

In other, more specifically-mastodon.social news:

I have moved the database and app servers from DigitalOcean to Scaleway. They are now a lot beefier, allowing me to handle a lot, lot more traffic, while cutting down on about $18 of monthly costs.

I've run a few semi-serious advertisment campaigns on Twitter, which has brought quite a few new folks to the instance.