Local timelines (Patreon)

• Admin UI for looking through and dealing with reports

• Improved speed of loading statuses in web UI

• Fixed remote avatars not being re-downloaded when they have changed under certain conditions

• Atom feeds no longer list who you followed, unfollowed and favourited, that information is now sent to the recipient only, to be more in line with privacy expectations of the platform

• Fixed database inconsistency under race conditions with a foreign key

• When home/notifications/etc columns are empty, they now display a helpful message, like "start a conversation with someone to get notifications" etc (not verbatim like that, but in spirit), to get new people started

• Added a new type of timeline, the "local timeline". Previous "public timeline" has been renamed to "whole known network", which was always the more descriptive name for it (i.e. posts from everyone people from your instance follow + posts from your instance). The local timeline is just posts from your instance. Should be good for community building on separate instances, like having separate subcultures throughout the fediverse (that sounded more cool than I thought it would).

• When you're scrolled down and new content appears in the column at the top, the header lights up to indicate that

• Performance improvements in the web UI through better use of selectors, splitting components, updated React/Redux dependencies to latest versions

• Fixed bug where un-boosting a toot would put the original into all followers' feeds, even those who had the boost filtered due to e.g. having blocked the original author

• Replaced URL parser with a better one, solving cases where punctuation would unexpectedly become part of a link in a toot

• Wrote documentation on how to tune Mastodon instances

• Do not display indefinite "loading" message when toot couldn't be loaded due to e.g. not existing, now a "not found" message is displayed

• Better validation of attaching media to toots when composing

• Added page that lists applications you have authorized to access your account (OAuth2) with ability to revoke access

• Right-to-left detection and display for compose form textarea and status contents throughout the web UI

I also wrote a response to Mark Zuckerberg's manifesto where he claims to be building the future of global communities at Facebook  and finished migrating from DigitalOcean to Scaleway. For reference, the current setup is:

• 1 VPS for PostgreSQL/Redis databases with 8 CPUs, 16GB RAM - 1x 18€/mo

• 2 VPS for web/streaming/sidekiq processes, 4 CPUs, 8GB RAM each, one of which is also the new load balancing server (i.e. nginx) - 2x 12€/mo

• 1 VPS for Minio file storage (though the current one is running out of disk space so I'm going to be upgrading it to a larger one) - 1x 3€/mo

With most e-mail notifications defaulting to "off", Mastodon still generates about 21k e-mails per month, which means about $5/mo to Mailgun. I also renewed the mastodon.social domain name for 34€/yr (damn, it's not the cheapest TLD - turns out Gandi has a special offer on new registrations for it, making the price close to .com, which got me. Oops. But mastodon.social is a good domain). That's more or less how much of the Patreon goes to external costs and not my rent/food/insurance/etc.

With me having created a Medium blog for that one post, would you prefer if I kept publishing these changelogs on Patreon, or start doing them on Medium? Do you want me to write any more blog posts about something? Let me know.

As always, thank you for your support.