Material Tusky (Patreon)

The main focus of this changelog post is something completely different, but first, here is what I did with Mastodon itself since the last Patreon update:

• Improved dropdown menus

• Changed "boost" mechanic slightly: if a status is within 40 items from the top of the home feed, further boosts of it don't "bump" it up (40 items is about two pages worth of scrolling back)

• Visual indication when posts/followers/follows numbers for remote users in the UI may be inaccurate

• Images can be uploaded by pasting from clipboard

• Added emoji picker to the web UI

• Added mutes - unlike blocks, a mute does not prevent the person from contacting you or seeing your content or following you, but filters out their toots from your view

• Confirmation dialog for notifications clear

• Added digest e-mail functionality! After 20 days of not logging in, if you have any mentions that you didn't read, they will be compiled into a digest e-mail. This too can be opted-out from in preferences.

• Animated GIF images are now converted to soundless MP4 videos after upload (which saves disk space and bandwidth for everyone). In the UI, those videos act just like the GIFs acted before. From the other side, if you upload MP4 or WebM videos without a sound track, they too will count as pseudo-gif (GIFV) in the UI. In terms of limit-per-toot, GIFVs just like static images are limited to 4. It is only videos with sound that are limited to 1. It is always preferable to avoid GIF images in the first place because their quality is abysmal for the file size they consume.

• Due to iOS treatment of videos (it always opens them in fullscreen view when they play), autoplay is disabled on iOS

• New API params for an account's statuses: option to exclude replies from the result, or to include only statuses with media attachments in the result

• Various small performance improvements

• Fixed an old and mysterious (until now) bug where some casuality of processing remote toots was wrong (they landed in the notification column before having finished processing all the metadata like who else is mentioned, attachments, etc)

There was a visible drop in activity during GDC and PAX East, when people would've been out and about instead of on their desktops. Of course, Mastodon works as a mobile website, and works quite well, but it's still not quite the same as a native app in terms of speed, functionality and UI. So in the last couple of weeks I have focused my attention on one app I could contribute to, so that Mastodon would have at least one polished, complete app people could use. That app is Tusky for Android.

Tusky was already one of the more advanced apps when I picked it up, it used a background thread to pull notifications, it wasn't real-time or perfect but it was better than a complete lack of notifications. I have improved the UI to be Material Design-compliant, added missing functionality, and added real push notifications to it.

To make push notifications happen, I wrote a proxy server that consumes Mastodon's streaming APIs on behalf of the app's users and forwards notifications to the proprietary cloud messasing platform Firebase (what used to be Google Cloud Messaging). This proxy server is open source, and was immediately picked up by developers of other Mastodon apps as well.

You can get Tusky on the Google Play store right now!

At last, I also wrote up a Medium post about all the privacy tools in Mastodon.