gotosocial

gotosocial , 9 days ago to random EN

Hi nerds! We've just released #GoToSocial version 0.16.0 Snappy Sloth into the wild. Look at it go! Climbing trees and all sorts, covered in algae, and #pooping once a week.

https://github.com/superseriousbusiness/gotosocial/releases/tag/v0.16.0

Thanks to everyone who helped us comb the bugs out of its fur during the release candidate process. We hope the protein you gained from eating the bugs was reward enough.

As usual, when updating to this version (which you really should, because it's quite good), please read the release notes carefully, particularly the database migration notes; and make sure you don't interrupt the database migrations.

Ta!

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Highlights of this release (nothing new since 0.16.0-rc1, just reiterating):

• Sign up / registration: In this release, you can open your instance to new registrations (aka sign-ups) via the new signup page at https://[your-instance.tld]/signup. No more manually creating new users via the CLI :)
  Documentation here: https://docs.gotosocial.org/en/latest/admin/signups/
• Accounts overview for moderators: To support the new sign-up feature, and help instance admins to moderate, we made a new section in the settings panel where admins + moderators can get an overview of accounts, and filter by instance, status, and more. You'll find this new accounts view in the settings panel.
• Totally reworked message delivery system and worker queues: We've completely reworked the way GoToSocial sends out messages to your followers and performs worker-related tasks; this should drastically increase the speed that outgoing messages are delivered, especially for users with lots of followers. It also paves the way for future work in terms of persisting worker and message queues over restarts.
• Account mutes: The account mute API endpoints are now implemented, meaning you can put (timed) mutes of accounts in place, to hide statuses from specific accounts from your home timeline, and/or hide notifications from muted accounts.
• Accurate account stats: This release introduces code to pull up-to-date counts of statuses, followers, and following from remote instances and show these stats via the API. So now in your client of choice, you should see an accurate count of the number of statuses and followers/following of a given account, no more "0 followers, 0 following, 0 statuses".
• HTTP header permissions settings: The settings panel now has a section that allows admins to set regular expressions to deny requests depending on HTTP headers.
  Documentation here: https://docs.gotosocial.org/en/latest/admin/request_filtering_modes/
• Filters v2 implementation: We've now implemented the v2 API for filters, which means you can create more complex filters to hide keywords or statuses, and more clients should be able to create filters on GoToSocial.
• Send test email: Admins can now use the settings panel to send a test email, to check if their SMTP (email) configuration is valid.
• Profile API: Clients that use the profile API to delete avatar + header images should now work, since we've now implemented this part of the API.
• Search operators: We've added a first search operator to GoToSocial, so when you're searching for statuses, you can add from:@[username]@[domain] to your search term, to search only within statuses created by the given account (while still respecting the search limitations we already had in place).
  Documentation here: https://docs.gotosocial.org/en/latest/user_guide/search/
• Email change: Users can now change their email address in the settings panel without admin intervention.
  Documentation here: https://docs.gotosocial.org/en/latest/user_guide/settings/#email-change
• Memory usage optimizations: GoToSocial now uses memory more conservatively than before; you should only need about 150-200MiB of memory to run GtS with a full cache, and it will spike less.

gotosocial , 17 days ago to random EN

Hello everyone!

We've just made the first release candidate for version 0.16.0 of #GoToSocial, aka Snappy Sloth.

https://github.com/superseriousbusiness/gotosocial/releases/tag/v0.16.0-rc1

For adventurous instance admins, please read the release + migration notes very carefully when updating to this release, paying particular attention to the database migrations section.

---

Here are the release highlights:

• Sign up / registration: In this release, you can open your instance to new registrations (aka sign-ups) via the new signup page at https://[your-instance.tld]/signup. No more manually creating new users via the CLI :)
  Documentation here: https://docs.gotosocial.org/en/latest/admin/signups/
• Accounts overview for moderators: To support the new sign-up feature, and help instance admins to moderate, we made a new section in the settings panel where admins + moderators can get an overview of accounts, and filter by instance, status, and more. You'll find this new accounts view in the settings panel.
• Totally reworked message delivery system and worker queues: We've completely reworked the way GoToSocial sends out messages to your followers and performs worker-related tasks; this should drastically increase the speed that outgoing messages are delivered, especially for users with lots of followers. It also paves the way for future work in terms of persisting worker and message queues over restarts.
• Account mutes: The account mute API endpoints are now implemented, meaning you can put (timed) mutes of accounts in place, to hide statuses from specific accounts from your home timeline, and/or hide notifications from muted accounts.
• Accurate account stats: This release introduces code to pull up-to-date counts of statuses, followers, and following from remote instances and show these stats via the API. So now in your client of choice, you should see an accurate count of the number of statuses and followers/following of a given account, no more "0 followers, 0 following, 0 statuses".
• HTTP header permissions settings: The settings panel now has a section that allows admins to set regular expressions to deny requests depending on HTTP headers.
  Documentation here: https://docs.gotosocial.org/en/latest/admin/request_filtering_modes/
• Filters v2 implementation: We've now implemented the v2 API for filters, which means you can create more complex filters to hide keywords or statuses, and more clients should be able to create filters on GoToSocial.
• Send test email: Admins can now use the settings panel to send a test email, to check if their SMTP (email) configuration is valid.
• Profile API: Clients that use the profile API to delete avatar + header images should now work, since we've now implemented this part of the API.
• Search operators: We've added a first search operator to GoToSocial, so when you're searching for statuses, you can add from:@[username]@[domain] to your search term, to search only within statuses created by the given account (while still respecting the search limitations we already had in place).
  Documentation here: https://docs.gotosocial.org/en/latest/user_guide/search/
• Email change: Users can now change their email address in the settings panel without admin intervention.
  Documentation here: https://docs.gotosocial.org/en/latest/user_guide/settings/#email-change
• Memory usage optimizations: GoToSocial now uses memory more conservatively than before; you should only need about 150-200MiB of memory to run GtS with a full cache, and it will spike less.

gotosocial , 25 days ago to random EN

Preview of stuff that will be arriving in #GoToSocial v0.16.0 (likely in a week or two when we've squished some more bugs):

• more efficient message delivery; useful for accounts with lots of followers
• user sign-up/registration flow; open your instance to sign-ups without having to manually create users with the CLI; approve/reject sign-ups
• better account overview on the settings panel, for instance admins
• display accurate followers/following/statuses counts for remote accounts
• filters v2 API; filters should work in more clients with this
• frontend for HTTP header filters; block incoming requests based on http header values
• settings panel section for sending test emails, to check SMTP config
• alternative SQLite implementation available via build tag
• search updates; search within your own statuses more easily
• shitloads of little bug fixes and stuff

gotosocial , 5 months ago to random

At some point in this first quarter of 2024 we plan to mark the Alpha development phase of GoToSocial as completed, and "officially" enter the Beta phase. This will happen prettymuch whenever we get account migration working properly via the Move activity, and also implement a basic sign up flow to augment the current manual account creation process done via the CLI tool.

Every software development process is different, but in our case, Beta will mean that we consider most of the very basic features to be complete, the software is reasonably stable, and we can then start adding other cool stuff like better moderation tools, better oauth tooling, status edits, and that sort of thing (see our roadmap for more details).

It's been a long and interesting alpha period. tobi started GtS as more or less a hobby project during a period of day-job burnout at the start of 2021. They got GtS federating fairly quickly, started seeing the potential in it for more than just a hobby project, and then other folks like kim, daenney, f0x, and maloki jumped in to work on the project too, as well as a whole bunch of semi-regular and drive-by contributors. tobi kept working on the project during their absence from work, and then kept going after they left their job and started taking unemployment benefits, and then continued (spending their last savings) after the benefits dried up.

In late 2022 when Twitter shat the bed for the umpteenth time, we saw interest in GoToSocial skyrocket, which was both scary and exciting. Suddenly way more people were running the software and finding bugs and reporting issues, which was overwhelming and stressful but also very, very helpful for the stability of the software.

In 2023, we managed to get funding from NLnet to continue working on the project, which couldn't come soon enough since tobi was, by the start of 2023, completely broke. Thanks to NLnet, tobi could now work on GoToSocial full time without worrying excessively about money, which was a huge relief.

Now in 2024, kim is also working full time on GoToSocial, having also got an NLnet grant, which gives us a lot more confidence in terms of the sustainability of working on the software. It's going to be a good year for GtS :) Big thank you to NLnet for believing in us.

Throughout this whole period, people donated over and over to our liberapay and opencollective, which helped us to pay for our CI/CD development machine, and gave us a buffer for unexpected bills and shocks. Thank you so much!

Over the course of alpha we discovered a whole bunch of weird bugs, leading to many headaches and late nights toiling over fmt.Printf statements and writing tests. We made the software way more resilient and flexible in terms of how it federates, poked through the code of other AP implementations to discover and work around edge cases, and generally worked very, very hard on stability and compatibility. We're not 100% there yet in terms of which other softwares GtS can properly communicate with, but given how divergent AP implementations are from each other, and how many softwares do wacky undocumented things, we think it's going pretty damn well.

And we found time to add features too! In 2023 we merged support for:

• hashtags
• polls
• status language tags
• allowlist federation
• account notes
• timeline markers
• lists
• partial search
• profile fields
• request tracing
• prometheus metrics
• pinned posts
• (most) mp4 videos
• bookmarks

So, there you go! A little potted, messy history of GoToSocial so far. Probably missing a bunch of important things that happened but memory is fickle.

Thanks for your ongoing support and kindness, and here's to a fun upcoming beta development period in a few months :gtspat: :under_construction: