Notices by Gregory (grishka@mastodon.social), page 2

#Smithereen 0.4.4 is out!

Walls are good, but you know what often appears on them IRL? Graffiti! Now you can draw things on people's walls. Meticulously ported to JS/HTML5 from VK's original Flash graffiti editor. Desktop only.

This release also includes extensive internal changes that make the codebase more resilient to bugs.

#activitypub #mastodev

In case someone wants possibly the longest thread on the fediverse for testing purposes, here you go: https://mastodon.social/@brownpau/112322747861701800
With the way I store replies in #Smithereen, this will soon exceed my limit of 256 levels ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

#activitypub #mastodev

I was sent another, longer thread, and yay it broke 🎉

What will happen when this limit is exceeded? The "reply key" field will get truncated. It's 1024 bytes and stores the IDs of all parent posts as 32-bit integers, always starting from the top-level one. So essentially, all further replies will be erroneously considered replying to the 256th reply in the thread.

Now I don't think this is a problem in any real-world use cases, but yikes

When you hover the "replied to" name, a popover with the parent comment pops up and you can open them in a chain like on image boards:

Same comments, different views:

You can now choose how you see comments in #Smithereen. This is most probably very buggy.

Oh and now when you click this "show previous comments" thingy, the scroll position is retained

(I spent way too much time refining these popovers and rewrote them twice)

Frustrated that you can't edit toots? Well, at least you'll be able to edit #Smithereen posts soon.

#activitypub #mastodev

#Smithereen update: group and event invitations!

Yes, these do federate. No, they aren't compatible with anything else out there.

#ActivityPub #mastodev

#Smithereen 0.4.1 is out. It adds the option for the instance admin to require new accounts to confirm their email addresses.

#activitypub #mastodev

#Smithereen 0.4.2 is out!

New features include a revamped invitation system and a new signup more with manual approval by server staff.

#activitypub #mastodev

One more thing I forgot: there's now support for federation blocking. Blocked domains are always publicly displayed in /system/about.

The next release will be even more important: I'll implement private messages and friends-/followers-only posts, at last! As far as federation is concerned, this will bring feature parity with Mastodon.

I just released #Smithereen 0.5.

This release brings lots of much-needed improvements:
- Federation is now more reliable thanks to retrying. Smithereen now also keeps track of federation errors and stops delivery to servers that are down.
- Reporting (Flag activity) is now supported. The corresponding moderation UI is very minimal for now, but that will improve in future versions.
- Long comment threads can now be paginated through and seen in their entirety.

#activitypub #mastodev

Here's some screenshots of the new UIs.

#Smithereen is about to become GDPR compliant 😅

I like my approach with deactivation period better than what others do. For example, @pixelfed deletes accounts immediately and it turns out people change their minds on this stuff sometimes.

#activitypub

Is there an #ActivityPub server where I need to parse HTML for <link type="application/activity+json" href="..."/> to get to the JSON representation of an object? I want to add support for this in #Smithereen but I need something to test against.

#mastodev

Evan's Threads account (@evanprodromou) is federated and you do need to parse HTML to load his past posts.

Smithereen now supports that! And I also found a bug in Threads.

I've never used Facebook much — it never gained any traction in Russia besides some Moscow hipsters — but daamn its desktop layout used to be so much more sensible 10 years ago!

(stumbled upon this screenshot while researching the mobile newsfeed/timeline layout for #Smithereen)