Hello everyone! We've just made the first release candidate for version 0.17.0 of GoToSocial :under_construction: Adventurous admins who want to try the new features and help us spotting bugs can get the release from below:

https://github.com/superseriousbusiness/gotosocial/releases/tag/v0.17.0-rc1

⚠️ This release contains several database migrations which will run the first time you start up this new version. Be sure not to interrupt this migration process. This will take anywhere between a few seconds and an hour or even more (on slower hardware / big databases). Please be patient! Back up your database file before updating! We had to rejig the entire statuses table to introduce interaction policies (see below). ⚠️

Release highlights:

- Interaction policies: This release gives you the ability to set interaction policies on your statuses using the settings panel. Interaction policies let you determine who can reply to, like, or boost your statuses. You can accept or reject interactions as you wish; accepted replies will be added to your replies collection, and unwanted replies will be dropped. This feature is still a work-in-progress as we will almost certainly have some kinks to work out in terms of implementation etc, but we wanted to get it into people's hands as quickly as possible.
User docs here: https://docs.gotosocial.org/en/latest/user_guide/settings/#default-interaction-policies
Federation docs here: https://docs.gotosocial.org/en/latest/federation/posts/#interaction-policy
- Much wider range of support for different media types: In this release we've embedded a webassembly build of ffmpeg into the GoToSocial binary, so that users can post many different types of media than previously, including mp3, flac, and other audio types, and many more video types. Admins: you don't need to have ffmpeg installed on your server for this to work.
- Audio player: to complement the new media types, we adapted our current video player to also play audio, so people visiting your profile can play MP3s and FLACs. Album art is supported when embedded in the audio file!
- Header/avatar alt text: You can now set alt-text for your avatar + header images, so that screenreader users visiting your profile can read a description of your beautiful face.
- Better threading model for statuses: On the web view of a thread, conversations are now indented at different levels, to make it easier to see who's replying to whom.
- Prefers-reduced-motion is now supported, so that folks with animations turned off in their operating system or browser aren't confronted with lots of animation when they open your profile.
- Conversations view: You can now view a list of your direct message conversations, making it much easier to keep track of who you're talking to.
- Import/export csv files: It's now possible to import Mastodon-compatible CSV files for accounts you follow and accounts you block, making it much easier to migrate across instances. Export of these files is supported too.
- Exclusive lists: You can now mark lists as "exclusive", which means that posts from accounts in an exclusive list will show up only in that list and not in your home timeline.
- Show/hide posts on your profile: Previously only Public posts were shown on your web profile. This is still the default, but you can now choose to show unlisted posts on your web profile too (the Mastodon default), or to show no posts at all.
- Lots of new themes: solarized, brutalist, ecks pee, and more.
- Store worker queue on restart: when you stop the instance, pending tasks are stored into the database, and loaded again when you start up the instance, so that no tasks get lost between restarts.

Thanks for reading!