Hello fellow creatures!

We've finally bitten the bullet and cut version 0.17.0 of #GoToSocial, aka Selective Sloth 🎆

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

As always, please read the release notes very carefully when updating, take a database backup, and don't interrupt database migrations no matter how tempted you might be to press ctrl-c. It's not wurf it mate!

This is the very first BETA RELEASE of GoToSocial. What does it mean that we're leaving alpha and entering beta? Not much really. It had to happen eventually, and now is as good a time as any to go from "people shouldn't really use this software" to "people can consider using this software but be warned it's not done yet, lots of stuff is missing, yadda yadda". Don't read too much into it!

- 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 (see screenshots).
- 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.

We've defined a list of platforms + architectures that we "officially" support and those we partially or don't support due to performance reasons or library constraints, you can check this out right here: https://github.com/superseriousbusiness/gotosocial/?tab=readme-ov-file#supported-platforms If your platform of choice isn't on the list you can, of course, try building yourself, and maybe try the very experimental nowasm tag we recently added, if you're feeling daring: https://docs.gotosocial.org/en/latest/advanced/builds/nowasm/

Thanks for reading and for your continued support for this silly sloth! :gtspat: