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!

Hi everyone!

We've just released v0.14.0 of #GoToSocial! Say hello to the Spoiled Sloth :gtspat:

https://github.com/superseriousbusiness/gotosocial/releases/tag/v0.14.0

We're really proud of this release! It fixes a lot of longstanding annoying bugs, and adds some very neat features tooooo

Thanks to everyone who helped us with code and trying out release candidates and filing issues, and a big thank you to all our financial supporters who help us out via opencollective and liberapay :)

When upgrading to this version from a previous release, please note that there are CSS and HTML updates, config file changes, and several database migrations which may take a while to run! So please read the migration notes carefully :)

Release highlights:

- Account aliasing. You can now set the alsoKnownAs field on your account via the settings panel, to indicate other accounts you own. This doesn't do much now, but it's the first step towards the Move implementation for account migration coming in v0.15.0. We originally wanted to include Move in this release but it needs more testing so we pushed it back. Hang in there :)
- Much better thread sorting. Conversation threads on both the web view and client API use a new sorting mechanism which makes them way more readable. No longer will replies in a thread be scattered all over the place.
- Better HTTP signature support. We fixed a longstanding issue with including vs not including query parameters in signed GET requests. We now try (and accept) both methods of constructing signatures. Which leads to...
- Improved thread fetching. You'll see far fewer "orphaned" statuses in your timeline now, and you'll see more replies on statuses from other instances.
- Syntax highlighting for code blocks on the web UI. When you include a code block in your markdown now, and correctly indicate the language the code is written in, it will be syntax highlighted when rendered on your profile in the web UI. This requires javascript, but it's a progressive enhancement feature. Visitors to your profile with javascript turned off will just see the code block without syntax highlighting :)
- Improved "about this instance" page, with a link to the page in the nav bar. Previously the "about this instance" page was more or less hidden. We've now surfaced it better, so you can write all your terms and conditions and instance description stuff there. Relatedly....
- Parse instance descriptions and terms and conditions as markdown. Previously it was very difficult to properly edit these fields, because you had to read + write HTML to do so. Now they're parsed as markdown. This means you can more easily include things like blockquotes, lists, etc.
- Big refactor of HTML templates + CSS. We did a serious rework of HTML templates to fix indentation. Previously if you did "view source" on a GoToSocial profile page, you'd see a mess of sloppily-indented HTML. With this refactor, the HTML is now nicely indented and much more readable. We also did an accessibility pass and tested our HTML with various screen readers to try to make the web view a bit less annoying to navigate.
- First pass at a basic spam filtering system. In light of spam waves happening on the fediverse recently we took a crack at implementing a filter to drop messages identified as spam. This is still in the experimental stage, but it's included in this release so you can try it out already. See the docs for details.

Hiya! We finished picking up the carpet and shaking out the bugs of 0.12.0 Spaghetti Sloth! Thanks for your help with the release candidates :)

Here are the notes for the proper release! https://github.com/superseriousbusiness/gotosocial/releases/tag/v0.12.0

Release highlights:

>

This release brings initial support for different federation modes, starting with allowlist federation mode. You can now set your federation mode to allowlist, and then add and remove domain allows via the admin settings panel. You can read documentation on this feature here: https://docs.gotosocial.org/en/latest/admin/federation_modes/.

We revamped some other bits of the settings panel too, including adding a setting for the discoverable flag, which is documented here: https://docs.gotosocial.org/en/latest/user_guide/settings/#mark-account-as-discoverable-by-search-engines-and-directories

We also added settings for instance rules: you can now add and remove rules for your instance, and users on your instance can select rules that have been broken when creating reports. Rules are shown on the /about page for your instance.

And as usual we did a whole bunch of bug fixing, performance tweaks, and that sort of thing! It's a bit of a cliche to put that in release notes, but there you go.

We also started implementing some background functionality for poll support, but we didn't quite finish that in time for this release, so polls are not yet enabled. Next time!

#GoToSocial

Hello hello! We made the first release candidate for version 0.11.0 of #GoToSocial

Highlights for this release candidate:

- #Hashtags! Finally, hashtags federate in and out of GoToSocial as they should, and you can view timelines of hashtagged posts in your client app of choice.
- Account notes! You can now set, view, and unset your own private notes on accounts.
- Lots of performance stuff: we tweaked our cacheing configuration, increased the amount of concurrent database connections that sqlite can use, and more. Things oughta feel a teensy bit faster :)
- Bug fixes, bug squashes, bug err... obliterations.
- Probably some new bugs for you to enjoy.

You can find the release candidate at the following link:

https://github.com/superseriousbusiness/gotosocial/releases/tag/v0.11.0-rc1

As always, please read the migration notes carefully.

Thank you!

Heya, we did the thing!

GoToSocial v0.9.0 Spicy Sloth is out now 🌶️ 🔥

This release was fun to work on, and we hope you enjoy using it! The project is slowly and steadily maturing and getting better :gtspat:

Big thank you to all contributors, folks who opened issues, instance admins who let us know weird stuff was happening, people who seem to like the code, and people who give us money to write the code!

You can get the release from here: https://github.com/superseriousbusiness/gotosocial/releases/tag/v0.9.0

Highlights:

- PROFILE FIELDS will now be federated. This means you can set key/value fields on your profile, just like other Fedi softwares already have, and they will federate in and out properly! It may take up to 2 days to start seeing fields on remote profiles, be patient ;)
- Kickass new layout for web view of profiles, including fields!
- Initial support for request tracing (https://github.com/superseriousbusiness/gotosocial/blob/main/docs/configuration/observability.md)
- "Subscribe" to an account you follow to receive notifications when they create a new post! (AKA "click the bell" functionality.) Very useful for catching posts of followed accounts who don't post very often.
- Automatic remote status refetching to get up-to-date replies + edits.
- Performance improvements for message sending: you can now configure the rate at which messages will be federated outwards, better spacing out CPU usage and avoiding issues with rate-limiting.
- Lots of caching performance improvements; things should feel generally snappier.
- Suspend accounts from right within the admin panel by clicking through from reports.
- We added a whole bunch of trans rights to the code 🏳️‍⚧️ The code has so much trans rights in it now. If you don't like trans rights, you won't like this code.

GoToSocial is getting a ton of attention lately. So I just wanna reiterate that if you're using GtS, you're using alpha software that has many features not yet implemented, and is chocka with bugs. We're quite proud of how the alpha development phase is going so far, but we make no guarantees whatsoever about stability, data loss, performance, etc etc. You use alpha software at your own risk.

There are many things you can do in Mastodon (and mastodon clients) which will 404 on GtS because they're simply not implemented yet. We are aware of what these are, and they're documented both in the roadmap document and in the faq in the docs. We're currently revising the roadmap document for the next year, so we'll have an updated version to share soon (tm).

Opening issues about features that we've yet to implement will not get them finished any faster: if anything, it will be slower because we then have to deal with answering issues. It is especially unwelcome to comment 'where is x feature' on an unrelated PR / issue. The cake is in the oven and it's not ready to eat yet, so stop asking if you can stick your fingers in it.

The team managing PRs and development and admin and planning and triage and releases and offering help in the help channels is 4 people, only one of whom (tobi) currently works full time on the project. While we're very open to PRs, feedback, and collaboration, we are also essentially just weirdos who like to be left alone to tinker with code, cuddle cats and dogs, and listen to music. This is home grown, open source software which started as a hobby project. Not a big company with support staff. Please be mindful of this when you're asking for support!

If you want to recommend GoToSocial to people, thank you, your enthusiasm is very appreciated! But please accompany your recommendation with the provisos I mentioned here, so that people's expectations are set appropriately. We don't want anyone to come to the software expecting miracles and ending up disappointed.

Phew, thank you for reading ❤️!

Hello everyone! A new (well, old!) thing we’re trying out: an opt-in setting for exposing an RSS feed of your public GoToSocial posts!

If you look at this profile in the web now you’ll see a bright orange RSS icon that links to the RSS feed for this account’s posts. The feed contains the same posts that you can see via the web page, but in handy RSS format.

This means you can subscribe to the account using an RSS reader like Fluent Reader or Akregator, and never miss a public post again. Great for when you want to share your GoToSocial posts with people who don’t have a fediverse account (yet!).

Just to repeat: this is opt-in and disabled by default. If you’re running on main, you can enable this in your profile settings. Otherwise, wait for the next release ;)