In the last few weeks, I have been trying to organise the #Mastodon development work, so our (very small!) resources are used efficiently. This led us to a tentative roadmap for Mastodon 4.3, with a (very optimistic) release date before Christmas.
Notify users when relationships (follows, followers) are severed, due to a server block, display the list of impacted relationships, and have a button to restore them if the remote server is unblocked
Improve account recommendations, to help users find relevant accounts to follow
Redesign all e-mails, add a few onboarding e-mails to help getting on board with Mastodon, and send an (optional) weekly digest e-mail
@teledyn there are regular occurences of somebody mistakingly blocking a server and breaking a lot of relationships, without anybody noticing and any way of cancelling it.
We have abuse and privacy issues in mind when working on this, and think we may hsve something that will work and not cause issues,
It will also help providing more transparency to mod and admin actions.
Continue to improve onboarding, by having a screen to set your profile & main settings (like search discovery) without leaving the onboarding process
Rework notifications, with grouping support (Your post has been boosted by X people, instead of a notification per boost)
Federate link previews to avoid having each instance send a request to the URL, causing a lot of trafic (not an easy problem to solve, may move to 4.4)
@renchap more stuff should be built in a way so others can build plugins for mastodon more easily. Stuff like search, discovery, feed algorithms could all be enhanced by external plugins. There is no need to do all this work in house.
(maybe) Make it easier to interact on other instances and make it easier for websites to add a “share on Mastodon” button, through a trampoline domain
(maybe) Rework/rewrite the announcements feature, to allow server-generated announcements, for example to highlight new features or help with onboarding
Thank you! This is a huge reason I’m currently using a custom theme on my instance, but it will be much nicer for it to be included out of the box. I went to point you to https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/pull/20107, but see you've already triaged it. 💪
@renchap
"Support system setting for light/dark mode"
Well, can we fix dark mode itself please? Background should be black, not off-black/grey, and scroll-bar needs to be in contrasting colours, not different shades of off-black/grey.
We are also working on more long-term features, like the much awaited quote posts, but those need some preliminary protocol-level work before we can start the implementation.
Please remember that the core team is very small, with only one developer! Many of those features are contributed by various volunteers, but we also work on fixing bugs and improving many non user-facing features (performance, security, admin & mod tooling…).
>We are also working on more long-term features, like the much awaited quote posts, but those need some preliminary protocol-level work before we can start the implementation.
you already know we could do quote-tweets hugely better here?
funding quit & invention died at Twitter before they finished that project
1 we can forward CW
2 we can unfurl as a wide an outside world as does Slack
3 we can crop out unfitting distractions when the substance of the unfurl can’t afford the noise of worthless details such as no one has retweeted it before now
this tweet of mine handcrafts a quote of mine but my tools wrongly leave an overlarge blank in the middle
If you want to help and are a developer (Ruby and/or Javascript), you can head to our Github repository and have a look at some issues, or can ping me if you want guidance on what is available to contributors.
And if you are not a developer, you can donate to the project (https://joinmastodon.org/sponsors), so we can hire more people to work on Mastodon full-time and be implement new features faster!
@renchap tbh, I think the “+" button style originally used in Twitter would be better?
So like it renders a preview above the post box, and then you can click through each and "edit”, and then post all at once in one big sequence of publishes.
Rather than publish one post, then writing the next, then publish, then writing the next; as often you need to go back and edit earlier posts.
@renchap mm, I don't think so? I'm not sure? Maybe the initial version would just be a “+" that posts and then does in-reply-to in the compose? (rather than just a "publish”)
@thisismissem@renchap take into account that in Mastodon you can edit previous posts, so it's not that critical to be able to preview all the threath before posting.
@renchap Possibly relelvant: The way Glitch-SOC Mastodon does "thread mode" is as a setting in the editor (similar to adding a content warning or changing post privacy). It's currently hidden behind a "..." menu, which isn't great. But the thread-mode setting then automatically propagates to the reply, which is good.
Long term, I would much prefer a way to edit multiple threaded posts & submit all at once, as @thisismissem suggested. But I understand that that's a much more complex project.
@renchap Could we get an API hook to run our media through PhotoDNA (enter PhotoDNA key in admin screen, all media gets scanned, bad things immediately deleted before hitting the S3 endpoints, alert sent to NCMEC, administrative alert to block account/instance).
@derek this is a much bigger project, and one of the goal for next year. Hopefully we will be able to get some funding to work on this.
It will probably not be a direct PhotoDNA/NCMEC integration as this is very US centric.
I wrote a blog post on what I (personally) would like it to be: https://renchap.com/blog/post/evolving_mastodon_trust_and_safety/
@joshix There is an open PR to add an instance setting to change it: https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/pull/27629
I need to discuss with the team on this topic to check if there are any issues with this, but this is on my todolist.
@joshix Longer messages are useful (our instance is using glitch and already has them), but threads have their own, separate uses. They allow you to add images at the right place to each post, and they allow people to boost or start a convo on specific posts of the thread.
So I agree that we could really benefit from easier thread-posting as well as better visualisation of the answers to the thread (independently of message length limits) 😀
@elduvelle@joshix@renchap adding my +1 to this comment. This is a microblogging service not a blogging service, so threading multiple, shorter posts is the name of the game. Don’t be discouraged by the replies saying that it’d be better to increase the character count; composing threads will be highly valued by some!
@elduvelle@joshix@renchap
One possible alternative implementation that allows even finer reply control:
1.) User marks content of a message they want to reply to (aka. what they do when quoting text now).
2.) Mastodon shows a new "Reply to" button (JS detects that text is highlighted by the user)
3.) Mastodon saves the text that was replied to as some metadata in the new toot
4.) When other users click on the new reply toot, they see the text in the original toot highlighted to indicate that the reply is to that. (Alternative: collapse the text that wasn't replied to)
@joshix@renchap please don't. Mastodon is not designed for long posts and this is a bad hack.
Instead, we should just have a support for attaching markdown files to posts, which then would turn into embeds with image, title and description from the file. HTML is not allowed at all.
Clicking such an embed would open an article mode in supported clients, or, to maintain backwards compatibility, link to the special page that renders nothing but the article content and footer for your instance.
I hope you will also look at an easier way to create a post when reading a list!
I mostly read content via lists, but if I want to post myself I have to move to another view first 😒
allow hashtags words to be included in a list (or a specific list with all the hashtags one is following, in order to have all of them in only one page - easier to look at them)
set up a voting system to evaluate dangerous or malicious accounts or instances, and ban or unban them if necessary, depending on the evaluations (a collective moderation, ruled by another higher chosen set of people too)
@renchap
I get ya :) im just saying we want to help out with the short staffing but it takes us a long time to make and review changes having to RE the thing. Docs as a force multiplier bc we know yall need some help!
@renchap@jonny depending on what needs documenting and for whom, I might be able to contribute a bit – I am a technical (and academic) writer and editor. Where should I look to see your documentation needs?
This might be helpful also to refine the onboarding.
@libroraptor Lot of things are needed, one of them is switching to another website framework as the current one is not ideal for doc. This should unblock having well separated doc areas (for users, for mods, for admins, for developers) and per-version docs.
Another is starting to rely on OpenAPI to generate our API docs.
There are probably many other improvements, and the docs repo has a lot of issues to triage: https://github.com/mastodon/documentation/pulls
… so I need to create a triage team for it 😅
@rizwan I am not in charge of the mobile apps for now, but you can reach out to @zeitschlag and @marcus to see where they need help.
iirc their main focus at the moment is getting out of CoreData for many things, as the way it is used causes performance and stability issues.
@renchap There is also another possibe way we non-programmers can help: Spread the word! i'm going to be posting the call for help on our PCLinuxOS forum. Have a beautiful day and be happy! :)
@gh0sti The blocked server users will not be notified, but the local users (on the server who initiated the block) will be. We do not think this is an issue, and will improve users’ view of their moderator & admin actions.
@renchap Who will decide whether an account is relevant enough to end up in a list of recommendations? I mean, isn’t that what proprietary apps do? I thought that one of the main interesting features of Mastodon was that users can decide themselves, by reading posts, if accounts are worth following regarding their interests. But maybe I missed the point. I probably did. 😕
@Poulpette This will be done automatically, based on various criterias, for example who you recently interacted with, or account followed by your follows.
There is a big onboarding issue where new users struggle to find accounts to follow, and as we do not push content from accounts you do not follow into your feeds, helping users to gather their first 10-30 follows is important if we want users to stay.
@renchap I see. Thanks for your answer. Couldn’t this feature be optional, then? So that newcomers (or even old users) could use it if it suits them, but those who wouldn’t want that could avoid using it?
Improve account recommendations, to help users find relevant accounts to follow
=> ça serait sympa de pouvoir ignorer avec un simple bouton certains comptes recommandés qui ne nous intéressent finalement pas pour pouvoir en afficher d'autres
@renchap Thank you for all of your hard work and dedication. I still feel like a newbie here but learning more all the time. Looking forward to so many great new features!
FWIW, I don't miss quote posts at all. Breaks the thread and always seemed self important. I love reading through a long discussion thread on Mastadon. My two cents...
Add comment