The Feditext iOS client for Mastodon, GotoSocial, Firefish, etc. now has its own account on fedi.software! Please follow us here for official Feditext updates and announcements.
GoToSocial provides a lightweight, customizable, and safety-focused entryway into the #fediverse, you can keep in touch with your friends, post, read, and share images and articles.
Consider #GoToSocial instead of Pixelfed if you'd like a safety-focused alternative with text-only post support that is maintained by a stellar developer community!
As usual, please read the migration notes carefully when upgrading to this version.
Thanks! Enjoy!
Highlights of this release:
Create, view, and vote in polls. It's been a while in the making but GoToSocial now has support for polls, aka Question activity types. You can create, view, and vote in polls using your client of choice.
Show unsupported media placeholders in incoming posts, where media could not be downloaded (temporarily or otherwise). No more dropped media on posts! You'll instead now get a link to the media on the originating instance, that you can click through in your (mobile) browser.
Mute threads that you're being overwhelmed by. Notifications for replies, likes, and boosts in that thread will no longer be generated.
Media cleanup scheduling. Previously media scheduling took place every night at 12am. With the new media scheduling settings in the config, you can customize the schedule to run it at different times and frequencies. https://docs.gotosocial.org/en/latest/admin/media_caching/#cleanup
Support for language tags on posts. Language of posts is now correctly federated in and out of your instance. The language of posts is also shown on the web view of statuses and threads.
Gather and expose prometheus format metrics. You can now expose a /metrics endpoint to allow a Prometheus instance to scrape metrics about Go runtime memory usage, http request and database metrics, and more. https://docs.gotosocial.org/en/latest/advanced/metrics/
We're well on the way to #GoToSocial 0.14.0 release candidate 1!
Based on the sheer amount of fixes and improvements included, 0.14.0 will probably be the biggest release we've done so far :gtspat:
It will also (probably, unless something goes wrong) be the first GoToSocial release to include support for the Move activity, which will let you migrate an existing account to or from a GoToSocial instance, while keeping your followers and following relationships intact :) We waited a long time to write this functionality because we wanted to make sure GoToSocial was in a decent state before people start migrating accounts to it.
So, very exciting! If all goes well, expect more news on the first release candidate in a couple weeks (we're still fixing some bugs, as always).
0.13.1 Spiderier Sloth fixes a couple small issues with poll vote counts and poll expiry, and an issue where domain blocks were sometimes not being properly enforced when deeper- and higher-level domain blocks were used in combination (eg., when combining blocks for say example.org, bad.example.org, also-bad.example.org).
There are no database migrations or config file changes on this one, so upgrading from 0.13.0 should be very simple :)
Now that #GoToSocial 0.13.0 is out, we are preparing to take a break :)
If you've been following us for a while, you'll know that every year over the holidays we like to make our github repository and matrix channels read only for a while. This lets us step back from support work for a few weeks, and focus on things other than GoToSocial (seeing friends and family, playing video games, reading, cuddling our pets), in order to recharge our mental and emotional batteries and come into the new year feeling fresh and excited again.
This year, we'll take our holiday from (and including) the 19th of December, up to (and including) the 2nd of January. During this time:
the three GtS matrix channels will be read only
the github repo will be read only for non-members of the org (though you may still see us pushing commits and whatnot)
we will be less active on this account
So, if you spot any issues with v0.13.0, please file them before the 19th, or save them until after the 2nd.
The proper release of #GoToSocialv0.15.0 Shagadelic Sloth has emerged blinking into the sun, fresh from the release candidate process :) One of our funkiest releases ever, since it contains some beautiful new themes you can try out (see screenshots).
What happened to the first release candidate, you say? Well, it didn't work properly 🤦 But this one does.
If you're the type of badass admin who uses release candidates, please give it a shot :) If you find any bugs particular to this release candidate, let us know on our issues page so we can fix them before 0.14.0 proper.
As always, please read the migration notes carefully!
Highlights of this release (candidate):
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 to be enabled in a visitor's web browser, 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.
#GoToSocial 0.13.0 Spider Sloth is coming along well. We've got a few little bugs to fix before making a first release candidate, and then we can let our little spidery child out into the world. It's quite an exciting release, so we'd like to get as many nuts and bolts tightened as possible so that it goes smoothly.
In particular, we've found a cheeky little bug in our png decoding, which sometimes causes pngs to fail to be downloaded from remote instances. We'll spend a bit more time poking and prodding this one, because it actually gets around the media placeholder logic we added.
The alpha version of @gotosocial now has support for allowlists.
Allowlists automatically prevent federation with all other servers, except those that the admin has added to their allowlist. (Traditional blocklists work the other way round, allowing all federation unless a server is blocked.)
Allowlists bring more safety but also reduce reach, and that's why it's up to each admin to decide whether to use them.
We fixed an issue where remote accounts that were suspended via targeted suspensions in the admin API could be later marked as unsuspended. This means that the suspended account had all their relationships / media / statuses etc deleted, as normal, but these might end up being repopulated later on if you interacted with the account again.
If you suspended any remote accounts from your instance via a targeted suspension in the admin settings panel, since 0.12.0, you may need to suspend these accounts again after updating to this release.
Note: This issue only affects remote accounts that were suspended in that particular way (targeted via the admin API). Domain blocks (and accounts suspended as part of a domain block) are not affected by the bug, nor are local accounts suspended via the admin API.
As always, please read the migration notes carefully when updating. If you find any bugs in the release candidate, kindly let us know on Github!
Release highlights below the line.
Create, view, and vote in polls. It's been a while in the making but GoToSocial now has support for polls, aka Question activity types. You can create, view, and vote in polls using your client of choice.
Show unsupported media placeholders in incoming posts, where media could not be downloaded (temporarily or otherwise). No more dropped media on posts! You'll instead now get a link to the media on the originating instance, that you can click through in your (mobile) browser.
Mute threads that you're being overwhelmed by. Notifications for replies, likes, and boosts in that thread will no longer be generated.
Media cleanup scheduling. Previously media scheduling took place every night at 12am. With the new media scheduling settings in the config, you can customize the schedule to run it at different times and frequencies. https://docs.gotosocial.org/en/latest/admin/media_caching/#cleanup
Support for language tags on posts. Language of posts is now correctly federated in and out of your instance. The language of posts is also shown on the web view of statuses and threads.
Gather and expose prometheus format metrics. You can now expose a /metrics endpoint to allow a Prometheus instance to scrape metrics about Go runtime memory usage, http request and database metrics, and more. https://docs.gotosocial.org/en/latest/advanced/metrics/
The other day I was messing around with the lightweight alternative to Mastodon called #GoToSocial (currently in Alpha).
Anyway I registered a silly little domain name (https://bits.lag.tf) and have now been running it for a while in production on a tiny Alpine #Linux container on my home server.
I thought I'd put it out there if anyone is interested in a test account DM me your email and desired username or fill out this form and I'll set you up.
we're trying to narrow down a (bizarre, kind of funny) #GoToSocial bug where a boosted status can appear in timelines to be authored by the person who boosted it -- so essentially boosting a status can sometimes "steal" that status
it's a bugger to reproduce, so if you see it, and you have any useful info to share about it (either in logs, or in the Network tab of your browser when looking at the status in a client) please do share