Notices by Renaud Chaput (renchap@oisaur.com)

I would encourage every Fediverse software project to implement a “dead-man switch" on registrations: if nobody with moderator permissions has been active in the last week, then disable new account creation.

The Fediverse has a significant number of abandoned instances that are used by bad actors to create accounts and send spam.

We implemented this in Mastodon (https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/pull/29318) and it has been highly effective.

@aral @goetz Mastodon supports the SWF foundation. They call us partners because of this support at launch I guess. I have no idea what relationship they have with Meta. And there is no relationship between Mastodon and Meta.
Similarly, Meta is a W3C member, Mastodon participates to some W3C meetings about ActivityPub.

@aral @TomWellborn Mastodon did not partner with anyone. We support the SWF because we feel this is really needed for the Fediverse to move forward. Meta might think the same, but there is no such partnership (or any other kind of relationship)

@goetz @aral @TomWellborn Yes, we are a partner / member / supporter / … of the SocialWebFoundation, as I said above, because we think such an organisation is needed for the Fediverse to grow. We are not involved in the Foundation creation, or it's management, neither we have partnered with Meta about anything.

If you deploy nightly Mastodon releases or directly from the main branch, you may want to check https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/pull/30203

We merged a migration yesterday and it is far too expensive to run on large servers, so we are rolling it back. If you already applied it, please check the link above to revert it before upgrading.

It is probably best to skip today's nightly build, if you did not deploy it yet.

#mastoadmin

@silverpill @julian @pfefferle@mastodon.social @pfefferle@community.nodebb.org @nutomic I am not very knowledgable about ActivityPub so I cant discuss the specifics, but we would like to improve how non-Note objects are processed/displayed in Mastodon.
If there are discussions about this, or a WG working on the topic, please send me the links so I can reference them for us to read when we start working on this :)

One of the ideas would be to support an embedded "view more" modal, that somehow displays the remote content.

I said it several times, but with Ivory's latest announcement, let me repeat it: we (the Mastodon team) are working on implementing Quote Posts. This is a much more complex feature than showing a preview for a link to a post, which is done at the moment by multiple clients.

It is a complex task and we have been working on defining the feature and the protocol-level details for some time. We are moving forward, and there are fewer hard questions to answers, but progress is there.

@silverpill It defines Object Links, which might be useful to represent Quote Posts, but are not Quote posts. Our proposal will probably be based on it (and suggest some changes to it due to possible issues).
We know Threads implemented support this way, we are in touch with Christopher. It is a temporary implementation on their side using what is currently done by some implementations.

@rolle @kevinjardine

@rolle @kevinjardine we are working on Quote Posts right now. First step is trying to figure out the exact behavior we want for them (this raises an interesting number of questions) and then how to represent them in ActivityPub (which nobody really did formally).
But remember that we have 1.5 developer on the Mastodon software, who need to also work on many other things, like bugfixes or security issues.
But we are making progress, slowly.

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.

Here are the main items ⤵️

#mastodev

- 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

- 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)

- Improve (or re-do) the Emoji picker

- Support system setting for light/dark mode

- (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

Note that this is not exhaustive, and may change!

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…).

@dimillian @Gargron @smurthys We are working on it (but this is not done by @Gargron).
As stated multiple times, this is not only about rendering status links as quotes, but need proper implementation in ActivityPub (which is not speced yet), quote notifications, thus also controlling who can quote you.
We hope to publish FEPs covering those in the coming weeks, and implement it in H1 2024

New feature in Mastodon 4.2 that I am very happy about: non-dismissable and very red notices for server admins when there is a new security update available.

We also sent emails to admin. This is all done locally by your instance, it (anonymously) fetches the available updates from the central api.joinmastodon.org every 30 minutes.

#mastodev #mastoadmin

@thisismissem @hrefna @Gargron no partitioning, but there is support for a read replica. Adding partitioning would be a huge task.

Full text search has been merged in #Mastodon `main` branch, and will be in the next (and final?) 4.2.0 beta 🎉

It is opt-in, so it will take some time to be filled with people content as they enable their profile to be indexed, but this was one of the most wanted Mastodon features for some time.

We plan to deploy it to mastodon.social and mastodon.online in the coming days to have a bit more feedback on it and see how it behaves in the wild.