2024.9.1

new “following” view, inspired by Cohost’s “following feed”

when following links to external sites, users are asked for confirmation (users and admins can set lists of destination domains that won’t trigger the confirmation dialog, or disable it completely)

users can turn off cat-speak for all notes they see

avatar decorations can be placed behind the avatar picture (so it can have a tail)

users can now make in-app notifications clickable in settings

capitalized emoji aliases are now properly found in the emoji picker

remote polls’ vote counts can be manually refreshed

on the user profile page, we show if they’re blocked, muted, followed, &c

user profiles show their latest notes by default, not their pinned notes

users can see their pending outgoing follow requests

note attachments are navigable via keyboard

users have a “default files as NSFW” setting, separate from “always mark files as NSFW” (the new one is fully under user control, the other one can be forced by admins)

rejecting a new user’s sign-up application frees that username for future users

admin have more control over the maximum text size for notes: they can limit main text, cw, and alt text, separately for local and remote notes

moderators can delete all files from a remote instance

local “system accounts” are protected from accidental deletion

information about remote instances includes following/followers relations, and actions that break federation will show how many relations will be severed

when an instance is blocked or silenced because it’s on a sub-domain of a blocked / silenced domain, admins get a clear message about it, and the buttons to un-block / un-silence are disabled instead of just useless

reports from an instance can be automatically rejected

abuse reports are rendered better in small viewports like phones

abuse reports federate correctly with Akkoma & Pleroma

welcome page and sidebar can have their own image, instead of sharing the instance icon, so an instance can have a big fancy logo without having to fork Sharkey

if the instance’s donation link goes to Open Collective, supporters will be shown in the “about” page

Highlights of changes from Misskey:

dedicated view for notes and timelines to embed on websites

allow-list federation

users can set a message to be sent when accepting a follow request

the list of blocked and silenced instances is now inside the “moderation” section of the admin control panel

Possible surprises:

the client setting “other → experimental features → enable condensed line for acct” finally has an effect: it compresses usernames horizontally instead of truncating them; that setting has been there for several releases, but had next to no effect, so some users may have enabled it and forgot about it

Special upgrade notes

When upgrading an existing instance to version 2024.9.1, the Following Feed will initially be empty. The feed will gradually fill as new posts federate, but it may be desirable to back-fill the feed with existing data. This database script will populate the feed with the latest post of each type for all users, ensuring that data is fully populated after the update. Run this after migrations but before starting the instance. Warning: the script may take a long time to execute!

INSERT INTO latest_note (user_id, note_id, is_public, is_reply, is_quote)
SELECT
    "userId" as user_id,
    id as note_id,
    visibility = 'public' AS is_public,
    "replyId" IS NOT NULL AS is_reply,
    (
        "renoteId" IS NOT NULL
            AND (
            text IS NOT NULL
                OR cw IS NOT NULL
                OR "replyId" IS NOT NULL
                OR "hasPoll"
                OR "fileIds" != '{}'
            )
        ) AS is_quote
FROM note
WHERE ( -- Exclude pure renotes (boosts)
                "renoteId" IS NULL
                    OR text IS NOT NULL
                    OR cw IS NOT NULL
                    OR "replyId" IS NOT NULL
                    OR "hasPoll"
                    OR "fileIds" != '{}'
                )
ORDER BY id DESC -- This part is very important: it ensures that we only load the *latest* notes of each type. Do not remove it!
ON CONFLICT DO NOTHING; -- Any conflicts are guaranteed to be older notes that we can ignore.