Fedibook week 8

Yet another great Fedibook week!

This week has been all about federation — making Fedibook instances talk to each other more reliably — and polishing small but annoying rough edges. I never got the time to establish the improved dev and test environment I was planning for. It will come.

Thank you again to everyone who is jumping onboard the project and contributes by just testing it out, and to all of you who are giving feedback and good ideas — it is what you are doing, and the fact that you are giving feedback, that makes me believe this could actually become something very useful.

Oh, and did I mention — 81 users are now onboard, using a good handful of groups with real-life topics ranging from local communities to dogs. Wonderful!

This week

Group federation between Fedibook instances

This needs to work for Fedibook to become a real Fediverse platform with many instances feeling like one. And there is some learning here. I'm not sure everything is in place, but some improvements have been made. Posting, liking, and commenting between instances should work. Next up is the federated admin role — being able to promote users on a remote instance to become admin for a group hosted on another server. Some groundwork has been laid but it is not final.

Groups and Mastodon

I would like it to be possible to be a member of a Fediverse group from other Fediverse platforms — my testing is done on Mastodon. There are many complications here as the group concept is very strictly formulated, so different platforms work differently. As of now it seems that Mastodon members in a group can read posts, read comments, and post themselves. But comments on a post from Mastodon are not working. For the time being I have decided to live with a limited feature set and user experience on Mastodon. Groups are really not a native concept there, and delivering a "native group experience" on Mastodon I think must wait for Mastodon to introduce this.

Links to posts and comments

There is now a direct share link to posts and comments so you can point your friends directly to an interesting place.

Notification that works!

Notifications now bring you to the topic they notify about. For likes on a post it brings up the post with a Fedibook purple frame, and for comments it brings up the comment. There seems to be a slight offset issue on small screens, so scroll a little if you don't see the purple frame. To be improved some day.

Pretty link to group

In the top right corner of the group profile there is now a share link with a pretty URL. The URL used in the application is still using UUID, so find the pretty link in the button.

Roadmap

I have started work on establishing a roadmap. It is a constant work in progress, but version 1 is here for you to read and react to. The breakdown into features is nowhere near done, but the overall concept for the current release — now called "Discovery" — and the next one, called "Delivery", is drawn up. Go check it out at https://about.fedibook.net/roadmap-1/

Bugs

Remote group profiles

Icon and banner are now syncing on remote profiles.

Remote group member list

Is now dynamically updated using an API call when viewing the list.

Double post in remote groups fixed

Bluesky posts no longer get cut off

Posts bridged from Bluesky via Bridgy Fed were showing truncated link card titles — for example "Moscow Targeted by Drones Befo..." — now fixed. It still seems that some "Bluesky via Bridgy Fed" formatting is off. It appears they are using links to e.g. YouTube that have no https:// in front. Will look at this some day.

System Groups tab hidden from regular users

The System Groups tab in the groups list was visible to all users. It is now only shown to admins.

Comment input field no longer grows unexpectedly

The comment text area would sometimes open already sized to match the length of a previous comment. The auto-resize logic now correctly resets the height whenever the field is cleared or a new comment thread is opened.