Fedibook week 9

Yet another week of Fedibook discovery. The main focus this week has been getting federation between Fedibook servers working properly. For Fedibook to be a true alternative to Big Social — with a community of Fedibook servers — the experience has to be transparent for users across servers.

Group admin features federated

Big update: it is now possible for a remote user (one on a server that does not host the group) to be a group admin.

Invites to groups are now admin-only

Regular group members can no longer invite new users. Instead, share the group link with your friends and have them request access. More granular settings for who can do what in a group are coming in the future — but not for now.

Original group creator cannot be demoted

Additional admins cannot demote the original group creator. If the original creator wants to step down, there is now a button for that.

Mark notifications as read

Notifications in the notification modal are now marked as read when you click them.

Input field resize fixed

When leaving a feed input in a group to look at the members tab and then coming back, the input field size was reset to default — making a long post appear in a very small field. Fixed.

Delete account

There is now a new page in the profile menu: User Settings. The first feature here is account deletion. Import/export is up next.

Image tab on profile

Your profile now has a tab showing all your uploaded images. Use it to do housekeeping. I'm planning to add a disk quota display here as well.

New development and testing environment

I finally got around to setting up a proper multi-server dev environment — and I wish I had done it sooner. Spinning up a new Fedibook instance is really fast and simple. I now work across three servers: one as the primary development server and two more dedicated to proper federation testing. Very helpful.

Federated posts, comments, and likes

With the new dev environment it was much easier to get the complete federated feature set working — writing posts, commenting, and liking across multiple servers. It should all be working now, but please test and give feedback. The combinations to test are endless.

Federation for groups

For groups, beyond posts/comments/likes, member joins and member lists also need to be federated between servers — not to mention being able to promote both local and remote users to group admin. This is genuinely the hardest part of Fedibook right now. There is no ActivityPub standard for this, so it has taken quite a bit of experimentation. The current approach uses both pushed updates to known members and an on-demand pull mechanism for a group to refresh its member and admin list. Signed requests throughout, of course.

Fedibook Network — Federated Group Discovery

This is a major new feature. For the Fedibook network to feel like one connected whole, the list of groups needs to be available on any server. To enable this without a central group catalog, I have built the Fedibook Network. When two servers become aware of each other — through a shared friend or group membership — they exchange their lists of known servers and groups.

This list is refreshed every 24 hours, and can also be force-updated via the "Fedibook Network" page. Whether this approach provides the right level of sync will need to be validated in real-world testing.