QOTO Announcements & Polls @QOTO@qoto.org

# QOTO New Features Guide

Since we have so many new significant features deployed as of last night I wanted to take a minute and give a brief explanation of the features and how to use them, as well as how we expect them to evolve over the next few weeks as I continue to work on them.

The following is a brief summary of most of the new features added:

* **Groups Rendering** - Accounts which represent groups (such as those from Guppe) are now tagged with a group badge and are specially rendered so the messages relayed by a group appear to be originating from the user.

* **Group Directory** - Groups are federated in the group directory which, like the federated timeline, will list all groups followed by anyone on our server.

* **Markdown Posts** - You now have the option to select markdown formatting when posting.

* **Circles** - You can now create circles with followers in it. When you make a post you can select one or more circles to privately post to and only users of those circles can see your post.

* **Colored follow button** - The follow button seen in the feed and in profiles (the one that can be optionally turned off in settings) will now be colored to indicate follower status. Gray if not followed, yellow if followed, blue if following, green if mutual follow

* **Read/unread notifications** - Unread notifications now have a subtle blue indicator. There is also a "mark all as red" button added.

* **User Post Notification** - Users now have a bell next to their name where the follow button is. This will send you a notification every time they makes a new post.

* **Rich-text rendering** - We now render rich-text from other servers, so servers which post in a formatting that includes things like bolding, quotes, headers, italics, underlines, etc, will render in the statuses.

* **Rich-text Stripping** - The user option to partially or fully turn off the rendering of rich-text.

* **Registration Captcha** - A captcha is now required to signup for a new account, reducing spam.

* **Local-only toot default** - You can now optionally set all toots to be local-only and prevent all your posts from federating outside of the local server. Without this setting you can still select local-only on a per-toot basis.

* **Quote feature turn-off** - As introduced earlier you can quote a toot rather than just reboost it. This is an additional button on every toot. This can now be turned off in your settings and removes the button.

* **Bookmark feature turn-off** - As with the quote feature we could previously bookmark posts. You can now turn off the bookmark button.

* **Follow button turn-off** - As mentioned earlier our added feature allowing you to add a follow button, optionally colored, into the feed can now be turned off.

* **Subscribe button turn-off** - As before the subscribe feature that lets you watch a users public toots without following them can now be optionally turned off.

* **Favorite Domains** - Our last release allowed us to add remote timeline as a feature where you could pull up the local timeline of a remote instance as its own column. Now you can also add domains to a favorite domain list which makes it easier to access and bring up the timelines by listing them directly in the navigation panel.

* **Favorite Tags** - Similar to favorite domains this allows you to create a list of your favorite tags and have them easily accessible in the navigation panel.

## Notes

### Markdown

The engine used to render the markdown is called Kramdown. It supports standard markdown, of course, but it also supports some special formatting. You can view some of its formatting rules here: https://kramdown.gettalong.org/syntax.html

Keep in mind that while many other fediverse serves will view the rich text not all servers can or will and the formatting will be converted into html in a best-effort to remain compatible. For examples vanilla Mastodon instances reject all special formatting, but links from markdown should still be correctly rendered, but bold and other formatting will be filtered out on Mastodon. Pleorma and other software which allows rich-text should properly render the markdown.

### Groups

Right now all of the support on QOTO around groups is centered around the group directories and rendering groups. You can not create a group on the QOTO server itself, but you can follow and share to groups and have a better experience. As it stands right now groups on the diverse are unmoderated and open. Anyone can join a group and participate, gup.pe which are open groups. The directory basically lists any groups known to the QOTO server, so if anyone follows a group on the server that group will show in the group directory.

With that said we will be releasing shortly a specially coded QOTO group server. It will behave similar to the way Gup.pe behaves in the sense that group is still an account that relays posts to that group by mentioning the group account. However it will allow for managed groups where the group is owned by an individual and thus a person can block people from the group. That should be up very shortly so keep an eye out for that announcement. It should allow QOTO to participate in moderated groups as is.

#QOTO #Fediverse #Mastodon #Mastoadmin

Forgot to mention we also added read notifications to the notifications stream. **Unread notifications** have a blue marker next to them indicating they are unread and there is a check mark at the top of the column one can click to mark all notifications as read.

## New Version of QOTO Released

The latest version of QOTO is now live on our server. There are a few minor bugs noticed when we deployed it that will be worked on over the next day, but otherwise everything should be up.

Here is a quick breakdown of some of the new features:

* **Groups** support for federated groups. QOTO will display a group batch on group accounts and properly render the relayed messaged. We also added a group directory showing any groups any of our users follow. We will be bringing up a seperate server soon as well dedicated to groups and allow for user moderated groups as well.

* **Markdown** support for toots.

* **Circles** allows you to add people to a circle and then when you make a post you can share specifically to one or more circles and only they can see your posts.

* **Captcha** Required when registering a new account, should help us eliminate some bots.

* **Rich-text** rendering. Rich text from servers that provide formatted messages will now be rendered with the formatting (bold, underline, coloring, etc).

* **Rich-text filtering** a new setting introduced to allow users to partially or fully suppress rich-text formatting.

* **Colored follow button** The follow button can now optionally be colored from the settings to provide additional information (gray if not followed, yellow if followed, blue if following, green if mutual follow)

**NOTE**: This was a pretty big change, so there will likely be a few bugs we flush out over the next few days. Everything seems to be working for the most part but there is one bug in streaming we identified after release. The consequence seems to be that when you make a post you wont see your own post in the local timeline until you refresh the page. It appears the streaming of other peoples posts is still working. I'll be looking into the bugs and fixing them over the next day. If anyone runs into any bugs or issues please let @freemo know and he will address it right away.

#QOTO #Mastodon #Mastoadmin #Fediverse

Attention!

#QOTO servers will be upgrading shortly with all new features. There may be some short down time. Stay tuned!

New feature here at QOTO! We now offer free and automatic SSL certs for any websites you host at QOTO.

Aside from being free, opensource, and no data collection to host your site with us, we now offer free SSL certs too. Just use our gitlab instance to publish your website on our servers by simply marking a tick box when you set it up you can request an SSL certificate that will be automatically obtained and renewed via lets encrypt. You also have the option of using your own SSL certificate or no certificate at all when hosting from our site.

If you dont want to bring your own domain name we also provide you a free subdomain on *.qoto.io that will also be https under our own SSL certificate.

To get started just open an account on our gitLab instance:

https://git.qoto.org

For more info on this feature check out:

https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/user/project/pages/custom_domains_ssl_tls_certification/lets_encrypt_integration.html

For information on using gitlab to host pages in general then check out this lengthier resource:

https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/user/project/pages/

As always if you have any questions reach out to one of our moderators such as @freemo

#hosting #qoto #gitlab #git

The QOTO Funkwhale service is back up, new hardware and more space. Open up an account if you dont already have one (and hit me up to get access to some high-quality libraries).

https://audio.qoto.org

#QOTO #Funkwhale #mastoadmin

The QOTO PeerTube service is now back up and running again on newer and bigger hardware, check us out.

https://video.qoto.org

#QOTO #PeerTube #mastoadmin

The QOTO discourse server is now back up and running at its usual address, but with all new, bigger, and better, hardware.

https://discourse.qoto.org

#QOTO #Discourse #mastoadmin

Great news, the QOTO services are starting to come back up on the new hardware/infrastructure.

So far our NextCloud instance ( https://cloud.qoto.org ) and our Gitlab instance ( https://git.qoto.org ) are both back up. Keep in mind things might go down in the next day or two as I continue to work on the infrastructure but backups are happening often so no worries.

I will continue to bring up the other services in the next day or so.

#QOTO #Mastoadmin #NextCloud #Git #GitLab

Our #QOTO secondary services (not the social media part im posting on here) will be going down temporarily as we move to a new infrastructure. As each service comes back up the community will be notified from this account.

Thanks for your patience, this is a big move for us but everything has been backed up and will be back shortly.

Our NextCloud instance located at https://cloud.qoto.org has just been upgraded to version 20.x

Enjoy!

#QOTO #NextCloud

Just a little update on what is going on at #QOTO.

Our Administrator @freemo has been working hard for about a week to completely recode our server architecture and eventually move over existing services to the new format.

As some of you know we use enterprise level infrastructure. currently that means we use Docker containers in a cluster formation with redundant endpoints.

However, the current way this is done is as individually managed docker containers using some nifty container layer automation to automatically renew and obtain certificates as well as scale. However by doing it as individual containers makes administering the system more difficult and can lead to bugs in the infrastructure (though thankfully we haven't run into those). As such we are moving over to using docker-swarm to maintain the cluster which will automatically handle replication and restarting containers should they fail.

This will mean quicker turnaround when updating services, little to no down time due to redundancy, and faster response time due to multiple load balancers across different regions.

While there may be some short downtime once we finally move the services over long term this should be better for everyone. We will keep everyone updated as this progresses.

In the meantime @freemo will be open-sourcing the scripts he wrote to bring everything online and manage the system. If any developers are interested in getting a copy for their own purposes please feel free to reach out to him.

#opensource #OSS #FOSS #FLOSS #AWS #Amazon #Mastoadmin #QOTO

Thanks to this post QOTO is currently being linked from HackerNews in the #1 spot. Our instance is getting a lot of exposure as is this very important issue.

I am proud to announce that @Sphinx is now officially the latest new member of the #QOTO moderation team.

Everyone please extend a warm welcome to sphinx, we are very happy to have him on the team!

#mastoadmin #fediadmin #fediverse

As of today the delete account feature has been re-enabled on #QOTO. You no longer need to email a moderator to have your account deleted.

As some of you know we had previously removed this account because many users complained when they could not recover their account later. Since this feature provides ample warning we feel that mistake is on the user and ultimately this is overall a good decision.

Please be careful when using this feature and be aware of the consequences.

We would like to announce Moderator nominations for June 2020!

We will be selecting a new moderator to join our team this month and we encourage all QOTO users to voice their nominations and votes.

The moderator team has collectively chosen to nominate @Sphinx for the position but as always the moderation process is an open one and any user can nominate themselves or another for the position.

We welcome users to visit the discourse forum and either lend their support to a nominated user, nominate your own, or offer criticism to an existing nomination. These are decisions that effect all of us so now is the time for your voice to be heard.

https://discourse.qoto.org/t/nomination-for-moderator-june-2020/272

#QOTO #mastoadmin #fediverse #moderation

Important QOTO announcement!

We are currently debating language rule changes in our Discourse forum. The current direction is that we may eforce in the next day a english-only rule for the server (though likely we will make an exception for accounts that are already established on the server that dont speak english). We havent made the decision final yet but we will be in the next day.

Please, if this topic is important to you please contribute to the conversation on our Discourse forum. So far no one has objected but if anyone does we would like to hear from you..

https://discourse.qoto.org/t/final-proposal-restricting-posts-on-qoto-to-english-only/226

#QOTO

QOTO has now moved to closed-registrations. Users are free to invite friends to the server whom will be given priority. All future users will be screened for acceptance.

#QOTO