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

Here is an excellent explanation of QOTO's remote local timeline feature.
QT: https://qoto.org/@freemo/105107254312720634

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

After a week of working on re architecting the QOTO servers I'm mostly there. I had to write a whole new load-balancer from the ground up. The old one didnt work with docker-swarm.

The load balancer is now automated like before AND distributed. So basically I never need to worry about obtaining or configuring ssl certs or even fussing with nginx configuration. When i bring a new service up into the swarm I simply add some labels to the service and the load balancer I wrote will automatically detect it and rewrite its own nginx configuration, obtain new certs (or renew existing ones) and automatically route itself to the new service.

This was the bulk of the work, I put the source code up for it (its three containers) here for anyone who might want to steal it, I'll be documenting it and cleaning it up tomorrow:

https://git.qoto.org/modjular/swarm-proxy

I also automated the process of bringing up new nodes in the swarm so I wrote a whole bunch of scripts for that in a separate repo (I'll share that tomorrow). So at this point its just a matter of actually bringing the services up in the new framework. So far I've tested it with two services and works great.

So starting tomorrow I can start migrating QOTO services to the new framework hopefully. Its amazing how easy this is going to make my life.

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