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