I just released v3.2.9 of Ktistec!

You can now customize the secondary menu on your home page. This is the menu that links to your posts, drafts, notifications, etc. Posts, drafts, and notifications are fixed, but you can change the final three—they default to bookmarks, followers, and following. Edit the links on your Settings page in the section titled Pinned Collections. I typically replace the defaults with hashtags I'm following and threads I'm actively participating in.

I am slowly adding functionality to support Mastodon API compatible clients. In line with that effort, OAuth access tokens are now associated with sessions, which makes it possible for clients that authenticate via OAuth (instead of username/password) to access all of the existing API.

I use this extensively when building scripts to automate my Ktistec instance. A script can authenticate and cache the access token in a secure keystore. Since access tokens have a limited lifespan and can be individually invalidated, a compromised access token does not force me to change my password!

Here's the full list of changes:

Added

• Support for customizing the secondary menu with pinned collections.

Fixed

• Thread rendering no longer fails when drafts are present.

Changed

• Content warnings are now preserved when replying to posts. (fixes #136)
• OAuth access tokens are now associated with sessions.
• Attachments are deleted when draft objects are destroyed.
• Actor icons and images are deleted when replaced or unset.

A recent poll prioritized emoji reactions and quote posts. I see dozens of quote posts every day, so that's where I plan to focus next.

#ktistec #crystallang #activitypub #fediverse

I didn't think I'd ever pull it off 😀, but the new editor framework is complete and with it support for creating polls. One nice extra—you can now choose which content editor to use (rich text or Markdown) on a per-post basis without updating your settings.

The full set of changes in this release:

Added

• Front-end support for creating polls.
• Editor selection support for content, polls, and optional metadata (name, summary, etc.).
• Poll expiry notifications for poll authors.

Fixed

• Poll closed_at handling for drafts and remote polls.

I'll try not to be quite as ambitious for the next release! 😅

#ktistec #crystallang #activitypub #fediverse

I’m wondering if there are any common or standard approaches to modeling RSS feeds as ActivityPub objects?

I’m thinking of an RSSFeed actor and RSSPost or something for the items but I’d love to follow established patterns.

Friendica supports RSS feeds. Maybe that’s a good place to start?

#ActivityPub

The two big features in release v3.2.7 of Ktistec are back end support for creating polls (the front end is coming in the next release) and advanced theming support—specifically, a rich vocabulary of CSS class values and data attributes on which to build a theme. The full set is documented in the README. I'll post more on how I'm using these later this week.

Here is the full set of notable changes:

Added

• Back-end support for creating polls.
• Advanced theming support with new classes, data attributes, and view helpers.
• Task status display on admin page showing running and imminently scheduled task counts.

Fixed

• Poll vote form now correctly submits Question ID.

Changed

• Move location of Ktistec version notice. (fixes #133)
• Updated admin page for better accessibility and less clutter.

#ktistec #crystallang #activitypub #fediverse

sometimes i wish #activitypub and servers/clients supported both Like and Love activities, for when liking something  isn't strong enough...!

I took a detour and worked on alt text editing in release v3.2.6 rather than continuing with the polls backend. I also continued to fix bugs and to add polish. Here's the full set of changes:

Added

• Support for editing alt text in the Trix editor. (fixes #52)

Fixed

• Render fallback icon when actor is down.
• Remove blank figcaption elements.
• Emojify display names in notifications.

Changed

• Color notifications label by type of unread notifications.
• Render lines instead of points for server starts in metrics.

(I'm editing this post in Markdown—the new feature in the last release!)

#ktistec #crystallang #activitypub #fediverse

I rolled out a lot of features over the last several weeks and created a lot of bugs in the process. Release v3.2.5 of Ktistec is mostly about fixing those bugs. I did implement two requested features, however: support for editing posts in Markdown and support for Open Graph metadata. Here's the full list of new features:

Added

• Support for editing posts in Markdown. (fixes #25)
• Support for Open Graph metadata on actors and objects. (fixes #71)
• Support for uploading a site image.
• Internal table of contents page.
• Poll expiry notifications.

🎄 I'm working on support for poll creation and management now. It's also time for a performance improvement pass or two.

#ktistec #crystallang #activitypub #fediverse

I wonder if you could use/abuse Mastodon polls (FEP-9967) to distribute posts that provide near-real-time status updates (I'm thinking about severe weather alerts but I'm sure there are other use cases)?

Create a poll with an expiry far in the future and a token set of options (ideally just one—"Do you opt in?"—but poll implementations seem to require at least two).

Nothing seems to prevent the content of a poll from changing—and this is the key insight. The FEP says, "The type of a poll (single choice / multiple choices) and its options might be changed at any time. In that case the author of the poll MUST reset the vote counts." So broadcast updates via the content.

It would be a lightweight way to follow a single item without following the actor, built on top of implementations that already exist. 

#ActivityPub #Fep9967

The big feature in release v3.2.4 of Ktistec is support for viewing and voting on Mastodon polls (AKA FEP-9967: Polls). This feature took a surprising amount of work. Some of the effort was due to my struggles with visual design, but getting the behavior right was also tricky. For example, a "vote" is just an ActivityPub Note, but unlike other notes, it shouldn't appear in a poll's replies (it could, but that would be redundant and confusing). So I had to add exceptions throughout the code to deal with this. A custom Vote object type would have been nice in the original implementation.

Added

• Support for viewing and voting on polls. (fixes #49)
• Added tooltip to notifications menu item summarizing new notifications.

Fixed

• Improved wrapping of actor panel follow/refresh information. (fixes #130)
• Autocomplete now works correctly when adjacent to a Trix attachment.
• Image title attributes are now preserved.

Changed

• Moved avatars to the bottom of the object detail view.

Thank you @jayvii for the build fix!

#ktistec #crystallang #activitypub #fediverse