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

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

Release v3.2.3 of Ktistec includes two big features:

• FEP-1b12 Group federation
  Improved federation with Lemmy and other forum-type servers. Ktistec supports community and thread follow/unfollow, as well as up-vote/like (down-vote/dislike is supported but there is no visual affordance for that yet).
• FEP-9098 Custom emojis
  Support for viewing custom emoji in posts and on actor profiles. Ktistec does not yet support custom emoji creation and management.

The full changelog:

Added

• Support for viewing custom emoji in posts and on actor profiles.
• Actor type (Person, Group, etc.) overlay badges on actor panels.
• Colored fallback avatars for actors without icons.
• Support for robots.txt.

Fixed

• Federation with Lemmy and other servers that support FEP-1b12.
  • Shared inbox support for local actors.
  • Serialization of Undo includes the undone activity.
  • Serialization of Like and Dislike does not.
• Notify only once for an object's first received activity.

Changed

• Accumulate metrics by hour for finer granularity.
• Clean up presentation of public followers/following pages.

The next release will include support for Mastodon polls (FEP-9967).

#ktistec #crystallang #activitypub #fediverse

The big feature in release v3.2.2 of Ktistec is pinned posts with support for the Mastodon Featured Posts collection. Federation works both ways—pin a post on Ktistec and it will show up as a pinned post on Mastodon and vice versa. When you refresh an actor profile, Ktistec also fetches and updates the actor's pinned posts. This is another small step in the direction of supporting all features that Mastodon-compatible client applications expect to access via the API. It's also useful in its own right.

The other major feature, which I posted a short video demonstrating here, is X-Ray Mode. X-Ray Mode is a developer and power-user tool for inspecting ActivityPub JSON-LD representations of actors, objects, and other content. Pressing Ctrl+Shift+X on any page displays the data behind the page—like an x-ray. You can:

• Cached Version: View the local JSON-LD representation stored in the Ktistec database
• Remote Version: Fetch and view the original JSON-LD representation from the source server
• Navigation: Click on any ActivityPub IRI to navigate to that object
• History: Use Alt+Left and Alt+Right to navigate through your viewing history

This feature is useful for debugging federation issues, understanding ActivityPub structures, and verifying how content is stored and represented.

Here's the full changelog for the release:

Added

• Support for pinned posts and the Mastodon "featured posts" collection.
• X-Ray Mode for viewing and navigating JSON-LD resource (actor, object, etc.) representations.
• Back links on thread pages for easier navigation. (fixes #1)
• License page for LibreJS compliance. (fixes #127)
• Highlighting of recently fetched hashtagged posts.

Changed

• Improved presentation of audio and video media.
• Refactored theming/styling implementation.

The next release will focus on smaller features and bug fixes.

Enjoy!

#ktistec #crystallang #activitypub #fediverse

I've streamlined theme development in Ktistec. The theming system uses a hierarchy of CSS custom properties and fallbacks. Theme authors can customize a theme at multiple levels:

Base Colors Only

Define only base colors like --text-primary, --bg-primary, --bg-input, --semantic-primary, etc. Derived colors will auto-generate using color-mix formulas. For example:

:root { --semantic-primary: #ffa500; }

From this one line, theme-appropriate colors like --bg-accent-code, --anchor-color, etc. auto-generate.

Base Colors Plus Derived Colors

Define base colors and derived colors. Derived colors use custom values when defined. Undefined derived colors auto-generate. For example:

:root {
    --text-primary: #333;
    --text-primary-2: #ff0000;  /* red for this specific shade */
}

Given this theme, derived shades like --text-primary-1, --text-primary-3, and --text-primary-4 auto-generate. --text-primary-2 is red.

The simplest possible interesting theme redefines the primary semantic color. The single line above (in Base Colors Only) would result in the following, with button color, link color, disabled, selected, and hover states all derived automatically:

These changes will be in the upcoming release. Existing themes will continue to work, as is.

#ktistec #crystallang #activitypub #fediverse

Release v3.2.1 of Ktistec adds support for bookmarking posts. This was so immediately useful I don't know why it took me so long to get around to it!

Pinned/featured posts are in the works for the next release.

The full changelog:

Added

• Support for bookmarking posts.

Fixed

• Invalidate user's sessions after changing password.
• Ignore supplied languages that don't conform to expected format.

Changed

• Upgrade Kemal.

In other thoughts... I'd like to make followed hashtags more consumable. I follow ~10 hashtags and: 1) it's hard to tell what's new, 2) it feels like they arrive in large batches that are difficult to digest, and 3) the reading experience is meh.

#ktistec #fediverse #activitypub #crystallang

no #ktistec release this week. i have been working on bookmarked posts, pinned/featured posts, as well as some minor performance improvements, but i need to spend time fixing an issue with my libxml extensions that is preventing me from moving to the latest release of #crystallang. i've been putting it off but it's gotta get done, so...

The major feature in v3.2.0 of Ktistec is thread analysis. The previous release, v3.1.2, added support for viewing threads from Lemmy communities. I follow the Open Source community, which leads to many large threads. The thread on FFMpeg and Google has 112 posts and is still growing.

Thread analysis helps me navigate these extensive conversations. It includes: top contributors, a timeline histogram, and notable branches.

The analysis applies several heuristics to identify interesting branches of the main thread. “Interesting” is subjective, but the algorithm currently looks for sudden bursts of activity and highlights those areas. Ktistec uses this to create a table of contents that links directly to those branches. Clicking on one of these links takes you to a branch-only view that focuses on the selected part of the thread.

It's fast—I anticipated needing to cache analyses, but analyzing a thread with over 400 posts takes only about 50 milliseconds on my production server.

This release also addresses an object visibility regression that was introduced in a previous version.

Full Changelog

Added

• Thread analysis that displays key participants, a timeline histogram, and notable branches
• New MCP tools: analyze_thread and get_thread
• Focal point rendering support for image attachments

Fixed

• Regression in object visibility affecting replies to threads

Changed

• Enhanced MCP tool details for likes, dislikes, and announces
• Improved cookie security.

#ktistec #fediverse #activitypub #crystallang

@alexanderadam works!

macro ✂️(str, n)
  {{str}}.size > {{n}} ? {{str}}[0, {{n}} - 1] + "…" : {{str}}
end
 puts ✂️ "hello, world!", 3  # => "he…"

https://play.crystal-lang.org/#/r/iecr

#crystallang

TIL

The … (the Unicode ellipsis character) works as both a Crystal Language macro and method name, as in:

macro …(str, n)
  Ktistec::Util.render_as_text_and_truncate({{str}}, {{n}})
end

Which can be used in a view template as:

= … preview, 120

I'm not saying you should. I'm saying you can.

#crystallang #til