This release has feature-creeped quite a bit, but the end result is turning out pretty great. I also promise it’s not vaporware and really does exist 😆

Hopefully, within the next 1-2 weeks I will have enough of it put back together and polished to throw out a beta release to the hosted instance for general use. Would love to get some extra eyes on the new features and suss out any bugs / UX stumbling blocks.

What’s New Since Last Update?

  • The sidebar and community menu (in the top navbar) can now browse/search all communities in addition to your subscribed/grouped/favorites. You can even scope the search to local communities only – right from the sidebar.

  • Re-implemented the form fields. Made them look all fancy-pantsy with integrated icons/buttons

  • Spruced up the login, forgot password, sign up, and instance selection pages

  • The search and community browser now take your filters into account. If you’ve filtered / blocked an instance, for example, nothing from that instance will show up in the search results nor will communities from there be listed if you’re browsing/searching for communities.

  • The search box at the top of the app is something of an “omnisearch” box:

    • Entering an activity pub URL for a post, comment, user, or community will automatically resolve it and redirect you there rather than going through a lengthy search where you then have to click on it.
    • You can prefix the search term with any of the following in order to set the search type:
      • user: or users:
      • post: or posts:
      • comment: or comments:
      • community: or communities:
      • url:

  • "Trending Posts’ widget in the right-hand sidebar. Shows the “Top Hour” posts.
    • Uses your default feed setting for local, subscribed or all
    • Takes your filters into account.
    • Anything you’ve downvoted will not show up in “Trending”
    • Posts in the trending list are randomized each load rather than sorting by score
    • Updates every 10 minutes

-Can hide removed coments, downvoted posts, posts/comment below a set score

  • Mentions and DMs can be disabled. When disabled, they will not be fetched or shown in the inbox, and when it checks for notifications, it will silently mark them as read and not show in the notification count. You can still see them in other clients (i.e. they’re only hidden in Tesseract), but they will be marked as read. I think I mentioned this before, but at the time, I did not have the notification suppression working; that’s integrated now.

  • Added a button bar every ~50 posts in the feed with some helpful actions:

    • Scroll to top of feed
    • Refresh Feed
    • Truncate feed to only posts below the bar

  • Why would you want to truncate the feed periodically?

    1. To free up memory, especially if you’re deep into infinite scrolling
    2. Performance: When navigating away from the feed, it takes and stores a snapshot of the current posts and loads + re-renders them when you come back. Truncating the feed reduces the amount of posts it has to re-render when it loads.
    3. Performance: Any time you update group memberships or modify the filter policy (or enable/disable filtering), every post in the feed has to react to that change and re-run the filter against itself. When you truncate the feed, the truncated posts are no longer rendered and thus do not have to react to events.
    4. A version of this behavior used to be automatic, but it would randomly glitch out in Firefox in ways I could never replicate consistently in order to properly fix it. Doing it manually, it can avert the issue by scrolling to the top. It’s less jarring for it to scroll to the top when it’s invoked manually versus automatically.

  • Add community-scoped search fields to the community profile modals and the sidebars:

  • The “Search for Alts” option in the User Profile modals now stays within the modal and no longer requires leaving to the search page. Additionally, any alts you click on can now load a nested modal without closing that of the current user.

  • Lots more little bug fixes for existing bugs and new ones introduced during this dev cycle

  • Probably more I’m not thinking of.