Mastodon Glitch Edition - fork supporting markdown and more

[tobias]

Introduction | Mastodon Glitch Edition

From the docs:

glitch-soc is a friendly fork of the open-source social media software Mastodon, with the aim of providing additional features at the risk of potentially less stable software. You can browse our source code and contribute to the project on Github.

What’s different?

glitch-soc adds a number of experimental features to Mastodon, such as:

• Media improvements
  • Images inside the CW spoiler
  • fullwidth images
  • scaling options
• Formatted toots
• Highlighting of misleading links
• Hiding follower count
• An app settings modal
• Collapsible toots
• Colored toot visibility icons
• Local-only toots
• Threaded mode
• data-* attributes on statuses for custom CSS targeting
• Advanced theming via flavours+skins
• Doodle

Features that have made their way upstream

Some of the features originally implemented in glitch-soc have been adopted in Mastodon:

• Optional boost hiding
• Optional notification muting
• Custom profile metadata
• Bookmarks
• Upload of audio-only media
• Toot visibility icon (at the top right of a toot)
• Reply selection in lists
• Filter improvements

[tobias]

I came across glitch-soc at fediday, after complaining about Mastodon’s limitations. Apparently glitch-soc supports markdown which I have come to love writing in here in Discourse, and am glad to see is getting excellent support across many platforms and apps including the Nextcloud collaborative text editor. Markdown source is human readable and it is incredibly flexible - and it’s portable!

And reading these docs I can see that many features from this fork of mastodon have made it back upstream. This is a super interesting example of open source at work, making software better for everyone!

Typically I personally stay away from forks or customizations, so will wait for now to see if markdown ever makes it back into the official Mastodon web app. The limitations are also not bad because they keep posts simple and short. I already have a tendency to write too much! And when I want to write longer I can post to Discourse topics that then can be federated to Mastodon and beyond using activitypub.