Hi everyone! We just made the second release candidate (rc2) for #GoToSocial v0.14.0. Here it is!

github.com/superseriousbusines…

What happened to the first release candidate, you say? Well, it didn't work properly 🤦 But this one does.

If you're the type of badass admin who uses release candidates, please give it a shot :) If you find any bugs particular to this release candidate, let us know on our issues page so we can fix them before 0.14.0 proper.

As always, please read the migration notes carefully!

Highlights of this release (candidate):

• Account aliasing. You can now set the alsoKnownAs field on your account via the settings panel, to indicate other accounts you own. This doesn't do much now, but it's the first step towards the Move implementation for account migration coming in v0.15.0. We originally wanted to include Move in this release but it needs more testing so we pushed it back. Hang in there :)
• Much better thread sorting. Conversation threads on both the web view and client API use a new sorting mechanism which makes them way more readable. No longer will replies in a thread be scattered all over the place.
• Better HTTP signature support. We fixed a longstanding issue with including vs not including query parameters in signed GET requests. We now try (and accept) both methods of constructing signatures. Which leads to...
• Improved thread fetching. You'll see far fewer "orphaned" statuses in your timeline now, and you'll see more replies on statuses from other instances.
• Syntax highlighting for code blocks on the web UI. When you include a code block in your markdown now, and correctly indicate the language the code is written in, it will be syntax highlighted when rendered on your profile in the web UI. This requires javascript to be enabled in a visitor's web browser, but it's a progressive enhancement feature. Visitors to your profile with javascript turned off will just see the code block without syntax highlighting :)
• Improved "about this instance" page, with a link to the page in the nav bar. Previously the "about this instance" page was more or less hidden. We've now surfaced it better, so you can write all your terms and conditions and instance description stuff there. Relatedly....
• Parse instance descriptions and terms and conditions as markdown. Previously it was very difficult to properly edit these fields, because you had to read + write HTML to do so. Now they're parsed as markdown. This means you can more easily include things like blockquotes, lists, etc.
• Big refactor of HTML templates + CSS. We did a serious rework of HTML templates to fix indentation. Previously if you did "view source" on a GoToSocial profile page, you'd see a mess of sloppily-indented HTML. With this refactor, the HTML is now nicely indented and much more readable. We also did an accessibility pass and tested our HTML with various screen readers to try to make the web view a bit less annoying to navigate.
• First pass at a basic spam filtering system. In light of spam waves happening on the fediverse recently we took a crack at implementing a filter to drop messages identified as spam. This is still in the experimental stage, but it's included in this release so you can try it out already. See the docs for details.

Thanks for reading!