Fossil v0.3 Release

Fossil v0.3 has been released. Lots of usability improvements in both back and front end, as well as in build pipelines. The focus of the feature was offering fossil as a service at https://www.fossil-social.com/

Published on March 15, 2024 by Tim Kellogg

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Fossil is a Mastodon client with an algorithm for displaying posts according to their content. It’s an algorithm, but it’s not your typical social media algorithm. Engagement (likes, boosts, views) doesn’t factor in at all. Only the content of the post itself is used. Fossil digs through your timeline and finds the posts you wish you saw before.

Website & App

The main focus of this release was fossil as a service. If you elect to go this route, you can pay $4/month and have an always-available web app. This addresses issues around fossil being a little tricky to setup, as well as being able to easily access from a phone (e.g. if the server is running on a laptop).

Improvements

Lots of bugfixes & improvements.

  • New look & feel. Re-wrote the header part of the website, now with a real SVG hamburger menu instead of a literal hamburger 🍔 emoji. Also, a new SVG logo and new display for settings pages.
  • Lots of new hooks for plugins
  • Local stability improvement — Store cache in ~/.cache instead of a temp directory. Some operating systems periodically clear temp files, which put the server into an invalid state until the server was restarted. Meaning that you had to periodically restart the server to keep it functioning. That’s fixed now.
  • Resolve issue #6: Publish package on PyPi by @baseely in #22

As always, please let me know about your wishlist features!

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