This month in Plume: May 2018

I would like to regularly post updates about Plume’s development, and I think publishing a summary by month is a good rhythm. So here is the first “This month in Plume”, for the month of May 2018.

First of all, we continued to improve the design, and to make it easier to navigate in Plume. But it is still not perfect, and Madeorsk proposed a complete redesign. Feel free to share your opinion about it here, or on GitHub.

It is also now possible to edit your profile’s informations. There is also a followers listing on every profile.

We also added the ability to reshare a post. Reshares will be displayed on your profile, in a dedicated section, but in the future you will see reshares from authors you follow in your personal feed too.

You can now receive notifications. Nothing more than a list (no mails, not even a badge to tell you you have unread notifications), but it’s a good start. You’ll receive notifications for likes, reshares or comments on your articles, but also for new followers.

On the federation side, we added support for shared inboxes, both for sending and receiving. This mechanism defined by the ActivityPub specification avoids spamming servers by sending an activity only once to a server, even if there are many people to receive it there.

We also switched to the activitypub crate, by asonix (thanks to them for their great work by the way). This change will let us take advantage of the Rust type system, instead of unsafely manipulating raw JSON objects everywhere.

Thanks to JosephKiranBabu, the author of a post and its publication date are now displayed under its title!

And fdb-hiroshima fixed a lot of bugs which were occurring because of missing trailing slashes in URL. They also made sure we were correctly redirected to the login page when we were trying to access a page that required to be connected. So big thanks to them two for their help!

And finally… we added Markdown support! There is all the basic features of the language (formatting, titles, lists, etc), plus some additions, like tables, strikethrough or auto-linking.

There is still a lot to do, but as you can see, but we are slowly making progress! But there are two important questions for the future of the project on which I would like to have your input: first should Plume have another name? I’ve heard that this name was too generic, and that it could be hard to find on search engines for instance. You can vote here: https://framaforms.org/should-plume-have-another-name-1528569752 (and propose a new name if you have any idea). The second question is about migrating away from GitHub: should we? and if yes, where should we go? Thanks for your responses!