It's been a while and we're overdue for a new release. Not a whole lot has changed, mostly refinements here and there. The same, but better.

There's now a (none) group, which is where posts that don't belong to a group land, instead of being dropped. This improves compat with microblog oriented services. You can't browse the none group yet; the URL just 404s, which actually seems appropriate. I still think different interfaces for different purposes is the way, but this was pretty low effort. Maybe there's one person always posting links and you'd like to see their posts on your cool links aggregator.

I pulled in a few honks from myself.

Tags are now linked at the bottom of each post and viewable on the web, such as /tag/activitypub or /tag/c.

Didn't get to parsing hashtags out of the post body yet, but that's not so urgent. #done.

I've implemented basic support for composite groups (groups of groups). (Formerly named meta groups.) There's a lot of redundancy because of the federated nature of the azoriverse, with similar groups duplicated across multiple servers. Composite groups are a solution, by presenting users with a (somewhat transparent) single group that collects all of the posts.

I've created two groups, metaprog and technoscience, for demo and testing.

This is still preliminary, so federation doesn't quite work yet, but eventually the goal would be that you can follow a composite group, and it will forward activities. Instead of having to individually chase down every new programming group that gets created, you could delegate that the metaprog admin (me) to keep the group list updated.

Some basic federation is now working. I think it probably won't work from Lemmy, ironically, but azorius, honk and mastodon, etc. should be able to follow these groups. (Don't follow from azorius until after updating.)

Mostly bugfixes and some refinements.

• Some performance improvements.
• Newest sort for comments.
• Activity tab shows active threads.
• Add some improved support for compat with Note activities.
• Only accept and serve activities with the correct content type.

There's a few changes in the pipeline to work a little better with mastodon (sigh). It's gone through a few iterations of live testing, but once I think it's stable will release.

Don't want to wait too long, this also has the security fix for activities served with the wrong content type.

A few other tweaks that I may get to, or not.

Minor update. A few refinements and fixes.

• Fix 32 bit support.
• Close database to give the wal file a chance to checkpoint.
• Reply notif links to comment.
• Collapse and expand threads.
• Dedupe posts across groups.

Finally got around to fixing a common annoyance. There's four different groups covering "technology" and the same link gets posted to all of them every time. These are now deduped in the main feed.

New release. Not a lot of changes, mostly bug fixes and some interop improvements. Biggest feature of note is post previews.

There's not a lot happening. I like it.

When clicking a link via notification or when replying to a comment on a post, it would be nice to be taken directly to the notification comment or your posted reply.

Right now I'm having to search for my name to see the discussion.

Release day classic! Fixed two bugs not noticed until just after release. One was a crash in the markdown parser which ironically broke the 0.2 release announcement.

Pushed an emergency fix, will resolve with a better fix in time.

Also trying out committing release numbers to the in tree version string.

New release. Lots of features and fixes.

Notifications, chat, (experimental) filters. The UI is basically the same, but lots of stuff reworked so it's more obvious what you're doing and where you're going.

I think this is approaching my vision for the software. It's not done, but all the pieces are in place.

=== 0.3.0 Imperfect Future

• Subscribe to post for comment notifications.
• Very basic search feature.
• Syntax highlighting for code blocks.
• More consistently useful logging.
• Experimental filters.
• Inline images in posts.
• Cleaner UI and navigation.
• Dark mode.
• Improved URL scheme.
• Previews for picture groups.
• Normalize some links (youtube only atm).
• Improved federation.
• Include replies collection in posts.
• Background refresh.
• Group chat.
• A little more tag support.
• Nicer online help.
• Detect recent duplicate links.
• Site alerts, woop, woop.
• Initial support for featured posts.
• Notifications for most events.

So I finally got tired of the hit and miss of using azorius on the same subdomain as my old lemmy install. I assumed it was a key issue so I killed the DB and re initialized the build, and am now hosting it under the new subdomain deddit.

I subscribed to all the same communities but this time I noticed when loading a new community no posts were shown, though the logs clearly show json dumps with posts from those groups. I didn't think anything of it and kept subscribing to my groups. Sometimes a couple of posts would show but usually zero posts.

Today, I see a few commeints but no new posts. Even though the groups are active with new posts, etc.

I see a lot of these entries in the logs:

2023/08/24 16:02:45 no post for comment: https://programming.dev/comment/2291160

Anything I can do to troubleshoot this? Are there any key files stored I should have wiped out or something? I did delete the entire -datadir and recreated it.

Very basic, only the site: operator and plain text is implemented, but if you were worried that you may have missed out on some twitter drama, it's now only a few keystrokes away.

So on my new azorius install I'm noticing that since my initial group import, no updates have come in on subscribed groups. The exception being this azorius.net. All of my other subscribed groups live in Lemmy instances.

Here's the log entry when I subscribed to it earlier today.

failed to post json to https://lemmy.world/c/world/inbox: http post status: 400

I tried unsubscribing and resubscribing and got this:

2023/08/19 00:12:11 posting to https://lemmy.world/c/world/inbox
2023/08/19 00:12:12 failed to post json to https://lemmy.world/c/world/inbox: http post status: 400
2023/08/19 00:12:19 posting to https://lemmy.world/c/world/inbox
2023/08/19 00:12:20 failed to post json to https://lemmy.world/c/world/inbox: http post status: 400

I notice ALL Lemmy instances have the same error. So I'm thinking I'm not actually subscribed to them on their end and thus they're not pushing me updates.

See current Lemmy group:

https://lemmy.world/c/world?dataType=Post&page=1&sort=New

and now my page:

https://discuss.petersanchez.com/g/world@lemmy.world

I haven't received any of the updates since the UK Nurse story (which was part of the original group import)

Now, I have a clue as to what this may be. Before I setup azorius I ran Lemmy on the same subdomain. So I imagine maybe there is a key mismatch possibly that's blocking things?

If that's potentially the issue, is there any solution? Or do I have to change my hostname?

PS, if these types of post don't belong here, just slap my hand with a ruler and I'll ping you via email or honk or whatever.

Got up and running with Azorius and I notice that the link to the post author raises a 404 on azorius software. Ie, https://azorius.net/u/tedu@azorius.net is 404 but https://azorius.net/u/tedu is not. However the linking on the rendered pages is using the user@domain syntax.

Assuming maybe in the findperson function just check if the @domain is the same as the configured hostname and use the username instead for this case?

Feature creep never ends. Added a very limited filter function, which can rewrite or edit posts. There's a couple ad hoc filters already, but this should converge over time.

There was already a tiny link normalizer, which only worked for youtube, which I find helpful to keep consistent URLs. And then it also rewrites lemmy links to self hosted images, which shouldn't (imo) appear as links.

The next problem I had is sometimes people post links, but put the link in the body, not in the link section where it belongs. This annoys me. I can't immediately see what site the link is for. It looks like a self post, then I open it, and then I have to open another link. That's two clicks! We can find a link in the body and make it the post link pretty easily.

But not all the time. I think that would result in too many false positives. So I started work on a little filter engine, that matches and alters posts. It's very limited at the moment, to only this use case, but the parts are now there for more extension.

I don't want to go all in on being a picture board, but sometimes it's fun to scroll through some pictures. But also, like 90% of the preview images on links are just stupid header graphics, so it's off by default. Now for some groups example previews can be enabled.

The search box, at present, is more like a fetch activity box. It can only find and retrieve objects by their activitypub ID (url).

First caveat is that you have to get to the actual object. Lemmy marks this with a little fediverse icon, but it's pretty subtle. You can't retrieve an object from a server that doesn't own it, even if you can see it there. That's just the way things are. Also remember that posts and groups can be on different servers.

Second caveat is that kbin omits some information that lets azorius know which group a post is in. If you get a group not found error, you have to search for the group first, then the post.

Fetching a post doesn't retrieve comments. I don't believe this is possible at present. Lemmy does not include a replies collection in its Page object. You should be able to search for comments to import them, however.

Pushed a big change to enable group chat.

This kinda seems like feature creep, but looking at successful forums, I think many of them have an irc (or a fucking discord) on the side. Or you resort to an adhoc chat post. So I think it's fairly important. It's not very complicated, either.

It's not on by default, and can be enabled on a per group basis.

But does it fedi? Obvi! Well, within reason, and with certain caveats.

It's based on the ChatMessage type, addressed to the group, and federated via Announce/Create/ChatMessage like other group activities. So nothing special.

Honk required a small fix because it wasn't expected chats to be announced. Not sure how other software would react. The fix was pretty simple and obvious, just not something I anticipated. The tricky part is getting addressing right and replying to the group, not only the poster.

Okay, we've got some basic notifications now. Some more to come.

Admins get notified when users sign up.

Mods get notified when posts are mod in their group.

Users get notified when someone comments on your post.

The logic for this is still incomplete, doesn't include all replies, etc. and so forth.

Well, that was quick. 0.2 is here. Almost immediately after setting up azorius.net, I found an accidental key disclosure. I was told sharing is caring, but the "experts" say that's wrong. More on that below.

So it's a little short of where 0.2 was supposed to be.

changelog

• Fix key disclosure. Keep secrets away from the web.
• UI refinements.
• Edit and delete comments.
• Reports for stuff you don't like.
• Modest group mod capabilities.
• AP vocab: better hashtag and context support.

why why why

The tactical bug was accidentally putting an internal object into public json. There are wire representations for these things, and it's not supposed to include all the messy guts. There are now json marshal methods for each type that panic to prevent a recurrence.

The strategic bug was keeping secret key data in the everyday types at all. I felt like this was a mistake, but let it slide. Gah. The fix here was to move all the key data out of the normal tables and types, so it's only accessed as needed.

The database upgrade will also rotate keys. I think fedi key disclosures are kinda low impact anyway, but whatever.

Grinding away. It's already a lot better than 0.1.

Mostly want to refine some of the UI flows to be smoother. I think the basic site management and moderation bits are in place.

Working on some form of notifications. That's probably the key feature. When that's done, will ship. Unless it takes too long, then we'll ship whatever is done.

Featured/pinned posts is somewhere in the mix.

Pretty much all the ActivityPub vocab I want to support is working now. What doesn't work may be intentional, at least in the short term.

Voting is probably 0.3.