I told you it wasn’t vaporware! By every stretch of the imagination this should probably be version 1.5 rather than a point release, but that may still change.

This is the longest stretch between updates, and I apologize, but I just needed to take some time away from…this. It’s not finished yet, and not everything made it into the cutoff, but it’s stable and feature complete enough to push out as a mature alpha / near beta. This is to allow some extra eyes / bug reports while I work to button everything else up. As far as stability goes, I always daily-drive the dev version, so everything I use works at least “good enough”.

It’s not generally available yet, but it is deployed to the hosted instance at https://tesseract.dubvee.org/

Notes Regarding Filtering Terminology

In the previous releases, “hide” was used to mean “collapse” or “minimize” but still show the content. In this release, “filter” means to minimize/collapse into a stub (you can click to reveal it) and hide actually hides the content completely.

Admins cannot fully hide anything with filters. If you’re an admin and you set it to hide any content, it will always be minimized. This is to prevent blind spots. Similarly, moderators cannot fully hide things in communities they’re in charge of.

Highlights

There are far too many changes to list in a post, and the changelog is a fustercluck right now, but here are the highlights:

• Lots of visual tweaks and refinement
• LOTS of bugfixes
• Upload Manager: You can now manage your uploaded media from Profile->Media
  • View all your uploads
  • Delete an upload
  • Favorite certain uploads for quick reference later
  • Search for the post/comment where the upload was used
  • When posting/commenting, you can select select an image from your existing uploads
  • Use a custom upload as a custom emoji (not fully implemented yet)
• Secondary Toolbar Can Be Hidden: The secondary navbar can be toggled on/off to give more vertical space in the app.
• Defederation Indicator: Community cards will indicate if your instance is defederated from the community’s home instance. The create post and other action buttons will also be disabled if that is true.
• Blind Voting: When blind voting is enabled, scores will be hidden until you’ve cast a vote. This encourages you to both vote/participate as well as to vote based on the content without being influenced by the current score. Admins can also set blind voting to be the default if they want.
• Post Reply Muting: You can now mute replies on up to 25 posts. The option is available from the post action menu (three dots at top of post). Any replies to those posts will be silently marked as read and not included in the notifications. You will still see those replies in the inbox, but they’ll be marked as read leaving your “unread” inbox clean for replies you are interested in. Muted posts have a “Muted” badge in the title to indicate that reply notifications will be discarded. This also applies to comments on the muted post. For example, if you comment under a post and then mute replies to that post, any replies to your comment will also be muted.
• Mentions and Private Messages Can Be Disabled: Well, not fully disabled. However, if you disable them, they will be silently marked as read and not trigger the notification indicator. They will also be hidden in the inbox. However, you can still see them if you turn them back on or access your account from another client.
• Mentions, Replies, and DM’s From Filtered Accounts Do Not Trigger Notifications: They will be silently marked as read in the background, not trigger the notification indicator, and be hidden in the inbox.
• Search Revamp: The search page has been revamped and no longer tries to be “too much”.
• Search Prefixes: You can prefix your search to set the type. to set the search type. You can now prefix the search query to set the search scope from the search box:
  • user: {query}: Searches only for users with the given query string
  • users: {query: Alias for user:
  • community: {query}: Searches only for communities with the given query string
  • communities: {query]: Alias for community:
  • post: {query}: Searches only for posts with the given query string
  • posts: {query}: Alias for post:
  • comment: {query}: Searches only for comments with the given query string
  • comments: {query}: Alias for comment:
  • url: {query}: Searches only for posts which have the provided URL as the post link
• LemVotes Integration: It was requested to add a LemVotes link to posts/comments. I was initially against it, and still am, but decided “what the hell?” and added it anyway. The post and comment action menus now have a “See Votes” option that will search for the item at lemvotes.org.
• Enhanced Filtering: Too much to explain. Just look at Settings -> Filters and see what’s there.
  • Filter users and communities by actor ID or Regex pattern
  • Filter content by platform
  • Filter out entire instances (including wildcards such as *.example.com to cover lemmy.example.com and piefed.example.com
  • Filter by domain (including wildcards)
• Settings Revamped: The settings and quick settings have been combined into a configuration panel with a tabbed interface.
• Admin Panel Revamp: The admin panel has also been refreshed to be easier to navigate.
• Community Groups:
  • Can have their own filter policies
  • Can minimize or hide all posts to them
  • Groups can be used as community flairs
• New Font: I added Atkinson Hyperlegible because I’m absolutely in love with that font.
• Block Management: Managing your user, community, and instance blocks is now easier. You can search/filter them as well as use the meta search term !banned to see which ones are banned and, optionally, remove them from your blocks.
• Allows adding accounts from multiple instances by default. Previously, it was locked to the deployed instance by default, but now it requires the admins to set an env var to disallow adding off-instance accounts.
• So much more under the hood (see release notes when this is released).

Known Bugs

• Import and exporting groups from Settings->Groups is not implemented yet
• The "Tags’ panel in the settings is not yet implemented
• Adding a user/community to the filter exceptions exempts them from all rules. During testing, this was not found to be not desirable and only a subset of rules should be exempted for those.

What’s Removed?

• Legacy Loops support. Loops now has proper embed URLs in their metadata so rather than re-write the shim for old Loops posts, I just took it out. Posts linking to Loops posts should just work unless they were posted before Loops released their current UI.
• Save / Load Settings to Lemmy API. With the addition of the filter policies, expanded community groups, and other settings you can store, it’s just too much to store in the theme field in your profile. I’m brainstorming a way to save settings to your Tesseract instance, but that’s probably not going to be in this release.

What Didn’t Make the Cut?

• Deezer embed support
• User tagging (the settings tabs are there for it, but it has a placeholder

When Will it Officially Release?

Not sure. Depends if any major bugs are found during the alpha/beta phase and how much time I can devote to wrapping everything up.