Beta test update

The last 5 days have been very busy, as expected. Things always get intense for a while when other people start using new software out there in the real world.

The main purpose of this phase is to fix problems that show up and to get enough #ActivityPub data flowing through the system to highlight any fundamental design problems with either the structure of the database or the code. I have been pleasantly surprised at how well it handles a high volume of incoming Activity data. After 5 days of operations there are now 7,000 posts, 28,000 comments and 500,000 votes while all database queries are still returning their results in under 100ms and CPU load average is under 1.0 (under 0.20 during quiet times). It seems to be about 33% as heavy as my #Kbin instance (running on the same server) was.

As well as fixing bugs and monitoring performance, I’ve added a slew of improvements and features:

• Comments are ranked by hotness, not just ‘top’ as they were at the start.
• Image posts can be viewed ‘inline’, without having to go to the post itself. Look for the magnifying-glass icon. This will the body of text posts in the same way, soon.
• Community subscriptions can be imported from #Lemmy
• Bell icon on community heading to be notified about new posts in the community. Notifications about replies to to your post or comment can be toggled using a similar bell icon on your post/comment.
• Low bandwidth mode – no images and less Javascript
• A notice on Beehaw posts to be mindful of their higher quality standards
• Topics in breadcrumb – better community discoverability
• PieFed groups to join

Coming up soon, no promises when tho:

• Send an email about unread notifications (with unsubscribe, naturally)
• Federation fixes, especially issues with Communities hosted on PieFed not sending posts out to other servers.
• Masonry-based layout for image-heavy communities like this one.
• Themes, including dark ones.
• Code introduction and development environment setup screen-casts, for future developers.