Fandom gets closer to the metal - issue 7: Making Hubzilla work for fan artists

[hit_the_books]

This week: Tweaking oulfis.space; blacklists; server upgrades; View Profile bug, and making Hubzilla functional for artists.

Experience Hubzilla

This month, oulfis has continued work on oulfis.space and said:

“I am now willing to say that it is open to all comers, as a for-the-foreseeable-future instance that is a Real Thing!”

So if you’d like to try it out, you’re welcome to. You can even migrate existing channels:

“People can EVEN migrate their existing channels from fandom.stopthatimp.net to oulfis.space if they want to!!

“After registering an account at oulfis.space, when it prompts you to make a channel, look for the fine print at the very bottom and it says "import an existing channel" -- this is how!

“It moves all of your connections, and you can choose to also mirror your last month of posts.”

If you’re interested in checking this instance out, please keep in mind that it will not be so quickly updated with technological improvements. There is also the chance, according to oulfis, that he’ll “make it pink and adorable”.

To see the development plans for oulfis.space check out the oulfis.space Trello board.

NSFW/blacklist add-on for Hubzilla

demitas had a poke around the NSFW/blacklist add-on for Hubzilla. Now if you, “put one of the blacklisted words JUST in the title, and it's not in the body, it will still hide the body.” To see more about this issue head on over to fanzilla.

Making Hubzilla work for artists

impertinence and daphneblithe report that they have been trying to solve some things that artists will need to be happy in Hubzilla. Things like share tracking, and accrued metrics – such as calculating likes across multiple shares – neither of these things are built in to Hubzilla, so creative thinking has been required.

According to daphneblithe, a plan has been hatched and is proposed here.

The metrics are meant to show engagement rather than being meaningless, as daphneblithe said:

“We will track likes and shares. And we are doing accrued metrics.

“We realized adding view is meaningless since bots and crawlers and the like skew it anyway, and plus it just adds the hit-to-kudos ao3 anguish. Whereas likes and shares show human engagement. So have opted for those.”

fandom.stopthatimp.net server

impertinence has been working on a few things including upgrading the fandom.stopthatimp.net server so that it can accommodate more users.

(Editor note: Being able to accommodate user numbers is perhaps one of the biggest challenges across all of the distributed fandom spaces and platforms that are being looked at.)

Impertinence also managed to update 'porple' to include a base theme and a dark theme.

View Profile

demitas, taking a break from a few other issues, has fixed an issue involving “View Profile” on Hubzilla that was not doing what users needed.

“I fixed the issue where the "View Profile" option in conversations takes you to the user's channel and added a link to the role help page in the channel privacy settings page,” demitas explained.

Don't forget...

To check out 

fandom-after on Tumblr and see what Wings has been posting.

 

Got something you want mentioned in these updates?

Head to #announcements-roundup channel on the distributed_fandom Discord and post about it before the end of Saturday each week. Thanks to everyone who contributed to this issue.