Hello friends and strangers on the internet! As you may have heard by now, some diaspora* team members met from Friday to Sunday to discuss and hack together. We will be following up with a proper summary on the blog soon, but we need to finish some proposal first, so everything we did can actually make sense to you. :) However, as the hackathon ended a few hours ago, I thought it might be a great idea to share some of our excitement with you.
In total, we spent 34 hours in the office, which brings us to 11.3 hours of work per day on average! Massive respect to my fellow diasporians for keeping up, especially since this was on the weekend, after a week of work and long trips for some folks! :)
We did not spend all the time writing text and code, though. We also spend a lot of time discussing valuable topics. I will not be spoiling all of those, because you will be able to read up on them on Discourse soon, but some of those points included questions around
- How can we improve the overall user experience?
- How do we make streams more useful and more flexible for our users?
- How should reshares look in the future?
- How could we deal with stale PRs?
- How should we implement a mechanism to mark bots and organization accounts as such?
and some other important points that will all be summarized in the official blog post coming up soon-ish. As for the code side, we also accomplished a bunch of awesome things, like
- finishing the two-factor authentication implementation, which is now available to pods running
develop, and will be released in the upcoming minor release, - finishing the user archive import, which is another huge step towards being able to migrate users from one pod to another,
- adding a PWA manifest to diaspora, which allows mobile users to usee diaspora* as a somewhat-Progressive Web App on their phones,
- working on the API, reviewing the code together, improving the API authentication scopes, fixing up inconsistencies, building a JSON schema we can test against, and generally give the API a gentle push towards the end, and
- working hard on bringing back likes on comments.
On the project site, we didn't make too much visible progress, but that's because we spent significant portions of time rethinking the way we structure and design our contents to make it more accessible to non-technical folks. While my initial idea about user documentation and guides was probably not too bad, we identified a way better approach, which required several hours of planning the guides alone. Nonetheless, we managed to write large portions of the user-related guides/tutorials/FAQ, migrated the old blog posts, got a general idea on the contents that need to be rewritten, and did implemented some internal changes as well as visual improvements. Really happy about the progress here!
Overall, it is incredible what a small group of people can achieve in a very short period. Obviously, this is not a development speed we can keep up on regular days, but I feel like everyone got a fresh portion of motivation out of the event. At least I did. :)
I absolutely have left out several things here, but I wanted to provide y'all with an initial overview for now. Stay tuned for the full story that will be published via the project's official channels!
Finally, thanks to @fla@diaspora-fr.org, @lis@wk3.org, @mrzyx@social.mrzyx.de, @senya@socializer.cc, @supertux@nerdpol.ch, and @waithamai@pod.geraspora.de for being there. Some of those lovely people had to travel quite a bit! Super awesome to meet some of you in person again, or for the first time! Special thanks goes to @goob@pod.orkz.net for participating remotely, providing valuable feedback and language reviews; and also special thanks to my awesome colleagues at the Mozilla Berlin office for helping me plan this event.
