Frontend February 42: Frontend March 14

Been busy with stuff, finally got time to setup blog and shiet. Meanwhile, Pleroma-FE got some more exciting stuff goinging on.

First of all, now we have proper pinch-zoom and swiping in media modal, for desktops you can use scroll wheel to zoom into images, no more need to open image in new tab just to zoom (although i still do it out of habit). (Done by @tusooa)

Second, threads can now be displayed in threaded fashion, much like comments on various other servers. This has been pretty cool to have as it makes some conversations easier to follow. Unfortunately, there's no way to mute a "branch" yet as backend doesn't exactly have a concept of branches in conversations, yes everything is done on frontend (and done by @tusooa)

Third, we have bot indicators and ability to mute bot posts (although fully hidden only if you hide everyhing for now). Might get some improvements in the future. (done by @iamtakingiteasy)

Fourth, this is a WIP by me - settings now have "expert mode" - meaning a lot of settings will be hidden by default. A lot of niche, specific usecase, workaround and experimental is now tucked away, just need to tick "Show advanced" to show everything.

Fifth, or technically, fourth-and-a-oneth (or whatever you call it), still part of the settings MR, some settings that used to be in "profile" page now moved away from it - in the screenshot above you can see "default visibility scope" is in Composing section now, and it has this funky icon to it. This icon signifies that setting is tied to profile and affects all sessions and clients (dw, there's a helpful tooltip that says what I just said). This allowed us to put a lot of settings into more appropriate places, notably all of the notification-related settings are now properly in Notifications tab. Profile only has actual profile-related stuff (avatar, banner, bio etc). Profile tab itself needs a massive overhaul however, and so does Theme tab, which will be done later. Probably before Themes 3.0.

Lastly, two defaults got changed:

• Images are no longer cropped in attachments by default - cropped images look nicer sure but uncropped ones are more informative and useful.
• Images use Play-on-hover GIFs code ("pause animated images") enabled by default. Despite the turbo-jank code backing it it's been mighty useful feature that proven to be useful and stable. It sill only affects (most) GIFs but not APNGs however, but I might make it better if instance uses media-proxy, we'll see.

These changes are not permanent you know, If you think defaults should be changed - speak up.

We are finally getting there - we went from two separate settings pages, to single settings window with messy arrangement to neat-looking single settings window. We however might add another settings window, specifically for instance administration, given that AdminFE is mostly dead nowadays.

Also - we now use RenovateBot to update our dependencies, apart from that I think next up I'll be working on vue3 migration, this should enable us to support 3-column mode.