Mastodon Glitch Edition

Welcome to the documentation site for glitch-soc! glitch-soc is a friendly fork of the open-source social media software Mastodon, with the aim of providing additional features at the risk of potentially less stable software. You can browse our source code and contribute to the project on Github.

What’s different?

glitch-soc adds a number of experimental features to Mastodon, such as:

• Media improvements
  
  • Images inside the CW spoiler
  • fullwidth images
  • scaling options
• Formatted toots
• Highlighting of misleading links
• Hiding follower count
• An app settings modal
• Collapsible toots
• Colored toot visibility icons
• Local-only toots
• Threaded mode
• data-* attributes on statuses for custom CSS targeting
• Advanced theming via flavours+skins
• Doodle

Features that have made their way upstream

Some of the features originally implemented in glitch-soc have been adopted in Mastodon:

• Optional boost hiding
• Optional notification muting
• Custom profile metadata
• Bookmarks
• Upload of audio-only media
• Toot visibility icon (at the top right of a toot)
• Reply selection in lists
• Filter improvements

How to install and update glitch-soc?

glitch-soc is based on Mastodon’s main branch. The installation steps are thus the same as described in the Mastodon documentation.

Updating from Mastodon (or from an earlier glitch-soc version) is exactly like updating from one Mastodon version to another, and will in general require the following steps:

1. Switch to glitch-soc, for instance by:
   • adding a new remote git remote add glitch-soc https://github.com/glitch-soc/mastodon
   • fetching it (git fetch glitch-soc)
   • switching to the main branch from that repo (git checkout glitch-soc/main)
2. Fetch the source code (typically, git pull)
3. Install dependencies: bundle install && yarn install
4. Run the pre-deployment database migrations: RAILS_ENV=production SKIP_POST_DEPLOYMENT_MIGRATIONS=true bundle exec rails db:migrate

5. Pre-compile static assets: RAILS_ENV=production bundle exec rails assets:precompile

   Due to glitch-soc shipping with two front-end flavours, this step requires more resources than it does on mainline Mastodon.

6. Restart the services: systemctl reload mastodon-web && systemctl restart mastodon-{sidekiq,streaming}
7. Clean Rails’ cache: RAILS_ENV=production bin/tootctl cache clear
8. Run the post-deployment database migrations: RAILS_ENV=production bundle exec rails db:migrate

How to migrate back to upstream Mastodon?

Should you wish to migrate back to upstream Mastodon for any reason, this is possible, at the cost of every glitch-specific feature, of course. There are a few things that you need to be aware of:

• Toots written in HTML or Markdown will not render as such anymore and will display the raw source instead.
• Local-only toots will not be local-only anymore, remote instances and users will be able to see them and interact with them, should they be mentionned in any way.
• If you have migrated to glitch-soc before Mastodon implemented bookmarks, migrations from Mastodon’s source code will fail to execute until you edit db/migrate/20180831171112_create_bookmarks.rb to remove everything between def change and the corresponding end.

How can I help?

You can get information on contributing here.

Disclaimer

glitch-soc is beta software, and under active development. Use at your own risk!