Ice Rock @IceRock@glaceon.social

Hiking to the center of the region's coldest tundra, you finally find it: The Ice Rock. It radiates with an unknowable energy.

You reach forward and touch it, wiping away a layer of snow. The ice is crystal clear, so it's not difficult to see that something is frozen inside it.

A laptop computer is running, despite no obvious source of power, and messages are occasionally printed to a terminal window. If you squint, you can just about make out what they say...

The instance will be a little less stable for the next little bit while I work on a problem with links in bios. No significant downtime is planned but there will be some restarts, causing it to go up and down a little bit. Just a heads up.

Here's the question, with some backstory.

Of course, we have markdown here, which allows us to write lists. For example, here's a list of some prime numbers.

• 2
• 3
• 5
• 7
• 11

(note: this list is not comprehensive)

However, here's what that same list looks like to anything reading this toot from a vanilla mastodon instance:

2 3 5 7 11

In this case it's not so bad, but you can imagine that when they're sentences, especially long ones, it gets hard to read fast.

I took a look at providing a more reasonable fallback for this, but it's not trivial. That's because mastodon simply strips any tags it doesn't understand. I can't say "use this instead", the html that gets rendered on that instance has to be contained within the html that gets rendered here.

I had a couple ideas for ways to "trick" the browser into inserting a newline if and only if it wasn't inside a list, but none of them panned out.

Unless I solve that puzzle, which may not even have a solution, I only see one real option. And it's not even a horrible one, imo. I would simply disable list formatting. We'd still properly render non-local lists, but any lists in toots composed here would look the same way they used to:

- 2
- 3
- 5
- 7
- 11

My question to you is: Do you think this is an acceptable option? Or should I keep digging for more ideas?

You will find a poll in the following, local-only toot.

Hey everyone! One quick update, and then a question I have for you.

The update is related to local-only posts. They used to be marked by having "👁️" at the end which, let's be honest, is really creepy. I've changed it so that local only posts are followed by two newlines and a ❄️. You'll see what I mean in just a moment! ;)

*ahem* With that minor hiccup out of the way...

ahh my toots are going through in the wrong order i'm sorry

I was content to just suspend the one user but the radical.town admin appears to be more concerned that people expect them to moderate their instance than they are that they're not moderating their instance, so goodbye radical.town

Okay, everything's broken, the server is on fire and snakes are physically manifesting in my home. I'm going to be reverting all the changes I made yesterday and then redoing them from scratch, trying extra hard to not break anything along the way.

Hey everyone! *We have basic markdown now!*

Just a heads up. <3

Hey, uh, my cron job failed and my SSL cert ran out! But we're back!

It's 3:15 here and I'm basically still asleep so I've fixed the main glaceon.social URL, but if you use a custom subdomain that's still broken

I'll hopefully fix that sometime today

Ummm... oops! We're back now!

Took me a little while to debug what the problem was. I had forgotten to migrate the database ​

Anyway, welcome to updated glitch-soc! We have polls now I guess!

Hey everyone! I'm about to update the instance to the latest glitch-soc version. I'm pretty sure I did everything correctly but there were some complications. If there's downtime in the near future, please hold tight while I fix it as fast as I can!

Hey everyone! Just a little update today. As you may remember, a while ago I completely removed the character limit here, replacing it with a soft nudge towards "hey, maybe you should use a CW" when you hit 750 characters. Well, that 750 number has to be configured somewhere. For convenience, I just told it to look at where the character limit is usually defined.

This worked, but it created a problem. Even though the server will never reject a message based on length, some third-party clients try to detect an instance's character limit and won't let you send a message that's "too long". Well, these clients thought our limit was 750, because that's how I had it set up.

This has been fixed! I moved some stuff around and the value has been split in two. There's the soft character limit (750) and a "hard character limit". The hard limit doesn't actually do anything! But because I have it set to an absurdly high value (currently 221841), third party clients should never wrongly try to stop you from tooting. If you're breaking 200,000 characters in a toot, we have bigger problems than Pinafore being confused. :P

If you don't use an external client, or if the one you use doesn't try to detect the character limit, nothing has changed for you! Please continue living your best life. For everyone else, this should be a nice fix.

Hey everyone! A while ago, upstream Mastodon made a change allowing video uploads of up to 40mb. They never worked here. I never knew why until just now, but they're fixed! Enjoy not having to host everything on youtube if you just want to share it on the fediverse. :3

Bah, never mind, I don't know why it's not doing what I want and I don't even know for sure people would like the thing I was trying to do :P

Maybe some other time.

Hey everyone! Just a heads up that you should expect some weirdness when it comes to custom emojis tonight. There will be brief periods when they'll behave incorrectly, such as appearing twice in a row or not properly respecting your "Autoplay animated GIFs" setting. Other things may happen as well, depends on how much I have to play with it to get it doing what I want. Sorry about that! I'll post again when the disruption is over.

Quick update: Since no one complained, I've added the custom CSS to hide the "Filtered" block on posts you've filtered out. You won't even know they're there.

How to make your instance more accessible in 6 easy commands!

The unlisted icon should be easier to distinguish from the followers-only icon, now.

Oh, and while I was messing with CSS anyway, I went ahead and put underlines on links!

They're transparent by default and become completely opaque when you hover, because I thought that looked pretty good. If it's causing accessibility problems, please let me know!!