Manyverse 0.2202.4-beta

✅ Bug fix: allow seeing images in private chats
✅ Bug fix: only allow SSB and HTTP links, not other types
✅ Bug fix: private chat glitches while scrolling
✅ Bug fix: wrong layout when you block a Profile
✅ (Desktop) Bug fix: sliders in settings looking broken
✅ (Desktop) Bug fix: text style in prompts in dark mode
✅ (Desktop) Bug fix: Windows LAN discovery
✅ (Desktop) Fix left-menu text getting clipped
🎉 (Desktop) Feature: tooltip when hovering pictures
🔷 (Desktop) Improve layout of the middle column
🔷 (Desktop) Improve scroll bar on RecipientsInput
🔷 (Desktop) Improve styling on the Instructions screen
🔷 Improve French translation
🔷 Improve style of summaries in the Private tab

Update from: manyver.se/download

#manyverse

Congrats on the release! :D

Can you clarify a bug for me, please. :-)

Bug fix: only allow SSB and HTTP links, not other types

That means that it should only allow SSB and HTTP links? Or that it was allowing just those and should allow more?

@SoapDog (Macbook Air) Happy to clarify :)
It means that from now onwards, only SSB sigil cypherlinks, SSB URIs, and HTTP(S) links should work, other links won't. The main purpose was to prevent a link like [LOL](/) open your filesystem "root" folder and other weird bugs. I'm happy to enable other kinds of "legit" links if we can think of any that would be useful.

@andrestaltz, if I may just voice my opinion, I'd rather all links were enabled except for file://. Then you could simply check for the presence of a protocol schema before allowing it to be a link.

We went through a lengthy process to try to let browsers allow us to use ssb: links. It feels to me that by allowing just SSB and HTTP links, we're not embracing the various protocols out there and making it a bit of a walled garden. This way there is no path for a user on Manyverse to link to a IPFS or Hyper resource for example, or Gemini, etc...

@SoapDog (Macbook Air) Sure, I'm open to that, just want to make sure that there aren't weird ass bugs (that could potentially crash the app or be a security concern).

@SoapDog (Macbook Air) I just made issue 1757.

@andrestaltz thanks a ton! <3 <3 <3 <3

I just realized it would be dope if a cabal URI shared on SSB would render as a link on Manyverse, so that if you have Cabal desktop installed, it would just open

About the narrower column, it was this issue, and inspired by Oasis's layout: https://gitlab.com/staltz/manyverse/-/issues/1689

The reasoning is two fold:

• Typography: lines shouldn't be too long otherwise it negatively affects how much your eyes need to work to find the continuation, example article
• If the middle column is too wide, image previews (with the "fading to white" preview) show just a very tiny percentage of the image, basically convey little to no information to "preview" it

I guess there is additional tweaking we could do, like maybe make a bit wider, and each Thread "card" taller too. But we're trying to avoid the percentage-based width because it can create extremely wide thread cards and that's bad.

@Powersource (phone) and @Dave [ iOS ] had many thoughts on the design of the middle column, so maybe they can add some info on that too.

@andrestaltz thanks for the regular updates. I'm using #manyverse on my iOS device.

I checked the roadmap but did not see any "active channels" or hashtags view like Patchwork has? This is what is really keeping me on Patchwork still, as I like to see what channels are lighting up with content, and it is a way for me to connect with others on common interests.

I'm gonna chime in here too. I saw the efforts to make the column thinner early on and personally I prefer a wider column and have said so before.

Running with the more narrow column now I can confirm that indeed the design looks more consistent with what I see on my android phone. The problem I'm having with that is that I don't want my desktop apps to feel like mobile apps. I'd much prefer something that speaks the same design language and feels "unsurprising" when switching between platforms, but still makes best use of what each platform provides.

As an example, Andre and the others put a lot of work into the menu column and I think the outcome is great! It really makes the app feel like it was thought out for a desktop use case, all the while being consistent with the rest of the UI and also (barring a color change that makes sense to me) with the menu on the mobile app.
The content column change feels to me like going from that nice menu column back to a slide-in hamburger menu as is used on mobile.

I'll not dare to speak about the typography part since I know nothing about it, so I want to repeat that this is a personal preference of mine and might not generalize. I will however point out that the interaction with image previews that Andre (correctly) pointed out might be addressed differently. Off the top of my head I see at least three options:

1. Change how the images are cropped/scaled when cards are collapsed
2. Increase the maximum preview height (possibly only on desktop since there's more space to work with)
3. When posts contain images, render the text and content separately, effectively creating a small text summary and then something like twitter's multi-picture preview cards.

Regardless of the content column width, I think that addressing the image handling would be a really cool thing to see. I'm sure there are more (and better) approaches than the ones I proposed.

Oh and I also want to point out that changing the column width in my local build of manyverse was pretty simple, so if people want to play with it, just change the value of desktopMiddleWidth.px in src/frontend/global-styles/dimens.ts, currently in line 60.
I played around with this, and can confirm that there is a point where the column becomes too wide. So the manyverse team is definitely right in making deliberate choices here. :)