With the new year just around the corner, we’ve got one last Sharkey release for 2024!

• Flash player! You can now attach .swf files to notes and play them back in the browser, using @ruffle, an Adobe Flash emulator.
• Scheduled notes, both through the web UI and through apps using the Mastodon API.
• Hostname contstraints for actors and activities are now slightly relaxed, restoring compatibility with Bridgy, an ActivityPub <-> AtProto bridge.
• Improved interoperability with other Fediverse software (Dislike activities are now handled, more types of “featured”/pinned activities are now allowed, activities interacting with other activities not known by the instance are no longer ignored).
• FriendlyCaptcha is now supported as a Captcha provider.
• You can now disable the RSS feed for your account.
• You can now disable the online status of your profile all together, rather than just making it always offline.
• Notes containing links to other notes (IE how Mastodon users might imitate quotes) are now rendered similarly to quotes.
• User profiles now show pinned notes by default when checking a profile, using the pinned notes tab.
• You can now configure the file permission bits used by locally-stored drive files via filePermissionBits.
• Poll edits are handled better.
• Profile edits are now only federated if the ActivityPub representation of their profile changes.
• Several improvements to error messages in logs.
• Enhanced ratelimiting logic.

Highlights of changes from Misskey:

• Users are now notified when their account is logged into from another device
• Users can now hide all their notes from logged-out users.
• Users can make past notes only visible to followers.
• If no administrators/moderators have logged in for a week, the instance will automatically switch to invite only.
• “Resolve report” and “forward report” are now separate actions.
• Animated MFM is now disabled if the browser is set to “reduced motion” mode

Possible surprises:

• If your timeline is jumping around a bit while scrolling, try going to “settings -> other -> experimental features -> enable render note skipping” and turn it off.
• During the 2024.9 release series, setting up allow-list federation may in fact have added those instances to the block list. Please double-check your allow-lists and block-lists.
• The sign-in flow for the web UI has changed (username and password are now input separately), which may break some bots or clients.
• The way themes are applied is slightly different now- previously, a theme setting accent became the CSS variable --accent, whereas now it becomes --MI_THEME-accent. Most users won’t be affected by this, except those using custom CSS.

Special upgrade notes

• Instances setting CSPs via HTTP headers should add raw.esm.sh (for Flash playback) and cdn.jsdelivr.net (for FriendlyCaptcha) to their CSPs.
• A newer Node.js version is required- 22.11.0
• If you’re not using Docker, you’ll have to pnpm clean-all before pnpm install --frozen-lockfile, otherwise some modules will break.