panos

Catodon now has built-in bot protection by default

We had some complaints about hCaptcha recently on catodon.rocks, and I didn't like the fact that you have to rely on other services and that the default Bot protection ("None") is "Not recommended" anyway, so I integrated ALTCHA in Catodon, which will be the default on new servers - no further action needed. Also added rate limiting to signups for extra protection.

#catodon #sharkey

@stinkek@denden.world alright, got more reports about this, will change hCaptcha soon

@berrystumped I am not really sure I understand what happened, but that might be a bug with the new custom timelines feature?

@berrystumped do you think it's an issue with hCaptcha? I will look into replacing it one of these days

@dsilverz yeah, not putting that crap on my servers
if anyone has any recommendations besides hcaptcha, lmk! @KrazyKritter

@KrazyKritter to avoid bots - fedi does have a bots problem, and most of them probably come from mastodon.social, which doesn't have any protection.

That said, I've had other complaints about hCaptcha, so I guess I'll have to replace it. I've used reCaptcha in the past, and some bots passed, plus it's Google and I'd like to avoid them.

If it works, it works 😅

@lnkr@staging3.plamenu.com seems to be company owned, which is not ideal to me, I like Codeberg's collective approach. But I will give it some thought, it doesn't look like a bad alternative apart from that, and it's forgejo... maybe , maybe. @TamsynUlthara

@TamsynUlthara exactly, Catodon just wouldn't be possible without AI, since all of my attempts to work with a dev failed. I had tried for years before I decided to try this path. @lnkr@staging3.plamenu.com

@lnkr@staging3.plamenu.com thanks, will give them a better look before self-hosting! Truth is that I prefer collective projects over personal solutions, whenever possible @TamsynUlthara

@TamsynUlthara yeah, I don't agree either, but Codeberg is a project ran by volunteers, and they can do what they want with it. I do think that this weakens the attempt to have an open source alternative to GitHub, a goal I agree with, and that's why I kept Catodon and a couple of other projects on Codeberg, even though the service is not always reliable. Oh well, there's always self-hosting - although I understand that many people don't want to maintain one more thing, so this will probably send more projects to GitHub.

Catodon is now up to date with Sharkey's develop

Catodon was supposed to be based on Sharkey's stable branch, but since Sharkey hasn't had a new non-security release for around a year (latest stable is based on Misskey from April 2025), I went through the commits that have been made on develop since then, and merged the ones that apply to Catodon, or adapted them wherever needed. Some bug fixes were already fixed independently on Catodon, but there were a lot of upstream fixes and performance improvements that I merged (mostly the amazing work Hazelnoot has done on Sharkey), resulting in over 100 new commits.

So, Catodon's next stable version, 26.8.0, will be up to date with Sharkey's latest develop where it matters/applies. If Sharkey stays stagnant, I might start merging commits directly from Misskey, but I'll give it some time, hopefully Sharkey gets back on its feet soon 🙏

#catodon #sharkey

@jsalvador tbh I find forgejo more convenient, it was the first platform I used (in the calckey days) and I never felt really at home when Firefish moved to gitlab. Plus forgejo is supposed to be much lighter, and I would like to avoid having to upgrade the server - this project already costs me a lot per month, and donations haven't exactly flown so far. Also, because this isn't a collaborative project at the coding level (like it is at the testing and brainstorming/design levels), I'm not sure it would really matter.

I totally respect Codeberg's decision to disallow projects with mostly AI-generated code - we should all be doing things the way we want, especially in open source. I am very thankful to Codeberg for hosting us until now, and I want to avoid github like the plague, so I will most probably set up a forgejo instance for Catodon (and a couple of other projects) in the coming days. Hopefully, this should also give our repo better uptime.

Custom timelines and Mastodon-compatible quotes deployed on catodon.rocks

You can now test both features =)
To demonstrate custom timelines, I have added !catodon-talks as a separate timeline for all users - you can add Custom feeds, Lists, RSS feeds and forums as timelines, and set any timeline as Home!

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#catodon