Great, all right, hi, I'm Mario and I'm here to talk about elk, which is nimble master
done client, so I'd like to start maybe a quick show of hands, who here has tried out,
all right, that's a really, really nice result.
Yeah, so for those who are not familiar with it, I guess I hope, by the end of the talk,
you'll have some curiosity to check it out.
If you do want to check it out, it's in elk that zone.
So yes, I am, and you can find me in the Fediverse, that's my handle, at iCloud.io.
Also, I'm a tongue twister, I guess.
So let's start with the trivia, did you know that elk is one of the few surviving species
that lived at the same time as the master done?
That's true, that's true.
Yeah, so we kind of wanted to stick to the lore there, there are actually friends,
I guess, unless master done it's elk, but I don't know, but we're not here to talk about animals,
we're here to talk about the software, the free and open software.
So just a simple, I guess, agenda, I'd like to just quick look back at the backstory
where did it start and where the people behind it, and then I chose a few highlights of the
features, but there's definitely more, and then at that end we'll try to answer what
now, where is it headed?
Yeah, so if you remember around November, 2022, there was a huge Twitter migration, I was one
of them, I signed up to foster done for a year in November, 2022, and then around December,
when the holidays came, I set up my own instance, which at the, the elk project, I'm
started with the people, the main core maintainers of this project.
So if you're familiar with the view nuts, these are the people who started it, and in fact,
I don't know if I'm allowed to say, but the first name of elk is not actually a, it's a
not studded, so they view that as a golden application, where they would showcase how they
themselves would build a real life application, so that's how it started, it's still placed an
important role in that ecosystem, so when they release new features that they would check out
if it broke. Yeah, that's how it started, where do I fit in the story? I'm not actually part of
that ecosystem, I'm a long time consultant for a different texture, and that's how it is mostly
for the front end. Yeah, so this is one of the first message I put in there discord when they invited
me, it's still, yeah, so this is December, it's still closed, I guess we were around 50 people there,
I said by the way, I'm not a view depth, so I have zero confidence contributing to the hold,
that that's how it started for me, but I did end up learning the code and I was able to put some
features there, thank you. So when I joined, it was just a lot of text, there were images of course,
but I was the first to implement preview cards and then a bunch of improvements on that. I implemented
the MasterDone filters API, so it respected your filters there, so if you know those closing and
opening eyes, that's the UI that I worked on, and then the latest one that I'm proud of is the embedded
midge player. If you share YouTube, YouTube, or SoundCloud, or Funkoil, it will expand to a nice UI that respects
the primary color that you choose for yourself. Yeah, and then how is it going for the whole project?
We are proud that we started 2022, and now we have a couple of hundred contributors scattered around
the globe. Elk is now provided in 34 languages, we have 12 known, community deployments, although when
I posted it in our Discord, some people say, hey, we actually deployed it ourselves as well.
So there's probably more, we don't track the users, so we don't, after, you know.
Yeah, so features time, as I said, there's way more, so this is kind of opinionated, I chose for
that I think is a differentiator compared to other clients. So it started very much like a developer
centric client, so one of the nice things in it, it made sharing code so much fun, so if you combine
that with MasterDone's high maximum current limit, it's just, before the way you would share code
would be a screenshot of your IDE, it's always images, but without, it's actually you can copy
paste the code, and it will do syntax highlighting. There's a lot of languages supported,
don't code me on this, but I think if GitHub supports that language, it's, uh, it supports it,
so do check it out if you like sharing code. To expand on that, we support a mark down
formatting, so this is just a client, it supports any MasterDone instance that you have,
uh, the formatting happens in your browser. So it's nice if you would like to be more expressive
in your post, I guess, emphasize some words, then you can use this. We have some photos on well-being,
there's a lot of well-being preferences in it. One of them, if you don't like being stimulated by
too much color in your screen, you can toggle gray scale, and it will make all images gray scale,
even the avatars. Right, so you can also toggle Zen mode, this is one of my favorites, if you just
like reading posts, um, yeah, it hides everything else, it's just for reading. If you'd like to follow
the first them hashtag and not engage too much, it hides engagement buttons and all other, uh, you
guys, and actually there's a fine, great way to hide a lot of stuff. You can hide boost count,
favorite count, and engage, other engagement counts, I guess. And you can hide the emojis in
user names, uh, if that annoys you for some reason, um, you can hide news, which refers to the new
tab in the explorer, uh, tab. Uh, I think this is the last, uh, different shade or feature kind of
that I picked. It, um, it arranges status posts in your timeline in a chronological order, uh, so that's
just easier to understand when you're, uh, yeah, reading threads in your timeline. Uh, that's it,
uh, as a last part of the talk, uh, yeah, uh, we're pretty much the new kid in town. We just
started 2022, uh, at least compared to the other, uh, projects in the Fediverse. We, we are a big fan of
the Fediverse, um, so we still have big ambitions for the project. One of them, um, it helps guide
the maintainers in choosing what to focus on. Uh, first we would like to, uh, be of feature parity
with master. I know I keep saying master done and the Fediverse is bigger than the master done,
but this is just to create focus for for the maintainers. I've seen success for BRS that are
specifically for, uh, forks and other Fediverse servers, as well. Um, second, I see there's a bunch
of administration features that are still missing in, uh, out, that's one thing that we can work on.
And thirdly, I don't know if you remember Mozilla, that social, so they experimented having their own,
thing, they, they, uh, connected their Mozilla accounts as, um, as the main, uh, uh, I guess user
database, and then they forked out as, as, as packaged front and to that. And that gave really,
uh, focus on single server deployments. And that's what it means. Uh, basically, uh, packaging,
out as, uh, full replacement to the master done, uh, web, uh, application. So those are three big things
that, uh, are still yet to happen. Um, yeah. So if you're curious, please join us, go to chat that
zone. That's a good place to start. I'm going to be dropping other links in the matrix, uh, server,
as well. But yeah, I'm there. The maintainers are there. Uh, if you would like to share
memes as well, that's always well. Thank you so much.