We are happy to announce the availability of the release candidate for the upcoming Friendica 2022.09 release, to focus on fixing existing bugs and smoothing out of rough edges..

Since June we have fixed around 30 filed tickets from the issue tracker, around 70 pull requests have been labeled as enhancements. Among these the highlights are

• the Gàidhlig translation was added to the repository, thanks to the work of @gunchleoc,
• the user settings about which notifications should be displayed and which not have been reworked,
• the 2FA login has also been reworked, and
• it was discovered that using the Blowfish algorithm is implying a password length limit of 72 characters. Should you use a longer password, this will be transparently dealt with upon your next login.

In addition there has been some work on improving the performance of handling postings and completing discussion threads. The procession of the database contents to reflect the changes in the database structure might take some time and cause additional system LOAD on your servers.

What is Friendica

Friendica is a decentralised communications platform, you can use to host your own social media server that integrates with independent social networking platforms (like the Fediverse or Diaspora*) but also some commercial ones like Twitter.

How to use the 2022.09 RC Version of Friendica

If you want to help in the release process, you can checkout the 2022.09-rc branch from the git repositories (core and addons).

git fetch
git checkout 2022.09-rc
git pull
bin/composer.phar install --no-dev

Note that you only need to pull the composer dependencies in the core repository.

Should the upgrade process of the database get stuck

If you encounter this, please initiate the DB update manually from the command line by running the script

./bin/console dbstructure update

from the base of your Friendica installation. If the output contains any error message, please let us know using the channels mentioned above.

What to do with Quirks

The 2022.09-rc phase is meant to identify and preferable resolve quirks and bugs that should not be in the 2022.09 release, but have slipped through so far. So if you switch your node to the 2022.09-rc version of Friendica, please let us know about rough edges you find, either at the issue tracker (github account required), in the support forum or in the development forum.

Thanks a lot for helping with the release 🙂