Today we have branched off the release candidate branch for the next stable release of Friendica which is scheduled for March. If you want to help finding rough edges and bogus behavior and hopefully fix them before the upcoming release, please checkout the new 2024.03-rc branch and report problems that you encounter.

The most notable changes in this release are:

• We could optimize the performance in some areas.
• The channel feature got some extensions.
• An OCR addon was added to generate missing captions from images.

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 Tumbler and BlueSky.

How to use the 2024.03 RC Version of Friendica

If you want to help in the release process, you can checkout the 2024.03-rc branch from the git repositories.

git fetch
git checkout 2024.03-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 2024.03-rc phase is meant to identify and preferable resolve quirks and bugs that should not be in the 2024.03 release, but have slipped through so far. So if you switch your node to the 2024.03-rc version of Friendica, please let us know about rough edges you find, either at the issue tracker (github account required), in the support group or in the developmers group.

Thanks a lot for helping with the release 🙂