The main highlight of this release: A search server has appeared in the Moera ecosystem! It works on the same principle as Google or any other internet search engine: it collects all posts and comments from all blogs (except private and friends-only) and indexes them. Thanks to this, Moera now has search, hashtags, and recommendations.

New Features

Search. In the top left corner of the page (at the top center on mobile), you’ll see the name of the owner of the blog you’re currently viewing. Click on it to open a search bar, where you can enter a username, nickname, or any text you want to find. This opens the search page, where you can specify exactly what you’re looking for: people, posts, comments, or everything at once. You can also select where to search: everywhere, in this blog, or in your own blog.

On the right, there’s a filter button, letting you search for your own comments, replies to your comments, posts with a single or multiple images, posts containing embedded video, or by an approximate date range. When searching within your own blog, you can also search through your news feed.

You can also enable safe search—in this case, posts and comments flagged by a sheriff as violating the rules are excluded from results. Note that safe search is not mandatory: the search engine indexes all public content, and you can turn safe search off for a specific query or globally in your settings. Additionally, multiple sheriffs can mark content according to their own rules, and you can choose the sheriff whose moderation approach suits you best. (This setting is already available, but I’m still working on the sheriff’s user interface.)

Hashtags. All hashtags you add (or have previously added) in posts or comments are now highlighted and searchable—either via the search bar or simply by clicking a hashtag. You can specify multiple hashtags in the search bar to search for any of them. Hashtag search results are shown in reverse chronological order (unlike text search, which sorts by relevance). All the same filters described above are available for hashtag search as well.

Recommendations. The most frequently asked question in Moera right now is, “How do I find someone here?” If a user isn’t subscribed to anyone, their feed needs something to fill it. That’s where the search engine comes in: it offers recommendations based on post popularity, likes, and comments from users you already follow. Unlike... other social networks, recommendations in Moera supplement the posts you’ve subscribed to, rather than replace them. I’ve aimed to keep recommendations minimal; once your feed is full, they’ll almost disappear (you might see just a few per day to help you discover new people). Recommended posts are marked with a label, and there’s a “Do not recommend” option in the post menu to remove posts from that author from your recommendations.

You can adjust the number of recommendations in your settings, or disable them entirely. Similarly to safe search (see above), you can enable or disable safe recommendations.

New users and those returning after a long absence get a bonus in recommendations for their posts.

Text recognition in images. Moera can now recognize text in images using the third-party OCR.space service. Text extracted from images will appear in page titles and in notifications for likes and comments, and it is searchable. Recognition quality is very high, even for handwritten text. Unfortunately, Hebrew is not supported 🙁

Other Changes

• Fixed an issue in the visual editor with recognizing Backspace on on-screen keyboards (thanks to Tigra for reporting).
• Fixed a similar issue with the @ key on on-screen keyboards.
• Pressing @ again in the name selection dialog now closes the dialog and inserts @ into the editor. So to insert a lone @, just tap the @ key twice.
• If you select text and click "Comment" under a post, the selected text is inserted as a quote in the comment editor (thanks to Tigra for the suggestion).
• In the date selection dialog, navigation button sizes and positions were adjusted, and a year selection button was added.
• Relative dates (“3 months ago”) are now displayed in a more compact format.
• Fixed word wrapping for long words in the comment visual editor.
• Fixed “jumpy” highlighting when selecting text in the visual editor with the keyboard.
• Fixed a bug when checking usernames during registration (thanks to @Fridka for reporting).
• It is now possible to complain to the sheriff from desktop.
• Text struck through using Unicode tricks is now replaced with properly marked-up strikethrough text when pasted into the editor.
• The image upload dialog no longer has a caption input field, since it was often confused with the post text field. To add a caption, now click the uploaded image or choose image editing from the menu.
• The “Mention” button was removed from the user card popup, since nobody used it and it didn’t work in the visual editor.
• The negative reaction “Absurd” is now shown as a clown emoji.
• Reduced the number of red error messages in non-critical situations.
• The redux-saga library in the client was replaced with custom middleware based on async/await, reducing interface lag.
• The moera-commons package is now obsoleted and archived. The new moeralib library is used instead.
• Removed the dependency on jsonrpc4j, as it is no longer maintained.
• Node package size increased significantly due to the addition of the LanguageTool library, which is used for cleaning up OCR results.
• The node and search engine are now compiled into JAR format, not WAR.