bocops

Category: Development

  • Altamira – delayed boosting

    Last week, Seth Larson published some ideas about being smart when “boosting”, which is Mastodon’s term for reblogging content and thus making it visible to your own followers. The original article can be found here, but my key takeaways are the following:

    • Considering a single account, it is preferable for boosts performed by this account to be spread out over time. If they aren’t, they will only happen when the account owner is currently active, and thus likely won’t reach other users in other timezones. The boosts will also be clustered in everyone’s timeline – and no one wants to see a dozen boosts by the same person in a row.
    • Considering a single piece of content that gets boosted, it is again preferable if not all of its boosts happen at the same time but over the course of a day or two, so that it might reach a bigger audience, and reactions such as replies get spread out a bit as well.

    Seth’s suggestion is to implement functionality in Mastodon clients to boost eventually instead of immediately – and I couldn’t help picking up that idea for the app I’m experimenting with.

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  • Altamira – a Mastodon companion app

    Whenever I participated on social media platforms in the past, key functionality seemed to be unavailable. In some cases, functionality I consider to be important just might not be that useful for most other people – but in other cases, functionality that is useful would actually be detrimental to some bottom line the company considers more important than its users, and thus doesn’t get implemented.

    As just one example, I consider it to be useful for the accounts I follow, as well as those that follow me, to be checked for their activity regularly, and unfollowed automatically if they are indeed inactive – because talking into a void just isn’t fun. Follower counts are an important metric for influencer-type people and the platforms that want to attract and host them, which likely is why, as far as I am aware, none of the commercial platforms offer this functionality.

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  • How to use FirebaseUI for Android

    Firebase is an app development platform by Google, offering various services for Android, iOS and the web. The services themselves are supported by a set of open-source libraries like FirebaseUI Android. According to the Firebase Open Source website,

    FirebaseUI is an open-source library for Android that allows you to quickly connect common UI elements to Firebase APIs.

    At the time of writing this in January 2025, the latest release of this library (v8.0.2) was published in September 2022, more than 2.5 years ago. The main branch of the GitHub repository has not seen a single commit since then – and while other branches at first glance suggest that a potential v8.1.0 or even v9.x is being worked on, none of these branches have seen any meaningful changes after their respective initial commits.

    For all intents and purposes, the FirebaseUI library version that can be used today is the version that was published while Android 13 was still new and the latest Firebase BoM was v30.5.0 (compare to the most recent BoM here) – and it shows:

    • FirebaseUI depends on SafetyNet, which was announced to be deprecated in 2022, with full turndown at the end of January 2025 after an extended timeline (issue)
    • FirebaseUI does not work with Android SDK 34 released in 2023 (issue)
    • FirebaseUI can’t be compiled using a dependency on Play Services Auth >= 21.1.0 since early 2024 (issue)
    • FirebaseUI comes with its own Play Services dependencies, although those are no longer required by Firebase (issue)
    • FirebaseUI uses the deprecated Google Sign-In that will be removed in 2025 instead of Credential Manager (issue)

    Adding insult to injury, the official Firebase Auth documentation suggests to add dependencies for the even older v7.2.0 released in June 2021.

    tl;dr

    Do not use FirebaseUI for Android, because its codebase is rotten.

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