Pixelfed, the federated social image-sharing platform, recently pushed out a major new release. The pace of development has rapidly increased over the past few months, and even after the 0.8.0 release was announced a week ago, numerous fixes and improvements have already trickled in. Now on 0.8.4, the platform sports numerous improvements. Let’s dig in to the things that stand out most.

New Mobile UI

The most notable improvement made is the presence of a better, easier to navigate mobile interface. It’s quite good, and many of the kinks in earlier iterations have been completely ironed out. Overall, it feels speedy, and on a phone the UI looks quite handsome.

New Compose UI

Another major improvement is the addition of a new compose box, which includes live filtering capabilities. The experience meshes beautifully with the application, and works well on desktop and mobile.

Improved federation support

The new release brings in many fixes and improvements to how Pixelfed federates with other platforms. An asyncronous library is now being used to ensure faster message dispatches in the federation process, object deletion is now properly supported across different platforms, and it’s now possible to follow a Pixelfed account from Pleroma!

Many of these building blocks will come together to incorporate the final missing pieces, such as a proper dialog form for remote following and a dedicated network timeline.

New mobile APIs

Pixelfed also ships with some new mobile APIs. The first client to have taken advantage of this is Fedilab, a popular app for Android. In theory, this means that app developers can now make use of tighter integrations with the underlying platform.

All in all, this is shaping up to be an exciting release, and we can’t wait to see what comes next for Pixelfed!