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luna, friend of eggbug

so apparently glitchsoc has a feature that lets you share a post only to your local instance, and prevent it from federating to the wider fediverse

whether a post is local-only or not is made available to clients via the not-in-vanilla-mastodon local_only: bool field in the Status struct returned by the api

on the surface, this is a neat idea, however the execution is... something.

as far as I can tell, if a post is to be local-only, the glitchsoc frontend silently appends the eye emoji (👁️) to the end of the post body, and the glitchsoc server interprets this as the signal that the post shouldn't federate

what this means in practice is that if you're on a glitchsoc instance and you explicitly make a post that ends with that emoji, the post won't federate, regardless of whether you toggled the local-only setting or not

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obligatory version details, i've observed this on v4.5.0-nightly.2025-08-30+glitch, no idea how it behaves on other versions

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@luna yeah that's how it was implemented by bea originally in like, 2018. it was truly a hack and it's persisted since then lol

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@luna hey, it works, doesn't it?

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@luna just as long as you don't want an eye emoji as the last character of a non-local post,

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@wxcafe I mean yeah, true, but on the flipside any local-only posts come with an unexplained-to-the-reader free eye emoji

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@wxcafe (to be fair it's not a feature i particularly see myself using anyways, just thought it was interesting)

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@luna Akkoma (and probably Pleroma as well) has this as well, though it is put under a `plemora` object in local api at least
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@luna oh yeah this has been a thing since near the beginning, it used to be visible (the emoji)

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@luna wait does this mean i can make a non federating rt for glitchsoc users lol

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@LottieVixen @luna still is if you use a mobile client afaict

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@s0 @LottieVixen still is on the default web frontend too

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