I have only been on Mastodon for about 10 days, but I have found the concepts easy to understand because I am familiar with Twitter. The familiarity is enhanced because the standard Mastodon web interface looks very much like TweetDeck. There were however some deficiencies in the web interface which were niggling me.
This is an account of my five-day mission to explore to the far extremeties of The Fediverse. Although I am a complete newbie to The Federation and The Fediverse I hope this very naivety has some value. If the free social network is to grow and prosper it needs to attract people who, like me, don't completely understand it.
Signing email messages is a requirement that I have several times a day. Claws Mail handles this requirement very nicely with the GPG Plugin. The plugin provides a configuration option to set a time period for the pinentry passphrase to be stored. For example, I have set the passphrase to be stored for 600 minutes. This means that when I enter the passphrase in the morning it is being cached for the rest of the working day, i.e. for 10 hours. If I need to sign an email after this period, the pinentry dialog will appear again and I re-enter the passphrase. Once entered the passphrase is stored for a further ten hours.
My continuing journey of discovery after upgrading to Debian Stretch has led me to the hidden vertical scroll-bars in some of the latest GTK3 apps. Presumably, the idea is that hiding the scrollbars gives the user more visible screen area for displaying content. Another possibility is that scrollbars are considered to be a visual distraction and should be hidden until needed. I haven't researched the motivation behind the change.
I recently did an upgrade from Debian Jessie to Stretch on my laptop which as expected, and desired, brought in a whole lot of new versions of the packages I am using. One such package was the highly configurable and versatile feed reader Liferea. One of the features of Liferea I have used for many years is the ability to open web pages in a manually selected external browser rather than the default or Liferea's built-in browser.