Hello everyone,

It's been a few months since the last update. As 2024 is drawing to a close, I'd like to share what's been going on with my personal projects. A lot has happened in these months, like in the whole year 2024. It's been a great year for my personal projects. Version 5 of floccus is stable now which gave me time to work on the icing on the cake, rather than the fillings. Here is my update of what I've done with the time you have helped sponsor.

First up, don't get me wrong, working on the fillings, the guts of floccus has been quite fulfilling as well (no pun intended). Introducing location types throughout the code base to track where each synced item comes from fixed at least 6 correctness bugs, I'm proud to say. I was also finally able to solve the problem with the inflationary duplication of sync files in GoogleDrive, as well as the annoying "Failed to map parentId" error in the mobile app. Another long-awaited problem was tab sync: Two-way sync never really worked well with tabs, and a few weeks ago I finally had the time to deeply look into and eventually solve the issues there. Two-way tab sync should now finally be a good experience with floccus! Yay. With your support, I’m tackling these intricate issues one step at a time!

But the rewarding work is always on the user-visible features. In v5.3 I was able to introduce support for syncing with linkwarden. I wanted to add another backend option with a graphical user interface, as quite some people are turned off by floccus because of having to install nextcloud to get access to Nextcloud Bookmarks for a graphical server side component. Linkwarden is a good alternative for this. I chose it because it has a somewhat stable financial base with its SaaS offering and is also a low entry barrier for people that look at floccus not so much from the selfhosting privacy perspective, but rather from a simple cross-browser sync perspective.

In v5.4 I decided to show some love to the mobile app, as quite some feature requests had piled up over the months, while I was busy fixing syncing intricacies. Both on Android and iOS you can now create folders ad hoc while creating a bookmark, search is smarter and shows results from other folders in a separate section in addition to those from the current folder. It also now remembers the sorting criteria for the bookmarks list between sessions, which was a long awaited feature. And when a profile is stuck in the dreaded 'scheduled' mode where floccus is waiting for other clients to clear the lock, you can now force a sync to happen, if you're sure there is nothing else syncing right now.

I've also spent some time on Nextcloud Bookmarks as my recommended backend for floccus. With Nextcloud 30 came the need to update to the new design, which was a bit of a hassle, but I still had time to work on many smaller patches which sometimes even came out of floccus issues with synchronisation gone wrong. That's some nice synergy there! If you have ideas for Nextcloud Bookmarks, head over to github and file an issue and if you're a happy user already, you can give me a smile this Christmas season by giving it a review on https://apps.nextcloud.com/apps/bookmarks <3

I'd also like to give some transparency and disclose how much money I've received to help fuel these efforts: Thanks to your generosity, throughout this year, I've raised, on average, 580€ per month, 30% of which came from recurring donations. This helps cover development time for new features and bug fixes as well as support via github. My monthly goal is 950€. This year, we reached roughly 60% of that -- thank you!

As always, I'm very grateful for the support I've received from everyone of you in working on these projects. Whether it’s your donations, feedback, or words of encouragement, every bit helps to keep this project alive and thriving. You are a vital part of this journey! Thank you to all of you who continue to support me in these efforts!

Also, by all means, feel free to shoot me a message, if you have feedback, ideas, critique or just want to say hi.

All the best and godspeed to you, wherever you may be right now :)

Marcel