There is a Ruby port [1] publicly available. From the encoding routine [2], it seems to be an sRGB correction followed by a two-dimensional DCT. The first two bytes encode parameters---the size of the output matrix n x m and the quantization scale used for ACs; next 4 bytes encode the DC, then (nm-1) quantized ACs (2 bytes per AC) follow. The comparison to Facebook's similar solution [3] would be interesting (but I realize that Blurhash tries to hide explicit images, so technically they have different goals).

[1] https://github.com/Gargron/blurhash/

[2] https://github.com/Gargron/blurhash/blob/master/ext/blurhash...

[3] https://code.fb.com/android/the-technology-behind-preview-ph...

Reminds me of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15053064

I normally hate this kind of blur and I'm not sure if this is worth such a big release note. I normally see such filters applied (forced on users by platform conventions), requiring a login to "unlock" and often you find yourself wondering why it was blocked in the first place....

Could be good to hide spoilers thought

How does Mastodon handle governance for content that gets reported? It sounds like a logistics nightmare. It's nice that the apps are getting a way to blur things, but I would imagine that the bigger problem would be bad actors running instances, and finding ways to keep them away.

I really like the idea of Mastodon, but i can't shake this feeling that their name is kind of awful. I get that they're not trying to be exactly like twitter but by comparison, twitter is a much bubblier and friendlier word.

Now if only certain instances would actually default to marking all their content as adult content. This is great to have but useless when certain 18+ instances just bare all kinds of smut clear to the timeline. (I'm talking mainly of the *blr instances, in case you haven't already hidden them for yourselves.)

I feel like "BlurHash" is a misleading name, since it's not a hash of the image data that gets created, it's just highly compressed to just some data about the colours used. Unless I'm misunderstanding something?