aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaand so, here be me, back yet again almost* at the beginning, the wheel not so much having turned full circle perhaps as derailed from the track & buggered orf into the scrub & mulga, startling the emus & irritating the yowies. 🙄🤦‍♀️

* Masto again, yes, but not the actual Masto web UI itself, given it's just too painful & a bit ugh, but instead, one of the #FOSS front-ends for it, being #Phanpy, notwithstanding its UI still has all the stuff that historically kept making me drop it. sadly, i'm here not so much out of explicit favour for it, but simply as an exhausted fallback position coz all these months & years have shown me that all the alternatives are on balance worse [& just for fun, each specialising in different aspects of "wrongness"].

• Phanpy [for Masto] still irritates me for its

  • weird Notifications UI,
  • stubborn refusal to include an emoji-picker for standard emojis,
  • disruptive habit of auto-reloading the timelines when scrolled to near the top rather than letting me manually choose,
  • inability to globally suppress boosts in Lists,
  • irritating need to open an overlay just to fav a post...
  • BUT it wins major brownie points with me for its
    • success in letting me see posts' video thumbnails & play them without having to jump outside P to the original source site PLUS
    • its apparent ability to let me create hashtag lists for more than merely five as limited by the actual Masto UI, AND it seems to do a fine job in fetching ample numbers of so-tagged posts from across fedi

• #Statuzer [for Masto] had my heart for many months over recent years, at the times i would try Masto again, but today when i tried it again i could not see any way to create any dedicated timelines for nominated hashtags

  • CORRECTION: my silly error, it can indeed do this, yay

• #Sharkey is aesthetically gorgeous, has a great array of settings options, a really clever flexible UI, brilliant hashtag timelines capability... but

  • it uses #MFM not #Markdown & i find this frustratingly limiting
  • yesterday i realised that if not all then a significant majority of others' posts, & all of mine, that include videos [eg, youtube & dailymotion], neither provide any graphical thumbnail nor allow said videos to be played directly in the UI [as i said, some do, which is great, but most don't]. Reference thread; https://blahaj.zone/notes/ak1ohqcgacpa0007
  • additionally today i discovered a distressing perplexing problem, by chance; a strayan account that whilst not actually following does frequently appear in my hashtag-follows in all the other fedi SW, simply does not appear at all in my Sharkey timelines, & if i try manually searching for them [once alerted to their existence via the hours of comparison i have been doing today & am here summarising], the searches fail with cryptic errors. this has rocked my confidence in Sharkey in that by extrapolation & inference, how many other posts have been hidden from me when i've been using Sharkey?

• #Friendica is a complex love-hate story; over the past 3.5 years i've tried many F instances, with my original sense of overwhelm gradually subsiding into understanding & enjoyment. i really do like it, but recently left my active instances yet again, coz:

  • compared to Masto-original, Statuzer, Phanpy, Sharkey, every Friendica instance's UI is lethargic in responding to various UI-navigation interactions, but
  • the worst problem has become terminal; i follow large nos of hashtags no matter which fedi SW & instance, but Friendica uniquely suffers the major problem that small instances simply do not adequately federate such that large swathes of my hashtags fetch few hits & many fetch none, whereas on larger instances though the hit-rate is acceptable two separate Admins, ie two different instances, told me that following large nos of tags causes them severe problems at their servers, which news shocked me & made me feel terrible for being an unwitting problem to them. Nonetheless, i "must" have my hashtags, ergo sadly Friendica & i have again fallen out of love it seems

i don't for a minute expect this to be the end of the story, given my history... 🥺

I also do this with the #Stylebot (https://tinyurl.com/24b7jtmr) chrome extension in order to modify most of the websites I frequent to change font size, letter-spacing, line-height, table cell padding and much more. It makes using sites more enjoyable by far and less triggering (to me). As well as, to an extent, standardizing the layouts and experience across the internet. How positively APPLE of me!

First pic is #Statuzer in browser without my Stylebot CSS applied. Second is with.