Ryan HeuserFeb 10, 2023

Introducing my hobby coding project since xmas:

Mastotron!

It's a different interface to Mastodon, replacing the mindless "feed" of most social media with a network map of conversations and recent and popular posts.

👉 You can download it here: https://github.com/quadrismegistus/mastotron 🖖

There's easy, double-click installation for Mac and Linux; Windows is a bit trickier for now.

This is b new, so bound to be bugs. But if you can, give it a whirl, and let me know if it works and what you'd like to see!

GitHub - quadrismegistus/mastotron: A different interface to mastodon, and other experiments in social media

A different interface to mastodon, and other experiments in social media - GitHub - quadrismegistus/mastotron: A different interface to mastodon, and other experiments in social media

GitHub
Show threadRyan HeuserFeb 10, 2023
Some pictures:
Show threadTed Underwood
@heuser Is the layout defined by any sort of similarity space re: tweet content, or is it a force-directed graph?
Feb 10, 2023 at 3:00amWeb
Show threadRyan HeuserFeb 10, 2023

@TedUnderwood Nodes are almost entirely positioned by those two axes on bottom left: most recent (top) to least (bottom); least engaged-with (left) to most (right). But at the last second a force layout tries to push them away from each other to make them more legible.

I tried a lot of layouts and found ones like this, conveying something mundane but specific & meaningful, were more cognitively satisfying than a force layout or the content vector similarity I tried, (tho I'd like to try again)