5mincrush
Toot!.app ↙︎↙︎↙︎One thing that many people have requested is notification icon badges for Toot!. The main reason they have not been implemented is that I've always found the use of notification badges a very toxic pattern to drive addictive behaviour on social media apps, always trying to nudge you back to opening the app.
I was thinking, though, that this mainly applies to things like favourites and other things that you don't REALLY need to know right now. So I was thinking enabling them for mentions only (and maybe some other things that require immediate attention like admin report notifications) might make sense. What do you think?
No! Boo to badges!
I guess just mentions is fine?
I want badges ALL THE TIME for EVERYTHING
I just like answering polls
Poll ended at .
David Chartier@tootapp Enabling them for a few, curated options is a good idea for the people who want it (like mentions and admin reports).
Make them opt-in for sure, don't enable any by default. A useful tool and people can choose to use it.
AccordionBruce@tootapp
I never knew about likes or follows on Twitter, but I know about them here because i don’t know how to see mentions without all of the notifications
I tried in preferences, but it didn’t seem to work?
I want to silo away the addictive follows and likes
I certainly don’t want notifications for them all
Eddie Dinel@tootapp configurability is KEY for this. Let me choose.
Ehler@tootapp It’s very easy in Settings to turn off badges without turning off other notifications for user control here.
@ehler To make an overly extreme simile, it's also very easy to just not buy and drink alcohol. The point of addictive behaviours is that you can't rely on user choice alone.
@tootapp My first part of that is that the service determines addictive behavior more than the app. I think the behavior of 3rd-party apps in Twitter were good cases of this the last ~5 years.
But the real reason I bring it up is to point out the system builds in a way to disable this for every app, guaranteeing a choice to *not* have it, but without building it yourself, users can’t opt in *to* have it. I’m not dying for the feature myself.
But the real reason I bring it up is to point out the system builds in a way to disable this for every app, guaranteeing a choice to *not* have it, but without building it yourself, users can’t opt in *to* have it. I’m not dying for the feature myself.
@ehler The system way is opt-out, though, which seems insufficient, and there's no way around that. Apple are making it easier to access though which is great.
@tootapp I get that. The most you could do in that case (other than building a redundant set of settings for it yourself that starts with it disabled?) is have a Settings deep link to it that is prominent – in the notifications tab itself?
le kendall 
@tootapp I really would like badges (just mentions) for toot! Because I don’t want to be checking it every day… I do want to pop in when someone is engaging with what I am saying, and the banner notifications sometimes draw me in when I am doing something else. The badges are more unobtrusive to me because I only see them when I am on my Home Screen. I know other people find them distracting on the screen - but you can disable badges app-by-app in the settings anyway.
For Twitter I ended up getting enough engagement there that there’s basically replies all the time so I switched the badges off.
I think it would be great to have the badge notifications configurable like the banner notifications (so we can choose if a badge is for mentions only, or private mentions only (if that is possible). Or if someone wants to have badges for favourites I guess they can do that (I would not want to do that but someone would and it would be cool to have that if they do)
JamesGecko@tootapp Elk shows the notification bubble for everything and it drives me crazy. 95% of the time it's something minor I don't care about like a poll ending or an edited post, but it also might be something I care about like human interaction!
Mike Cohen@tootapp I don’t use Toot due to its lack of badges.
Kevin 
@tootapp On the one hand, mentions are really the only thing I want notification badge for. I use badge numbers as an indication of “Here’s something that requires your attention” and likes and boosts are not something that requires my attention.
On the other hand I feel like it would be presumptuous of me to be like “I only care about mentions so anyone who wants something other than that is wrong”. So my preferred choice would be to allow people to choose what they want on the badge in the same way they can choose which notifications they want and just have them all off by default.
Jocelynephiliac 
@tootapp just make it configurable
Dimitry
Michael Abon 
@tootapp I love Overcast’s microcopy on their badge setting: “Show the number of unfinished episodes on Overcast‘s icon to add stress to your life”
Manuel Wenger (old account)@tootapp I have another argument against badges: I've never seen an app that implements them right. They will always be off and never reset when you read stuff from another device. I essentially turned badges off everywhere. But I guess many people like them, so why not 😊
@manuch This is because it is very hard to synchronise them between devices, as they rely on incoming notification from the server to update at all. You can implement this right, but it requires careful synchronisation between serverside and clientside state, which Mastodon just doesn't have support for (and I'm not even sure if the web pushes Mastodon uses CAN support it).
@tootapp Yes, I understand that. I believe the only way to do it right is by implementing the sync purely clientside, but that would require a serverside component operated by the app developer (sending push notifications to clear badges etc), which is probably out of scope.
kimu@tootapp I had not really thought about this, but now that you’ve mentioned it, I wonder if this is part of what I really like about Toot. It has a very low stress vibe that seems to fit mastodon very well.
@kimu The most obvious choices made in the design to lower stress is to not have notification badges, and to not show post statistics on the timeline.
JamesTDG@tootapp maybe provide it as a feature that is toggled off by default?
Piotr Kotnis@tootapp missing badges was the number one reason I stopped using toot! ☹️ i would love to have them as an opt-in option.
@harmag See the follow-up question, though: Would having badges only for mentions be a good option for you?
@tootapp have some faith in your users, and let them control the notifications 😉
I personally would like to have a badge notifications for mentions, new follows and boosts, but I can see how this can differs per person.
Jeff@tootapp I imagine notification badges are limited in terms of display options. But something very “toot!” like might be to change the icon slightly instead of a badge. Maybe the little elephant holds a flag in its trunk, something like that, if there’s at least one notification.
https://docs.mobile.sailthru.com/docs/changing-icons-with-push-notifications
iOS: Changing Icons with Push Notifications
Starting in iOS 10.3, Apps are able to maintain a set alternate icons which can be switched by the user at runtime. Imagine being able to theme your App Icon based on your home team in a sports app? Or have an icon change to reflect a Sale or campaign, such as Halloween?Setting up the iconsFor this ...
@box464 I'd love that but I don't think that trick would actually work very well. You need to do the change from a notification extension, and I don't think they allow changing the icon.
@tootapp I figured but it’s alway good to throw an idea out there in case it sparks something else. The other thought I had was making the trunk go up to the top right corner. When a badge comes in it would look like they are holding a little ball on their trunk. I know I’m weird. 😅
@box464 This is absolutely the kind of thing I would spend a week doing instead of doing anything useful, if it were possible.
oshy@tootapp why not make it opt in only?
@ocean I think having a badge for stuff like getting a new favourite just doesn't make sense, and the only reason apps like Twitter do it is to drive you to open the app more. There's just no situation where that is important enough that you would want to be informed that forcefully about it, and giving users an option where one choice is always wrong is not good design.
Kit Bashir@tootapp I’m with you there, I turn off all badges in all my apps. It’s a breath of fresh air!
Here’s an anti-addiction feature request: I’m at the top of my timeline and have ten minutes to kill. I scroll down till I find the gap, tap fill down, scroll, tap, repeat. 3 gapsful is about right. Now I read up, over coffee. Is there any way to do “jump to next gap”, or otherwise streamline this “there’s too much to read, so I’ll just read the top N toots” use-case?
Ferles 
@tootapp I have notification badges turned off on my phone for all social media because of that very reason