My first real deep-dive into #Firefish over the last 36 hours has been frenetic, steeply learning, fun & amazing [31/7/23].
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Firefish's GUI & hugely granular Settings are a pretty different beast from #Mastodon, so i've had heaps of learning, setting up, fiddling & finessing to do. I've reached a point now where it's seriously good, in many ways a far better UX than in Masto... & yet sadly, i believe that for now i need to leave it alone for a while & return to Mastodon as my daily socials client.
Fwiw, self-notes i've just scribbled down for my later reference.
#FirefishBugs
1. Atm impossible to stop timelines auto-updating [no #SlowMode per Masto], & this is stressful. Albeit they don't AU when already scrolled down from the top, but if i'm reading the top toot the t/l can & does reload sans-warning & displace my toot being read by however many new toots just arrived. This is hugely discombobulating!
2. Atm no native way to globally stop Boosts appearing in my Home timeline [in Masto this is simple via one click]. I had to use the clumsy inefficient workaround of manually muting boosts for each individual account i Follow.
3. The #Firefish paradigm afaict is fundamentally different to Masto in that for the latter, my Home t/l remains useful even if i Follow no other accounts, coz it's populated with my Followed Hashtags plus any Followed accounts. Given my strong preference is to follow myriad tags, but minimal accounts, that's great for me. Otoh in Firefish the Home t/l seems to be exclusively for toots from accounts i follow, ergo, if i choose to follow nobody, this t/l is empty.
4. As said, Followed Hashtags do not appear in my Home timeline. I had to create an Antenna for them, then display it as a parallel timeline. This causes me cognitive overload & partially duplicated reading work.
5. This one might be The Killer though. There's an official Bug re Antennas, whereby they only show a subset of the targets, but then repeat all these over & over as one scrolls down that timeline.
It's a great pity, not only that maybe the past 36 hrs might have been a waste of time & effort, but much more importantly, IMO Firefish in many ways is already a superior* UX than Masto... but its fatal flaws atm seem a showstopper for my needs. I'll keep the tab pinned but unloaded, & keep checking in every few weeks to see if improvements might have happened.
* eg, i love these aspects [non-exhaustive list]:
- 4000-char toots... (1/2)