Mastodawn

Shauna GM Jan 19, 2024

My biggest complaint about mastodon these days is how easy it is to miss things in the flood of posts. A good problem to have! But has anybody solved it?

A while back I made a list of accounts that I especially wanted to see updates from, but there's no way to filter out boosts from those accounts so it's still pretty unmanageable. You can filter out boosts from your home timeline, but not a list timeline, I'm pretty sure.

Any advice?

Update: solved it (I think!) https://social.coop/@shauna/111783099957849233

Shauna GM (@[email protected])

@brecht @[email protected] Omg this is it! It's perfect! Thank you! I tried using phanpy a while back, but didn't like the boost carousel feature overall, so I went back to Elk. But that feature is exactly what I need in this use case. And using two separate front-ends eliminates the need to toggle it on and off. I'll just set phanpy 'boost carousel' to on, and bookmark this specific list, and then whenever I want *just* to catch up on the posts from people I know, I'll click the bookmark. Thank you!!

social.coop

@shauna So— from a design/tech perspective, I *have* seen a solution!

Cohost (it's a Tumblr-like treehouse social network) has this cool "Following" page where rather than the usual linear feed, they list *people*. Two panes, one is everyone you follow sorted by who-posted-first, click one and see their recent posts on the right. This means if one person is posting 10x as much as everyone else, they probably get sorted to the top, but they don't take up any more *room* than anyone else.

mcc Jan 19, 2024

@shauna You could imagine a variant of this where instead of sorting by most-recent, it remembers whose posts you've seen and surfaces people whose most recent posts you haven't read. A big problem I think is how to keep visible the posts of people who only post once a week, where some people post several times a day. (Back on Twitter I had a list named "low hz" for exactly this purpose, curated for people I knew who made infrequent but well-considered posts… but I kept forgetting to check it.)

Shauna GM Jan 19, 2024

@mcc Yeah, this is a neat design.

I just wish it were easier for people to make UX innovations like this to Mastodon (or elsewhere in the fediverse) without having to dedicate weeks of their life to getting all of the other fiddly bits of setting up a server, learning AP protocol, etc. My kingdom for a fediverse app with a vibrant plugin ecosystem!

mcc Jan 19, 2024

@shauna Yeah! There's the client API, but knowing the client API exists isn't the same as knowing "and here's the repo I clone to get a tiny React app that's already logged in to the client API, and can grab whatever it needs for whatever it wants to do".

I put a bunch of effort into learning the Tusky codebase so I could make little Tusky UI experiments on a whim. Which has been cool and promising! But it goes on hold whenever Tusky's refactoring. And nothing I make will work outside Android.

Ralph Waldo Pickle Chips Jan 19, 2024

@mcc @shauna the api does exist, but i don't think the current api could implement the cohost ui effectively. you could either:
- get the entire list of followed accounts (paginated, max 40 per req), get each of their most recent posts, and then sort (for a total of n+ceil(n/40) requests for n follows)
- set an arbitrary limit for the number of recent posts (still 40 per req) you're interested in and show the most recent post for each account from that subset of posts (potentially missing people who don't post frequently enough, which is the whole problem)

anyhow, sorry to sort of rant in your mentions. where i was originally going was that i'm coming around on graphql because it makes this sort of client-side ui experimenting feasible

mcc Jan 19, 2024

@shadowfacts @shauna I think a graphql endpoint in the client API would be *fun*.

One difficulty is the social anathema on Mastodon against third-party mass indexing/"scraping". Which I am not going to say is an unreasonable norm. But a lot of creative post-viewing features like the cohost one more or less require you to dump all posts the user has visibility on into a data store and then work on it at rest. But once you do that you're pretty much "scraping".

mcc Jan 19, 2024

@shadowfacts @shauna There was a very interesting site shortly post-Twitter where you'd log in to Mastodon with this app, and it would scrape the posts *visible to you*, only those posts, and allow history search but *only posts you'd been shown*. That got shut down by public outcry within a week. And I'm torn on it because on the one hand, it wasn't doing anything you couldn't do by leaving a tab open for a week and CTRL-F'ing. But otoh once that central site's DB existed, it could be resold

mcc Jan 19, 2024

@shadowfacts @shauna Possibly if there was like… a desktop or phone app that did this kind of slurp-the-entire-timeline-then-do-searches-and-statistics-on-it thing, but *locally*, not somewhere a third party technically has access to many users' slurps at once… maybe people would be less bothered by that because it's harder to abuse? I don't know.

Ralph Waldo Pickle Chips Jan 19, 2024

@mcc @shauna yeah, I remember that kerfuffle. I think having it be local would help to a certain extent, but there's absolutely still a group of people who would object to their posts being included in someone else's instance of such an app

if it did exist, it would certainly be fun to experiment with new/better timeline ui though

t3rminus Jan 19, 2024

@shadowfacts @mcc @shauna I get wanting a private space, and respecting people’s preferences, but like… isn’t the point of social media public posts to share with the world?

One solution might be an account level preference flag, defaulting to off, for “include my posts in public indexes”?

mcc Jan 19, 2024

@t3rminus @shadowfacts @shauna Actually, we have that now (because Mastodon dot Social is now indexing posts). So you could build a index-on-behalf-of-users service and simply use the "ok to search" flag. But the less your app looks like a search, the less practical this is. Like, imagine the cohost style "posts from followers you missed" view, but users know it's missing random posts based on the search flag. They probably wouldn't use the feature at all— its entire point is to not miss stuff.

Ralph Waldo Pickle Chips Jan 19, 2024

@t3rminus @mcc @shauna I think it stems from a desire for social media to be more ephemeral. it's a reasonable desire, even if I don't agree with it, but trying to make mastodon of all things be that is a fool's errand

Julian Fietkau Jan 19, 2024

@shauna @mcc I'm like... 75% certain I've seen someone work on a Mastodon client that looks pretty much exactly like that, but I don't remember who it was or how far along it is. I think it was brought up in a context of a conversation on what if a social media client looked more like an RSS reader. Maybe it was more of a concept.

@box464 @Damon Did either of you also see what I'm remembering, and perhaps know where to find it?

Jeff Jan 19, 2024

@julian @shauna @mcc @[email protected] There's a few apps I think could help. Lists are definitely the right direction!

@MonaApp is the strongest. You can filter a list all kinds of ways (exclude boosts) and it saves your preferences (per device).

@ivory can filter any feed to exclude any combination of things. You can save the filter and use it throughout the app, too. Doesn't save your preference for a list, tho.

@radiant has a quick and simple filter on all timelines as well, to show "posts only”.

Jesse Jan 19, 2024

@julian @shauna @mcc @box464 @[email protected] Maybe Ebou? https://github.com/terhechte/Ebou

GitHub - terhechte/Ebou: A cross platform Mastodon Client written in Rust

A cross platform Mastodon Client written in Rust. Contribute to terhechte/Ebou development by creating an account on GitHub.

GitHub

Jeff Jan 19, 2024

@[email protected] @julian @misc @mcc @shauna This is the one I thought of as well! But..the TestFlight isn’t open anymore, and Shauna is linux/android.

Wraithe Jan 19, 2024

@shauna @mcc If you happen to be on macOS someone has a Mastodon client called Ebou (it’s by @terhechte) and it works by viewing your follows individually.
It’s an “experiment” but I really like it!

(Also thanks for asking this, it’s brought out a lot of people posting cool solutions!)

Jason Cosper Jan 19, 2024

@mcc @shauna IIRC, #Shuttlecraft (a single user fedi instance) can do this as well.

https://github.com/benbrown/shuttlecraft

GitHub - benbrown/shuttlecraft: a single user activitypub server - join the federation!

a single user activitypub server - join the federation! - GitHub - benbrown/shuttlecraft: a single user activitypub server - join the federation!

GitHub