Been trying this out secretly for the past few weeks — a "catch-up" timeline page. Did whole bunch of iterations, where I myself is the guinea pig, but this time reaching a point where I just got to share it out in the public.
- NOT final design, still very experimental, only on my local machine
- Instead of algo timeline, this is focused on data-grid-like UI for configuring exactly what I want to see.
- This honestly could be another full-fledged app/client by itself 🫠
After a while, my usage slowly leaning towards this: grouping by authors. Feels refreshing browsing it this way. Faster to scan too.
Oh yeah, this is how it looks like on wider viewport. Kinda email-like.
#PhanpySocialDev #sneakpeek (not available on dev site yet)
Not sure where to put these, so experimentally placing them at the top for now, reusing the styles from trending news in Trending page. It's based on the post's `card` so some links are actually "quote posts" 😬
#PhanpySocialDev (not on dev site yet)
🤫 Quietly dropped on dev site #PhanpySocialDev . Feedback/bug reports welcomed 🙇♂️
Cool to see @laurenshof the first one to post about it https://indieweb.social/@laurenshof/111997146906858162
Attached: 2 images holy shit catch-up just dropped on dev.phanpy.social this is soooo fucking good @[email protected]
An experiment that I wanted to try: sort by post density — give a chance for short posts to shine among the attention-grabbing ones. Let's see how it works 🤞
Is it a combo of replies + likes + boosts among people you follow?
Sorry if I’m being dense (pun was unintended but here we are)
@FlockOfCats hmm, I guess maybe your timeline doesn't have a lot of differently-dense posts 😄
Density refers to the amount of information in the post. For example, a post with only 1 word is "lighter", a post with many words is "heavier". A post with photos is "heavier" than a post without photos, because a picture is worth a thousand words 😉
I see…I did notice that it was weighted toward photo heavy toots.
So the density is “info density” per toot. Got it!
I was confused because I was thinking it was also related to “popularity” (likes and boosts).
I’m super excited to try this out for catchup tomorrow morning. Thanks for the quick reply and your awesome work on this project!
I think “info density” or “toot size” might convey it without extra explanation. But I’d be curious what other people think is clear. 🤓
And verbosity has a slightly negative impression —many word…too many words 🤓
Edit: I also thought info density
some early feedback after playing around for a bit with it:
- its really good
- popular posts that are boosted a lot by multiple of the people you follow get duplicated when you sort by boosted
- when people post a thread, the 2nd+ comment shows as a comment, not as a reply. i get the intent and think its better this way, but it did confuse me for a second the first time i saw it happen
@laurenshof yeah currently the "smart" grouping from Phanpy doesn't apply in this Catch-up timeline. Will need to think more about it.
As for the feed post view, it's more similar to email now. I initially started with one-liners (looks even more like email) but ended up with this max-3-line "preview". The cramped-ness really depend on the posts, some look very empty with a lot of white-space, while some are just too much. Will need to experiment more 😄
@paulcox re: resource usage, you mean the API calls and the rate limit?
As for 'popularity' metrics, I didn't really play around with them. I don't think anything is really skewed here as you have complete control on how to filter or sort the timeline. Though the idea of sorting posts by follower count seems interesting 🤔
@paulcox in my opinion, regardless of whatever scoring logic, there's always a chance or possibility that you might miss something.
So instead of intelligently rearranging the posts based on some score, Catch-up shows everything, provides email-like interface for fast scanning and lets you sort and filter in any way you like. It's more manual work but you have high visibility over the whole list and not having to worry that some posts are hidden from you.
@cheeaun This is an excellent "morning catch up" tool!
More load time, I know, but it would be nice to have a filter for mutuals or for accounts you have interacted with the most over the past X days.
Separately, if you could apply this to lists - some lists filter out accounts on the main timeline, so they aren't being included here I assume.
@box464 oh… filter for mutuals sound good 🤔 As for past interactions, I probably can use the notifications/mentions API 🤔
Re: lists, yeah this is still missing. This is tricky as I don't know how many lists most people have, so it'll probably use a lot more API calls. I also have lists that's filtered from main timeline, so I need this feature too 🫣
@cheeaun oh looking forward to trying this. I'm one of those people who really tries to read every post of the people I follow. In the morning I would love to read it forward from where I left off yesterday, in forward time order. Not sure exactly which grouping I'd pick but looking forward to trying.
Phanpy's grouping of boosts is a genius feature. I turn off retweets / boosts in every social media system because they are too noisy but with Phanpy I like them!
@cheeaun Very cool looking. I remember that there was an Android client that was working on a similar view, showing authors first with a badge to indicate posts, then clicking through to view only those posts.
This looks really good on a full desktop. Love the quick toggle sorting and filtering options.
@cheeaun i realized it's been a while since your last push to phanpy's production branch , and i was wondering "what could Chee Aun be cooking? "
Then this appeared in my timeline like an answer from the heavens 
This looks brilliant ! Lots of way to organize your feed, amazing!
@box464 it's another page on Phanpy. I'm only using it when waking up in the morning to catch up on posts during sleep.
I'm fine for anyone else taking this idea further and build their own app. It's almost like building a full-fledge data analytics platform so the usage and discovery patterns are endless.
@cheeaun I love how this is shaping up, and group by author does feel more feed-reader-y. I like this idea of also tuning my Follows by who's noisiest, etc.
But! I have been yearning for a way to group posts that all reference the same link. As in "this link is getting a lot of traction among my Follows, and I just want to see what they're all saying about it at once". I don't know if that fits in with the Catch-up concept, or would be better as a thing all by itself.
Chee Aun 🤔
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