If you know someone who wants help using this place, feel free to ask, I can answer their questions directly. This account aims to be an unofficial help desk, especially for new or non-technical people.
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I'm not sure, I'm going to boost your question in case others can offer suggestions.
By the way, when you say "end of long posts first", do you mean the final posts of threads?
You mean the newest posts appear at the top?
@rspfau
It's because I read from top to bottom. (weird!).
Imagine reading a Kindl or a long web page. I will scroll it upwards, so the text moves upwards. more text appears from the bottom of the screen. Chat clients do it that way too. So does Mastodon inside threads.
Maybe very short posts don't have an issue. But people post long posts a lot.
@ianp5a I don't know of an app that does this, but if you run across what is very obviously a thread, you can go into the first one you come across (which would be the last one in the series) and then I think that it will show the thread in order from old to new. That's how it looks for me in a browser. (If it doesn't look that way for you, it may be because my server is running "Glitch-Soc" which is a slightly different flavor).
@ianp5a @FediTips Pachli does have an option called "Reverse timeline order" under "Lab experiments", but I'm mainly using Moshidon for the design.
Another useful feature of Pachli is saving the point in your timeline where you exited the app (so you don't have to catch up everything at once).
I can't understand why such a basic feature is not considered as a standard on most apps.
@ianp5a @FediTips As best I can tell, the behaviour you're describing -- which also irritates me a lot, too -- is caused mainly by the fact that all posts are Public by default, meaning they stand on their own and will be seen by anyone associated with that user, independent of the context of the post.
I've recommended that posts be Quiet by default for this reason, and about once a month recommend that people set that as their default, so far with limited success.
Your home timeline shows all posts from people you follow no matter what visibility setting they are. Your DMs show up in the same timeline, for example.
It's just because apps show newest unread posts at the top by default, and they're asking for an option to show the oldest unread at the top.
(What you say is true on the Local timeline though!)
@ianp5a @FediTips
I've been thinking of this problem since my first few days on Mastodon.
There's no easy way to fix the problem since, here, threads and timeline are intertwined. Only reversing the scroll direction won't make much of a difference since you’ll come across the latest post before the first one anyway.
The kind of option you're looking for is a "conversation mode" where new replies to a thread would bring the whole thread back in your timeline while still showing the first post on top with some sort of notification of new replies within.
To achieve that, each post would need to be scanned to the find the first of the thread and then show this first post in your timeline instead of the latest one. It is most certainly technically possible, but I haven't seen anything like that in a Mastodon client.
@ianp5a @FediTips yep, we're at the same place now.
Then, we close the app and come back a couple hours later. At that moment, where should the app put us in our timeline?
- Where we left, and we keep scrolling down getting closer to present. In which case, we would get the desired behavior.
- Or at the bottom and we start scrolling up (into the past), in which case we come accross the latest post before the the first of the thread.
I'm with you that it would feel more natural to read in the same direction in both timeline and threads. However, if the app moves us to the present when we open it we end up with the same problem.
To summarize, newest at the bottom WITH a marker to get back where we left is what would be required to ensure we always scroll towards the present.
There would still be some "out of order cases" when someone you follow replies to a thread you've never seen before. For those, I only see the conversation mode explain earlier as a solution.
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