Mastodon: New column: The Slow Lane.

[egypturnash]

What if we had a column that shows toots from people you follow who don't post very often?

This is one of those things that commercial social media tends to cram into their non-linear timelines with no way to turn off, and it sucks there - but as a separate area that you can turn on and off at your leisure, it sounds pretty good to me.

We'd need to keep track of some kind of posting frequency for everyone for this to happen, of course. Not sure how much hassle that'd be under the surface, I just run an instance and do weird little tweaks now and then.

(original idea from @[email protected], I'm just posting it here because I'm the one with the Github login 😇)

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• [x] I searched or browsed the repo’s other issues to ensure this is not a duplicate.

[CosineP]

Thinking about something like the reddit home feed. "One post from each user, in chronological time."

[egypturnash]

comment from Masto: "It would be ideal if that timeline were also exposed through an api so mobile clients (which I use almost exclusively) could have the option of displaying it."

@CosineP Do you know anything about how that Reddit feed picks which post from a particular user to show? I've never tried following any particular people on there.

[SaphireLattice]

@CosineP That sounds similar to how messenging apps work. Especially if you add a toggle "show last public message"/"show last private message".

[rysiekpl]

We'd need to keep track of some kind of posting frequency for everyone for this to happen, of course.

We could simplify this and just say "this is a column for contacts that are designated by the user to be in this column".

No complicated processing needed, and way more flexible.

[Yukitty]

But that already exists, rysiekpl.

[rysiekpl]

But that already exists, rysiekpl.

A single column where I can add a number of contacts to follow simultaneously? How?

[egypturnash]

@rysiekpl That's called "a list" and has existed since 2.1.0; go to the 'getting started' tab and you'll find 'lists' at the bottom. Once you've set one up you can use the menu at the top of its column to move and pin it, like any other column.

The whole point of this idea is that this column is populated without any interaction on the user's part: Mastodon notices that someone you follow who hasn't tooted in a long time showed up again, and puts a copy of it in here to give you an extra chance to notice it in case they're drowned out by the more talkative people you follow.

It's a way to automatically amplify quieter voices.

(We could also theoretically just bubble these toots to the top of whatever column they'd appear in, and give users a switch to disable that - but I suspect that tastes too much like FB/birdsite's Algorithmic Timeline for it to go over well.)

[rysiekpl]

I retract my comments and crawl back under my rock, where I fail to be up to date on Mastodon improvements. ;)

[CosineP]

@egypturnash it's actually subreddits on reddit, and it's the "hottest" (which is basically upvotes - age). Obviously that doesn't apply here so id just go for most recent post maybe?

On reddit those are ordered by upvotes / subscribers. I wonder if it wouldn't be bad to display them in reverse order of toots / account_age

[153]

Cool