 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 74 comments
   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)  @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. @hybridhavoc that's probably @rodentapp - difference here is this doesn't require clicking through or filtering by author. Everything is still on one page, but grouped instead.  @cheeaun This is nice. It does feel like it could be its own app. Where do you navigate to it from Phanpy (when it releases)? @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. @nix aware of that feature on Voyager but haven't really tried it. Once hidden, how do you go back to see it? On Gmail, a similar concept would be "Archive" which is manual-hide regardless of read state, and can be seen again in "All Mail" @cheeaun iirc theyre working on letting you hold the hide button to unhide the read posts. Currently you turn off hide read posts to bring them back. On gmail you have to manually press archive on each post? Because on voyager every post is marked as read when you scroll by and then one tap on hide or refreshing the feed, hides all the read posts. @cheeaun doesn’t have to be auto a manual button would be great too. - reply would make it appear if its a reply from someone you follow like how a post appears on top of your timeline now if someone you follow replies to it - I think manual hide button and refresh by pulling down at the top of your feed should be the only time it hides the posts - if turned off reset timeline to the most recent post knowing if we’ve caught up on all posts with this would be like Inbox Zero and RSS feeds :) @nix 😄 that's quite a number of assumptions made there. As of now, I'll slowly iterate. There's a lot of ideas; I would rather let other devs take this idea(s) further and make a standalone app 😬 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)  @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! 🤫 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  some early feedback after playing around for a bit with it: - its really good @cheeaun id also be very curious what it looks like if the catchup feeds shows post slightly more expanded so its closer to the regular feed. it does feel a little bit cramped right now @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 😄 @cheeaun @laurenshof yeah I like the idea that it's a bit more like a normal feed so you can set your filters or click on an author and just scroll around as normal. Otherwise I'm having to specifically click through on every post that might be interesting. @cheeaun It’s great. Couple of things I noticed: 1. no way to get back to the control bar except scroll manually to the top again? (iOS 17.3.1). I think I’m going to want to change the filtering as I’m reading. 2. I enjoy the styling of individual posts on the standard home view better. Really useful! Thanks. @cheeaun curious, is this more, less, or doesn't a make difference to resource usage on an instance? I guess highly dependent on someone's mastodon usage? Also, have you played around with different types of 'popularity' metrics? e.g. very rough one off of the top of my head, a post's likes / their follower count, as a way to not have things skewed to just large accounts. @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. @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. @cheeaun Ooooh, I just saw the "top links" bar at the top! I like it, but again... I want to see what my Follows are saying about it when they share it.     @cheeaun nice, looks neat! @rodentapp implements something similar with the no-FOMO button. It seems to be a useful feature; some help from the server would come in handy.    @cheeaun This looks great and one of the more popular feeds inside of BlueSky works a bit like this, but I like this version better as it gives granular control over it.  @cheeaun @phanpy I'm already liking what I'm seeing, and I'm so glad to see a reference to Destroy Twitter in the project Readme, it's one of those things I miss so dearly about internet 2.0. Are there any plans for a patreon option to support? Paying dollars from India is a little painful in a recurring basis right now. Thank you! @cheeaun Looks great! Stretching the capabilities of the API I see. At first I thought you were building some kind of custom per user saved filtered view, like your hashtags timelines. But I see now. Always amazed at your creativity. @cheeaun Looks good. I miss a similar collapsed TL capability in Tweetings (client for Twitter, RIP). All posts from a given poster were removed and replaced w the latest one which, when clicked on, revealed all unseen ones from that person. Facilitated skimming and fast, efficient catch-up.  @cheeaun An actual timeline with posts arranged on the timeline with their position in time clearly marked. Brilliant. "No algorithm" isn't the aim, "No algorithms designed for the benefit of advertisers and shareholders" is the aim. Add RSS and I'm in. @cheeaun Nice power tool! I hope there will be a mark-as-read mechanism for each category (and that scrolling the list won't mark posts read, by default). I've often wanted a time slider, but one that could also show me 8-16 hours ago, so I can read friends outside my time zone easily or catch up after being offline for a while. Maybe you could collab with https://feditrends.com/ and round out the picture with trending stories.   @cheeaun I would love to see something like this that helps with catching up. A few hours of sleep and I wake up to a gazillion new posts 😮💨 Boost carousel already helps a lot in making it more manageable!      @cheeaun I tried Phanpy- really nice interface! I like the grouped boosts. I would love to try the grid view- letting me scroll through and see more posts faster is nice for catching up on days that I don't happen to open social media |
Gregory's Server
Here's the screen *before* this. Specify how long back I want to fetch the Home timeline posts.