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Kartik Agaram

Idea for a new tool

Drop a Mastodon or HN URL on a window, and it constructs a more dense 2D graphical layout for a thread.

* Separate card for each comment.
* Ideal readable width per card.
* Short arrows from comments to their replies.
* Keyboard shortcuts to pan along semantically to sibling or child.

Side-effects:
* It needs the network, obviously.
* Zero contact with file-system.

Inspirations:
* @ColinTheMathmo's Chartodon
* @s_ol's FediDag tool (example: dag.s-ol.nu/?document=https://

8 Aug 2022 at 0:04 | Open on merveilles.town
4 comments
smallcircles (Humane Tech Now)

@akkartik @ColinTheMathmo @s_ol

It might have a side-panel where you see the flattened list of comments for a selected branch in the tree, and that branch visually highlighted.

8 Aug 2022 at 7:42 | Open on mastodon.social
s-ol

@akkartik @ColinTheMathmo
Curious to see how you're going to do layout, I have some ideas for the fedidag thing that I'm not managing to try out because in either direction I either need to build my own layout algo at near-graphviz quality and make it also incremental, or find way to retrofit incremental-ity using some sort or "chunk detection" to group and lock subgraphs.

Either one is daunting to me at the moment since I just don't know enough graph theory I think...

@akkartik @ColinTheMathmo
Curious to see how you're going to do layout, I have some ideas for the fedidag thing that I'm not managing to try out because in either direction I either need to build my own layout algo at near-graphviz quality and make it also incremental, or find way to retrofit incremental-ity using some sort or "chunk detection" to group and lock subgraphs.

8 Aug 2022 at 8:37 | Open on merveilles.town
s-ol

@akkartik
If you want to try that, it shouldn't be hard to get a HN discussion into dag.s-ol.nu at all. I'm not sure if HN has a JSON API, but even scraping it you just need to assemble a bit of JSON in this schema:
git.s-ol.nu/fedidag/-/raw/370d

That can be done in JS in the client or it can be done in something else (e.g. Lua) and served by HTTP. That way you can make the "id" URIs real and proxy user information from HN without modifying the client as well.

@akkartik
If you want to try that, it shouldn't be hard to get a HN discussion into dag.s-ol.nu at all. I'm not sure if HN has a JSON API, but even scraping it you just need to assemble a bit of JSON in this schema:
git.s-ol.nu/fedidag/-/raw/370d

8 Aug 2022 at 8:50 | Open on merveilles.town
Quincy
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