 I hated the design of thread unroller apps on Twitter so much that I made my own a few years back called Spooler. It's still used by lots of people (I don't collect usage stats but people complain when it breaks). https://tinysubversions.com/spooler/ All it does is: you give it a link to a thread, and it renders it to look like a blog post. It doesn't save or rehost the thread. It just makes it easy to read *in your browser* (for example, on a screen reader). 48 comments | Expand all CWs
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@stolas_mk2 @ifixcoinops it stores nothing at all except the authentication stuff that twitter needs @darius Sounds useful yes! The only problem I see is that I'm not sure how you'd handle content warnings in a way that makes it look blog-like. @brecht great point. I would probably list every CW at the top of the "article" and then have a "show/hide content warnings" toggle. if "show" is selected then I would basically hide individual bits with CWs behind spoiler-style tags labeled with the CW
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@crazypedia what I do with spooler is print the page to PDF and send it to my reader (no different imo than printing a twitter url as PDF, and it's not redistributable in the same way)  @blaine right but this doesn't "put" it somewhere. it's like "reader mode" in your browser. the content is not rehosted at all @darius I don't see myself using it personally, but I also don't use this type of tool on twitter.  @darius very! I tend to use unroll apps when linking to threads to someone that I know doesn't do/understand social media platforms like Twitter. And I just want to give them a simple webpage to look at
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@Lore I would require it to authenticate with your fediverse account in order to respect blocking across servers etc (I don't want this to be something that just scrapes stuff on its own) @darius @Lore @doot had a good and straight opinion on this thread roller stuff. And @SuitedUpDev has taken their advice. Check out I would say  @darius Anything that encourages and facilitates posting long threads is a bad idea from my perspective. Long threads are not just difficult and annoying to read -- they also clog timelines. I think it would be nicer to encourage and enable a culture around posting long form content on other sites specifically designed for that, and just posting a link to it with a summary on mastodon.   @darius @mcc Paul Butler wrote a neat tree visualizer for deep Twitter reply trees that worked as a browser extension: https://github.com/paulgb/Treeverse/blob/master/README.md#readme @darius I think it should be a function of "core Mastodon" - if a post has a follow up/reply by the same author then a share option could be "Share as single thread" which generates a url such as " https:// friend. camp /@darius/ 109354166569717714 / unrolled " which just shows the initial post and any subsequent posts by the same author which directly follows one of the others. If any/all are under a CW, then a "Show all content warning sections" button is at top.
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@clarfonthey I agree, though it is interesting to think about the affordances of a thread and whether they are good or not. For example, you can very easily share a specific point from a thread. That also of course hides context behind an extra click so like.... mixed bag at the very least.
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@clarfonthey I agree that would make the most sense, but we don't live in a world where everyone does the most sensible thing. So I provide stuff like spooler as a balm @darius could something like this be useful for the visually impaired, to allow screen readers to follow the narrative/conversation in a less disjointed way? I don’t have vision impairments but I do have “following the thread” impairments”, so this might help me! @darius my toot had zero value; for some reason nobody’s responses had loaded so I missed all the conversation that was already taking place. @david oh I appreciated your post, don't get me wrong! there was nothing else in the conversation to suggest what you did, you just correctly guessed a good use case that got me thinking about this @mcc oh yeah I would just call it a spooler! I just put unrollers in the subject because people are talking about them generally and they know what it means @mcc (thread viewer is good too, I just like spooler as a clever name for a thing that organizes thread)  @darius sigh, of course CORS gets in the way https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/issues/10400 of like, crawling posts which are publicly visible and so shouldn't need any authentication. (i'm also bummed out to learn that mastodon doesn't allow api token access to the as resources, only to its proprietary api. as resources need digest signed requests, which of course you can't do unless you're the server which holds the signing key of a recipient.) @jleedev I wouldn't want to crawl public posts anyway. I would want to auth the app with a user which would allow blocks to be respected (even on public posts)  @arin_basu well it doesn't exist yet but it would work in a way very similar to my tool I link at the top of the thread Got it. Really like it! Much better than the other solutions.  @darius I think it's more sensible than the other tools. But... I write for the medium. My blog posts aren't made of 500 char paragraphs. So I feel something gets lost in translation when micro-blogs are format shifted.
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Gregory's Server
Would this be useful for Fediverse threads? Again this doesn't rehost content. It is basically just a 3rd party client for viewing threads. If you delete the thread, it can't do anything with it. People can't share the spooled post with other people, not really. The best they can do is send you a link to spooler with the url of the thread already in it and you press "spool" -- if you don't have permission to see the thread (bc you are blocked or whatever) it won't work