|
I've had the idea for a weird kind of Twitter client for years. With Mastodon being all open, I've decided to do the experiment: What if your Timeline looked like iMessage. A normal timeline confuses me to no end because everything is out of context. My experiment, Ebou, is a Mastodon client that looks like iMessage. Conversations are grouped by friends and sorted by recent postings. It is super basic right now, but this already feels much more natural to me 😀 @terhechte And conversations of multiple people could be group messages. That’s really cool! @terhechte this looks great! I’ve wanted an easily digestible Twitter/Mastodon feed for some time now, and I think that you’re onto something. I’m eager to try it out.  @terhechte I’ve often been thinkjng about something like this, just never got around to creating it. Go for it! @terhechte This breaks my brain in a really fun way. I'd love to try it out when you feel like sharing! @terhechte Being able to try all these different Mastodon clients with completely different approaches is so exciting! I really like when people experiment with new stuff and have fun while doing it. It’s a neat idea! If you keep working on it, I’d love to give it a shot. @terhechte That is a great idea! Something different and innovative for sure.  @terhechte looks awesome, but I'm a Windows user, so for me it should be also a Windows client :D @emill1984 The app is cross-platform (in theory, I haven't dared running it on Windows yet). So once it becomes available, it should also run on Windows and Linux 😄  @terhechte I've had this same idea and I think it has a lot of merit, tbh, and I'm super happy to see someone experimenting with it!  @terhechte Wow, never thought of such interface, but it would really help be up to date with specific accounts. It’s awesome. Is there a way to test it? @CarlosSierraOz No, not yet. I shared a video of a super alpha version, but I'll post development updates here on Mastodon  @terhechte This is really good! Reminds me of how you would visit people's FB pages before they made "the feed" @terhechte great! do hashtags show as friends in left list ? could you please make an android release also? I don't have any apple devices.  @terhechte This is a great idea! I keep a “Close Follows” list on Mastodon for people who I don’t want to miss a single post from, and I thin an interface like this would make more sense than a timeline for those closest or most interesting accounts. @raygan @terhechte This was my reaction. I'd not want this for my general timeline. But, for a list of people that I'm trying to closely follow, it's an interesting interface to be sure to keep up to date. @brndnsh @stroughtonsmith I'll be posting updates here on Mastodon as the app improves and also share a link here once there's an alpha or beta     @terhechte this is really cool! Can you put groups of friends together too? I can see this getting a bit unwieldy with lots of people, but grouping in eg family, irl friends, etc might be good too (I guess like lists) @CatherineFlick Yeah, it would make sense to allow selecting a list for this kind of view.  @terhechte How does this work when you follow anything more than a handful of accounts? @Aaron Remains to be seen. I think in most cases not everybody tweets at the same time, then the UI should hold. As a day progresses, other follows will drift to the top. If all your follows tweet all the time, it might look chaotic because the sidebar will continue to reshuffle. But that's a UI problem that can be solved with less frequent updates and so on. I'm experimenting here :) @Aaron @terhechte hot take maybe: it will likely hold better than simply chronological timeline which gets refreshed with every new post. I follow less than 500 people and it’s annoying that new posts come in all the time. This per-user sorting will work better I am sure. Want to try!  @terhechte This is genius! 🤯Happy to help test it out when you get something up on TestFlight. @terhechte This looks great! But I also kinda have to be that guy and say "He's invented RSS!" I love the concept for sure though.  @HilliTech @terhechte In a way ActivityPub is better at RSS, as it has the concept of an inbox, and content is sent to the inbox. I would like to do a "Public Mail" type of client, where lists act like inboxes with read counts, and people are also on the sidebar. You could check lists and people as "read". @terhechte cool concept! Reminds me of when we had twitter in adium: https://blog.adium.im/2009/03/birds-of-a-feather/ @kimfranken I completely forgot that that existed! Thanks for the reminder. These Adium screenshots make me nostalgic..  @terhechte Isn't that still out of context? Especially people posting a lot might contribute to different threads at different times. What IMO would be really interesting is a client that concentrates on properly displaying threads and splitting discussions, but I have no idea how that could look like. Just flattening it in some way is what makes stuff hard to read fo rme on those platforms. @terhechte But I still like that people are trying out new stuff! The chronological timeline is kind of a pain...  @terhechte This is interesting, one thing I like about this idiom is you could potentially add a feature to uplift people who post infrequently above people who post frequently. Like one problem with reading these sites daily is if you have one friend who posts something really compelling once a month you're likely to miss it  @terhechte That is actually a very nice idea!   @terhechte Other than possibly needing to click a lot on a busy timeline, this looks interesting.  @terhechte Woahhhh. I love visualizing stuff like this in new ways. Kudos for your innovative thinking and being able to whip up a prototype! @terhechte I like the idea. I was thinking exactly about something like this because some contacts post 20 or 30 times per day, while others just once per week. Which means the less-frequent posters will go unnoticed, and I don't want that to happen. I think it would be very interesting if there were different ways to explore the same timeline, not just one. 👍 @terhechte this is very cool! I love that the Twitter exodus is bringing innovation and new paradigms to Mastodon. We haven’t thought about the “what” or “how” of social networks in years. @terhechte been saying for years Apple was just a few features short of a full blown social app with Messages so I’m looking forward to trying it out! @davemurdock Thanks! :) Also, I agree, iMessage would only have needed some more features and status updates.  @terhechte @the_roamer Thanks! Yeah lists should come at some point and make a lot of sense here I think  @terhechte I guess that depends on what iMessage looks like. I've never seen it; what's the difference between it and other IMs? @segiddins Hah, thank you! I like side projects, and I really don't care if they go nowhere 😄 (hence why I have so many of them). @bestmacfly I'll post developments updates on here. Currently it's still super early alpha @terhechte oh fascinating. I really like this approach. Do you have an app in any of the app stores yet, or a web client to try? @terhechte I’ve wanted an app that displays new posts from the bottom for a looong time. Since we read top to bottom, new at the top has always felt a little off.  @gosorios @terhechte omg that makes so much sense, having posts show up above the current ones breaks the flow of reading so hard! @terhechte That is very interesting: a simple context(?*) shift. *I’m not sure if that’s the right word, but it is as close as I can think of right now. @terhechte I have a folder in my rss reader I call “Mastodonians” with feeds for my can’t-miss tooters. Similar effect. But I like your implementation with integrated likes/boosts/etc for each post. @terhechte it’s not what I would have ever considered, but I love the concept. Great idea man  @terhechte perhaps the first interesting client experiment i've seen. neat! (if you edit this message to include an image description of your gif, i'll boost it!) @terhechte I love it as an optional view, especially the recency sort. It would simplify a common use case for me, where I'll click through to someone's profile to see what else they may have posted recently. Are you building this as an app or a web client?  @terhechte @neauoire happy to see some experiments that aren’t just clones of the Twitter UX 👍🏻😊 @terhechte One of the beauties of Mastodon is that it's very malleable ... I can see this format service a very large purpose, while using other clients to really extend the experience. I'll be keeping my eye on this. @terhechte Fascinating! This paradigm has a nice synergy with content-warnings-as-subject-lines, and I can imagine mailmate-style sorting/filtering of messages by hashtag, instance, etc. Neat!  @terhechte I was just thinking how the standard chronological timelines kills context and overwhelms, creating a creeping feeling of dread. This looks wonderful. Great idea!  @terhechte For the last weeks I was composing an essay in my head on why classic timelines turn your brain into mush. Now you're making what I would have proposed. Hope to see it on android! Hmm, maybe I should write that essay anyway, and just refer to this 😃 @terhechte pretty cool. I could also see a slack-like view that had hashtags and location or instance trends |
Gregory's Server
@terhechte that's a neat idea!