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
Instead of algo timeline, this is focused on data-grid-like UI for configuring exactly what I want to see.
This honestly could be another full-fledged app/client by itself 🫠
@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.
@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 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.
@mogul yeah I get your point, also thought about this when I built "top links" 😀 — it's very basic now, some comes from boosts so the followings didn't say anything about it, unless it's "quote post". Some posts have multiple links and they are not all shown yet.
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" 😬
@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.
@cheeaun This is brilliant. Having written a similar tool for myself, I'm wondering if you fetch the like, boost and reply counts from posts' originating servers. Otherwise they may be wrong because of how federation works. Servers other than originating servers only count likes, boosts and replies that reach them.
@abnv Thanks. It's not fetching the counts from original servers. The accuracy of the counts are not much of a concern at this point (for me at least 🫣)
@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.
@paulcox re: resource usage, you mean the API calls and the rate limit?
As for 'popularity' metrics, I didn't really play around with them. I don't think anything is really skewed here as you have complete control on how to filter or sort the timeline. Though the idea of sorting posts by follower count seems interesting 🤔
@cheeaun I was thinking more of an aggregate popularity sorting e.g. giving a post a popularity score based on the number of likes divided by the number of followers. Kind of like a relative popularity of a post for the user. Interested if this is a better metric than sorting based on number of likes as posts from larger accounts are more likely to appear at the top and so I might miss particularly interesting posts from smaller accounts I follow.
@paulcox in my opinion, regardless of whatever scoring logic, there's always a chance or possibility that you might miss something.
So instead of intelligently rearranging the posts based on some score, Catch-up shows everything, provides email-like interface for fast scanning and lets you sort and filter in any way you like. It's more manual work but you have high visibility over the whole list and not having to worry that some posts are hidden from you.
@paulcox for API calls, there's still rate limit and pagination limit set by the server. As for CPU usage, this is probably not much compared to the federation stuff 😬
@box464 oh… filter for mutuals sound good 🤔 As for past interactions, I probably can use the notifications/mentions API 🤔
Re: lists, yeah this is still missing. This is tricky as I don't know how many lists most people have, so it'll probably use a lot more API calls. I also have lists that's filtered from main timeline, so I need this feature too 🫣
An experiment that I wanted to try: sort by post density — give a chance for short posts to shine among the attention-grabbing ones. Let's see how it works 🤞
@FlockOfCats hmm, I guess maybe your timeline doesn't have a lot of differently-dense posts 😄
Density refers to the amount of information in the post. For example, a post with only 1 word is "lighter", a post with many words is "heavier". A post with photos is "heavier" than a post without photos, because a picture is worth a thousand words 😉
@FlockOfCats I kinda suspect that it could be confused. Initially thought of the word "Weight" before deciding on "Density". Not really sure which one is a better word. If more people are getting confused, I'll probably need to put an explanation somewhere 😬
@FlockOfCats@cheeaun I caught this conversation and was thinking about "info density" or "verbosity" (although for images this last one would maybe not make sense anymore)
@cheeaun Okay the bigger one I’m failing to replicate this morning and it needs a screen recording, but here’s a very little one that I’m not even sure is fixable:
Firefox iOS latest version
In catchup, when you press and hold on a profile pic in the author row, the image becomes a square, then expands and gives you the Firefox options for images (share/save etc). When you dismiss this pop-up, the image shrinks back down but stays as a square for a second before becoming round.
@cheeaun Whoops, attached the wrong recording. That one shows the image press-and-hold behaviour on Home. This one shows it in Catch-up, and also that the behaviour is different again when viewing a single post.
@cheeaun I’ll let you know if I replicate the other one, it was an issue with the icons in author row in Catchup staying greyed out even if you’ve reselected the author (ie their posts are showing).
@cheeaun This is not it, but after I select ‘reset filters’, shouldn’t all authors be showing? Some are still greyed out. I’m not sure if that’s a bug or expected behaviour - is something happening there that I’m not understanding?
@Brendanjones Phanpy actually removes boost duplicates but not on Catch-up (yet?).
It might seem strange but I personally find this "useful" because one of Catch-up's goals is to give better high-level visibility and control over your timeline. I probably won't remove the them but could visually collapse/group them together 🤔
@cheeaun Hmm okay, that’s another piece of information that for me is good to know, but isn’t the primary piece of info. I’m finding out “of the posts my follows have boosted, which are the most boosted?” as opposed to “how many/which of my follows have boosted those most boosted posts”. But still good info to know.
Visually collapsing/grouping the duplicates would solve both use cases 👍
@cheeaun In terms of behaviour, I don’t necessarily have a preference, but I guess I expect consistency across the app?
Regarding the visuals, it’d be nice if the square version of the profile image never showed (except when expanded, of course). It’s such a tiny thing, though, so I’d very much understand if you leave it.
@Brendanjones currently those gestures are not handled, so it fallbacks to whatever the browser choose to do when press-holding them 😬
Despite the site looks very app-like, it's still a web site 😆, so I need to juggle between expectations for an app-like experience and web-like experience.
@Gargron@cheeaun Yes, thanks. I’ll definitely be using it but Phanpy is used by a tiny fraction of the people who use native Mastodon, so I’d like to see such an amazing and highly requested feature available for everyone.
Or is this the kind of feature that you prefer to only implement in the mobile apps, and leave to other app devs to implement client-side like Chee Aun has done here?
@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@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!
@ni_nad@phanpy thanks! The current options for support are either Github Sponsors or BuyMeACoffee (links in Settings). Do you mean you're not able to donate in your preferred currency via them?
@cheeaun@phanpy it's been a while since I last checked what is supported for payment methods in Github. I checked again now and it seems to work with Indian cards, so I'm gonna give it a shot!
@cheeaun this looks super interesting and promising. Would it have the option to "pin" particular accounts? There are definitely some people I'd like to more easily make sure I'm not missing any posts from, without having to get explicitly notified of new posts
@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.
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