Add a "don't scroll with load new" option

[MysticalOS]

I like to pick up where i left off if I left app for a few hours. What I don't like is that the load new just auto scrolls to top, which then leaves me having to read in reverse until I "catch up" to where I left off.

Ideal would be that there is an option to load new that respects my current position but still loads new posts so I can continue reading in order and "catch up" on feed. I'm not only user like this that likes to catch up on what I missed, so we definitely need this option.

[pfrazee]

Can you share a little about how you use the app?

My guess is that what you do is scroll down some amount and then work your way up, and what you'd like is for the "Load More" to just add a few more to the top and you can keep working your way up?

We can look into something like that but our UI components sometimes struggle intensely with adding elements to the top while maintaining scroll position (it is the source of some bad bugs).

[MysticalOS]

yeah idea would be to load to top without scrolling up, similar to how tweetbot worked in it's glory before someone put an end to that. no idea how they did it though, but when it'd load new, it maintained current scroll position, so you could continue scrolling up chronological where you left off instead of snapping to top.

[pfrazee]

To be clear we've got a pretty full work queue so this may not get prioritized, but I am curious:

Would there be some other UI mode that would be even better for this? Sometime like a "catch up" mode where it goes chronological (instead of reverse chron) starting from a previous date? (Not even sure this is possible without some protocol updates because we often assume reverse chron, but I'm just curious.)

[MysticalOS]

Yeah anything that really is conducive of just reading things in order. It just feels bad to snap to top, then kinda read things backwards in between where you were and top. you end up reading things out of context sometimes. Like imagine people are talking about an event, you kinda ruin the hype reading it backwards.

And absolutely there are prob more important tasks atm :)

[pfrazee]

Ohhhh I see what you mean. That makes more sense than I was originally thinking. Okay I'll think about this.

Thanks for explaining!

[chronomac]

I was going to post about this very thing and then found this one. I just wanted to follow up and see if there was any update. To add some more context: the current Twitter app works this way too, not just Tweetbot (RIP). When I open the app, I'd like my feed to let me pick up where I left off.

[Cowthulu]

I am very new to Bluesky, but the current behavior seems very counterintuitive to me as well. I am used to coming back to where I was in the feed, and having to search for the last post I read or arbitrarily scrolling down (or reading backwards in time) seems very odd. I guess I don’t understand how the UI is supposed to be used?

[ian-pop]

I was searching for this so wanted to add my support. I want to pick up from where I was last reading. Starting at the top isn't a very good experience

[Pikuboy]

I would love that functionality too.

[Tim-Pohlmann]

I think the different points of view are based on whether you are primarily using the "following" or an algorithm based feed. For an algorithm based feed, it makes sense to scroll from the top. You want to just scroll for a while and see the newest posts. For the "following" feed, the goal is to catch up with the people you follow. You want to see all posts and stop when you have reached when you all caught up. Here it makes sense to go chronologically.

[xquewx]

+1 for that functionality

[Cowthulu]

I suppose that “Discover” and “Popular With Friends” are the algorithm-based feeds? I don’t really have an opinion on the order for those.

I pretty much just go to the Following tab, and that is the one where having it not remember position is really annoying.

From: Tim Pohlmann @.> Sent: Monday, October 2, 2023 4:22 PM To: bluesky-social/social-app @.> Cc: Arlen Feldman @.>; Comment @.> Subject: Re: [bluesky-social/social-app] Add a "don't scroll with load new" option (Issue #976)

I think the different points of view are based on whether you are primarily using the "following" or an algorithm based feed. For an algorithm based feed, it makes sense to scroll from the top. You want to just scroll for a while and see the newest posts. For the "following" feed, the goal is to catch up with the people you follow. You want to see all posts and stop when you have reached when you all caught up. Here it makes sense to go chronologically.

— Reply to this email directly, view it on GitHubhttps://github.com/bluesky-social/social-app/issues/976#issuecomment-1743852114, or unsubscribehttps://github.com/notifications/unsubscribe-auth/AKV6WSYSCGTPOSI5P45UE6TX5M5BTAVCNFSM6AAAAAAZ7SFRM2VHI2DSMVQWIX3LMV43OSLTON2WKQ3PNVWWK3TUHMYTONBTHA2TEMJRGQ. You are receiving this because you commented.Message ID: @.**@.>>

[pfrazee]

Yeah we'd probably just do this on following. There are no conceptual blockers to this; it just takes some dev work we need to have time for

[Cowthulu]

I understand (I’m a dev myself). It would definitely improve the app experience though.

From: Paul Frazee @.> Sent: Wednesday, October 4, 2023 11:41 AM To: bluesky-social/social-app @.> Cc: Arlen Feldman @.>; Comment @.> Subject: Re: [bluesky-social/social-app] Add a "don't scroll with load new" option (Issue #976)

Yeah we'd probably just do this on following. There are no conceptual blockers to this; it just takes some dev work we need to have time for

— Reply to this email directly, view it on GitHubhttps://github.com/bluesky-social/social-app/issues/976#issuecomment-1747360468, or unsubscribehttps://github.com/notifications/unsubscribe-auth/AKV6WS5YWUDTT4D2K3T5P6LX5WNSRAVCNFSM6AAAAAAZ7SFRM2VHI2DSMVQWIX3LMV43OSLTON2WKQ3PNVWWK3TUHMYTONBXGM3DANBWHA. You are receiving this because you commented.Message ID: @.**@.>>

[jspencersharpe]

Came here to say this exact thing 🙌. This would change the game for me.

[Oestberg]

For me this feature is #1 on my wishlist to be added. Looking forward for it to be added.

[MScoutsDCI]

Adding another voice here. This seems like a glaring omission and is the reason I also never use threads (their behavior is the same).

Can’t wait to have this functionality added.

[witszymanski]

Another voice here. I was using Flamingo for Twitter and when I was opening the app after a while I was at the last read Twit, and I had a counter of unread Twits, and I was just chronologically scrolling up.

The same functionality (without the counter) is in Mastodon app.

[Enzo90910]

Same here. I also think this should be the default for the « Following » tab.

[R-Sommer]

Adding another voice here. Or let me be clear, without such functionality I'll never use this app on a regular base.

[witszymanski]

This is exactly the reason, why I am not using the app. The countless scrolling down to the previous content is so tiring.

[seboslaw]

I've started implementing this functionality in my app "Skeets", which is available for iOS / iPad OS (sorry, no Android yet) here: https://bsky.app/profile/skeetsapp.com

At this point it works if the newly loaded number of posts is not larger than 50, but I'm currently implementing a new version which will just prepend the newly loaded posts and then give you an option to "fill the gap" between brand new posts and older posts successively.

So maybe Bluesky could do something along that?

[Cowthulu]

Sebastian –

Will take a look, but 50 is not remotely going to be enough! Will have to wait for your “fill the gap” feature.

Thanks,

Arlen

From: Sebastian @.> Sent: Tuesday, January 30, 2024 3:54 AM To: bluesky-social/social-app @.> Cc: Arlen Feldman @.>; Comment @.> Subject: Re: [bluesky-social/social-app] Add a "don't scroll with load new" option (Issue #976)

I've started implementing this functionality in my app "Skeets", which is available for iOS / iPad OS (sorry, no Android yet) here: https://bsky.app/profile/skeetsapp.com

At this point it works if the newly loaded number of posts is not larger than 50, but I'm currently implementing a new version which will just prepend the newly loaded posts and then give you an option to "fill the gap" between brand new posts and older posts successively.

— Reply to this email directly, view it on GitHubhttps://github.com/bluesky-social/social-app/issues/976#issuecomment-1916583269, or unsubscribehttps://github.com/notifications/unsubscribe-auth/AKV6WS5BXJEKERUTPCQVXZTYRDGM5AVCNFSM6AAAAAAZ7SFRM2VHI2DSMVQWIX3LMV43OSLTON2WKQ3PNVWWK3TUHMYTSMJWGU4DGMRWHE. You are receiving this because you commented.Message ID: @.**@.>>

[banjaloupe]

Adding my voice as well to request this feature! It makes me use Bluesky much less than I would otherwise, and is preventing me from fully switching over. I'm very interested in third party Android apps that have this functionality as well.

[witszymanski]

Let me know if you find a good alternative with this feature!

On Thu, Feb 1, 2024 at 11:23 PM Brian @.***> wrote:

Adding my voice as well to request this feature! It makes me use Bluesky much less than I would otherwise, and is preventing me from fully switching over. I'm very interested in third party Android apps that have this functionality as well.

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[pukku]

I would very much like this as well!

[cjshrader]

Also chiming in for this. It feels like most social media sites aren't really catered for the "not algorithmic, only the people I follow" users. I want to see everything they post and reskeet and that's it.

[DougAK]

To be clear we've got a pretty full work queue so this may not get prioritized, but I am curious:

Would there be some other UI mode that would be even better for this? Sometime like a "catch up" mode where it goes chronological (instead of reverse chron) starting from a previous date? (Not even sure this is possible without some protocol updates because we often assume reverse chron, but I'm just curious.)

The ideal would be a chronological feed reading from the top down, loading new posts at the bottom instead of at the top. The app currently tries to put replies below the post that it’s replying to, but when a single poster tries to thread three or more posts, the result is a disaster of repetition. I realize that it would be very unconventional at this point in the evolution of the Web to load new content at the bottom instead of at the top, but OMG it would just make so much more sense. But anyway just letting me pick up where I left off would be great even if you can’t do it in the way I think would be ideal.

So I agree with the large number of people on this thread. I respectfully disagree with the one who said there are more important issues. 😉

[Cowthulu]

To be clear we've got a pretty full work queue so this may not get prioritized, but I am curious: Would there be some other UI mode that would be even better for this? Sometime like a "catch up" mode where it goes chronological (instead of reverse chron) starting from a previous date? (Not even sure this is possible without some protocol updates because we often assume reverse chron, but I'm just curious.)

The ideal would be a chronological feed reading from the top down, loading new posts at the bottom instead of at the top. The app currently tries to put replies below the post that it’s replying to, but when a single poster tries to thread three or more posts, the result is a disaster of repetition. I realize that it would be very unconventional at this point in the evolution of the Web to load new content at the bottom instead of at the top, but OMG it would just make so much more sense. But anyway just letting me pick up where I left off would be great even if you can’t do it in the way I think would be ideal.

So I agree with the large number of people on this thread. I respectfully disagree with the one who said there are more important issues. 😉

I have to admit that I've mostly stopped looking at Bluesky because of this issue. My experience was "scroll down for several minutes until I recognized something, read some entries, get interrupted, then come back later and have to do it again."

I really enjoyed the conversations on Bluesky, but reading them backwards just did my head in.

So I agree with DougAK--basic usability features like this likely should be more highly prioritized.

I also wonder if you guys aren't overthinking it. If I can manually scroll down to the last entry I recognize, it doesn't seem like it would be that hard to provide a feature in the app to do that--even if it were literally a client-side "find last read entry" button (yes, I understand the performance issues, but at least you wouldn't have to load the graphics, which is what happens when I do it manually :-). Not as elegant as just remembering between uses, but would solve the core problem.

[witszymanski]

I literally stopped using Bluesky at all, just because of the lack of this feature.

Does anyone know any other 3rd party app that can do that?

[MScoutsDCI]

I straight up don’t use the native app anymore at all. I use one called Skeets that has this Twitter-like functionality. It’s a little janky and it doesn’t always work right but it’s the only thing that makes bluesky usable for me.

On Fri, Apr 26, 2024 at 12:35 PM Arlen Feldman @.***> wrote:

To be clear we've got a pretty full work queue so this may not get prioritized, but I am curious: Would there be some other UI mode that would be even better for this? Sometime like a "catch up" mode where it goes chronological (instead of reverse chron) starting from a previous date? (Not even sure this is possible without some protocol updates because we often assume reverse chron, but I'm just curious.)

The ideal would be a chronological feed reading from the top down, loading new posts at the bottom instead of at the top. The app currently tries to put replies below the post that it’s replying to, but when a single poster tries to thread three or more posts, the result is a disaster of repetition. I realize that it would be very unconventional at this point in the evolution of the Web to load new content at the bottom instead of at the top, but OMG it would just make so much more sense. But anyway just letting me pick up where I left off would be great even if you can’t do it in the way I think would be ideal.

So I agree with the large number of people on this thread. I respectfully disagree with the one who said there are more important issues. 😉

I have to admit that I've mostly stopped looking at Bluesky because of this issue. My experience was "scroll down for several minutes until I recognized something, read some entries, get interrupted, then come back later and have to do it again."

I really enjoyed the conversations on Bluesky, but reading them backwards just did my head in.

So I agree with DougAK--basic usability features like this likely should be more highly prioritized.

I also wonder if you guys aren't overthinking it. If I can manually scroll down to the last entry I recognize, it doesn't seem like it would be that hard to provide a feature in the app to do that--even if it were literally a client-side "find last read entry" button (yes, I understand the performance issues, but at least you wouldn't have to load the graphics, which is what happens when I do it manually :-). Not as elegant as just remembering between uses, but would solve the core problem.

— Reply to this email directly, view it on GitHub https://github.com/bluesky-social/social-app/issues/976#issuecomment-2079723535, or unsubscribe https://github.com/notifications/unsubscribe-auth/AAMLUHMSQL4P4QWQDZXMG33Y7J653AVCNFSM6AAAAAAZ7SFRM2VHI2DSMVQWIX3LMV43OSLTON2WKQ3PNVWWK3TUHMZDANZZG4ZDGNJTGU . You are receiving this because you commented.Message ID: @.***>

[DougAK]

I also have been using Skeets. It tries to remember my timeline position, and sometimes it does and sometimes it doesn't. It does this weird thing with threaded replies where it shows them 1-2, 2-3, 3-4, 4-5, etc. (but actually if you're scrolling down it's 4-5, 3-4, 2-3, 1-2). The native app tries to thread them all together but skips some. Both of them assume that you're reading a thread from top to bottom even though it otherwise orders skeets with the most recent at the top. Maybe trying to solve the threading problem is making it harder to come up with a simple solution like Arlen suggests? If the timeline must be reverse-chronological, perhaps that's how we should read threaded replies too.

On Fri, Apr 26, 2024 at 9:22 PM MScoutsDCI @.***> wrote:

I straight up don’t use the native app anymore at all. I use one called Skeets that has this Twitter-like functionality. It’s a little janky and it doesn’t always work right but it’s the only thing that makes bluesky usable for me.

On Fri, Apr 26, 2024 at 12:35 PM Arlen Feldman @.***> wrote:

To be clear we've got a pretty full work queue so this may not get prioritized, but I am curious: Would there be some other UI mode that would be even better for this? Sometime like a "catch up" mode where it goes chronological (instead of reverse chron) starting from a previous date? (Not even sure this is possible without some protocol updates because we often assume reverse chron, but I'm just curious.)

The ideal would be a chronological feed reading from the top down, loading new posts at the bottom instead of at the top. The app currently tries to put replies below the post that it’s replying to, but when a single poster tries to thread three or more posts, the result is a disaster of repetition. I realize that it would be very unconventional at this point in the evolution of the Web to load new content at the bottom instead of at the top, but OMG it would just make so much more sense. But anyway just letting me pick up where I left off would be great even if you can’t do it in the way I think would be ideal.

So I agree with the large number of people on this thread. I respectfully disagree with the one who said there are more important issues. 😉

I have to admit that I've mostly stopped looking at Bluesky because of this issue. My experience was "scroll down for several minutes until I recognized something, read some entries, get interrupted, then come back later and have to do it again."

I really enjoyed the conversations on Bluesky, but reading them backwards just did my head in.

So I agree with DougAK--basic usability features like this likely should be more highly prioritized.

I also wonder if you guys aren't overthinking it. If I can manually scroll down to the last entry I recognize, it doesn't seem like it would be that hard to provide a feature in the app to do that--even if it were literally a client-side "find last read entry" button (yes, I understand the performance issues, but at least you wouldn't have to load the graphics, which is what happens when I do it manually :-). Not as elegant as just remembering between uses, but would solve the core problem.

— Reply to this email directly, view it on GitHub < https://github.com/bluesky-social/social-app/issues/976#issuecomment-2079723535>,

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[garvinhicking]

I only read blueskye about 1x a month for this.

I "like" the last post that I read. Then after ~30days I check the age of my like, then I scroll like a maniac until I arrivr at that date. Then I read it from bottom up and hope the all doesn't crash (it sometimes does) or I fall asleep (I sometimes do) in which case I have to start again at -30 and try to remember what I read until that point. The I like the last post and recover 30 days from that awful experience.

Ivory (Mastodon) does this expertly. I can throw my phone into a well, forget about it for 2 years, switch the battery, reboot and flash the device, and Ivory will know where I left off.

TL;DR: Please create a setting that restores the timeline at the place I left of, thank you ☺️

[witszymanski]

I seriously don't get why it is so difficult to implement. Literally all the old 3rd party Twitter apps and Mastodon apps have this option.

[surfdude29]

I seriously don't get why it is so difficult to implement. Literally all the old 3rd party Twitter apps and Mastodon apps have this option.

I'm no expert on the technical details, but it seems like this isn't the easiest thing to implement in atproto (the protocol that Bluesky runs on): https://github.com/bluesky-social/atproto/discussions/1834

[seboslaw]

For anyone running iOS / iPad OS: I've just finished implementing this feature in https://www.skeetsapp.com. It replicates the well-known behaviour from the bird app and works for the Following TL and for timelines based on lists.

https://youtube.com/shorts/MQjoL4XAOxQ?feature=share

[garvinhicking]

For anyone running iOS / iPad OS: I've just finished implementing this feature in https://www.skeetsapp.com. It replicates the well-known behaviour from the bird app and works for the Following TL and for timelines based on lists.

That's a good thing, I tried the app today, but it sadly doesn't address what I need: I need the app to never scroll on its own. When closing and reopening the app it should always stay at the same position I left off, no matter if that was 1 hour or 7 days ago.

I scrolled to a post 7d ago, went to do something else, reopened the apo, and it refreshed itself to the top of the timeline.

[seboslaw]

I scrolled to a post 7d ago, went to do something else, reopened the apo, and it refreshed itself to the top of the timeline.

That should currently only happen if the app restarts (e.g. you kill it and then re-open it). However, it's also possible that iOS kills it due to memory constrains. Anyway, I'm currently working on also getting this fixed so that the position remains throughout restarts.

[garvinhicking]

Anyway, I'm currently working on also getting this fixed so that the position remains throughout restarts.

Excellent! (iOS probably put the app to sleep in background, I don't close apps ever) I'll watch the app updates - thank you for your work! (but still hope that the "original" app here also gets this implemented)

[seboslaw]

@garvinhicking I forgot to mention - the feature currently only works for lists and the "Following" feed, since other feeds are not always chronological. Were you using a feed by any chance?

[garvinhicking]

@garvinhicking I forgot to mention - the feature currently only works for lists and the "Following" feed, since other feeds are not always chronological. Were you using a feed by any chance?

Nope, I only use the main chronological "Following" feed (that's also the reason why I want it to be completely chronological and linear, I don't want to miss anything and have an urge of completionisting social media....🥶)

[MysticalOS]

I scrolled to a post 7d ago, went to do something else, reopened the apo, and it refreshed itself to the top of the timeline.

That should currently only happen if the app restarts (e.g. you kill it and then re-open it). However, it's also possible that iOS kills it due to memory constrains. Anyway, I'm currently working on also getting this fixed so that the position remains throughout restarts.

I believe the only true way this was supported by tweetbot back in day was cloud based sync. it applied some kind of signature record/cache to posts and then could sync position not only on restart but between different instances (desktop vs phone etc).

at least, whenever icloud wasn't being glitchy.

[Bossett]

getTimeline (now? Not sure if this changed with AppView v2) takes a date as a cursor - would it be possible to store the date of the 'page' (maybe the date) and the state of the current view and load it that way?

Probably wouldn't be perfect (though a brief skeleton-loading screen would probably hide that the scroll position isn't precisely where you left it), and it wouldn't necessarily work on feeds but it seems like a possible angle. If you store the date of ~10 posts above the viewport, and the date of the last post fully rendered then load from that cursor and seek to the scroll location of either 'the last full post rendered' or 'before the last post rendered' you probably get the right outcome regardless of blocks/deletes/etc.

[danguyf]

The lack of this feature is why I went from a give bluesky evangelist to basically never opening it. Please give us a sane, chronological timeline.

[pjrdata]

I’ve come back to BlueSky after a year or more, hoping this feature would finally be available. Nope, still not there. It’s such a basic requirement! Back to that other place again. Sigh….

[DrMarcusHill]

Just joined BlueSky the other day and am already annoyed by the lack of this. I think I am a modal user in that my main interaction is to scroll chronologically through my Following feed, and I want to just pick up where I left off when I next open the app. I also want to keep the scroll on the last post I read when getting new ones, not jump to the top and have to find my place again. This is one of the few good features of the basic Twitter app!

[googlephonics]

This is also #1 in my priority list. Love Bluesky, but I really like to continue from where I left off when I return to the app. Twitter/X has always had this functionality while also having a button/arrow thinguie that you click and sends you all the way to the top, if this is what you want. You have the option to continue exactly from the last post you read or to go straight to the newest one.

[Somulos]

+1 from me as well, the fact that this still hasn't been implemented yet a year later is baffling to me. I'd love to have Bsky completely replace the other blue site in my social media diet, but being able to resume reading my feed where i left off is a crucial part of the UX to me.

[plwhite]

To me (and some others), bluesky is just totally unusable, while the devs reckon it's largely fine with some minor caveats. That usually means that we are talking past one another in some way, because we each have radically different assumptions about use cases. I think the two assumptions are the following.

1. Users want to pick what they see, getting everything they chose to see, and only that. If bluesky forgets what they have seen a whole bunch of posts just disappear into "stuff that happened ages ago so we are not going to tell you about", which is not acceptable.
2. Users are happy for some feed algorithm (which they may be able to affect or control in some way) to pick stuff. If they happen not to be online for a couple of hours, they just miss stuff, and they don't care.

To me, option 1 is like streaming TV or watching films or reading a book; you choose what you want and you get that. If you pause, you can pick up where you left off. Option 2 is like having the TV on in the background; you may have some control, but everything is ephemeral; if you miss it it's gone, short of manually hunting back through what you might have missed.

The thing that I find astonishing is that there are actually users who prefer use case 2 - and not just a few, but so many that use case 1 not working is seen as an edge case feature enhancement. I suppose I should know from working in software development that one user's edge case quirk is another user's critical bug on the main line.

I appreciate that everybody is acting reasonably, and I can see that there are technical issues that may be tricky. However, twitter and mastodon both handle this (though both show a warning if there are more than N unseen messages, for some N), so it would be great if bluesky could.

[BallistiX09]

It's far from ideal, but if you're comfortable with some self-hosting and are using iOS, then you could try hosting https://github.com/videah/SkyBridge on a server to convert Bluesky API requests to be Mastodon-compatible, and then use Ivory for iOS (paid subscription needed) to then basically use your Bluesky account within Ivory. It seems to handle the basics just fine, and has the benefits of Ivory's timeline position history so it'll let you load all posts from where you last left off.

Again, obviously not ideal and it's only going to be suitable for a relatively small group of people, but it's just solved by far my biggest Bluesky complaint, so I figured I'd mention it here in case it helps out anybody else. Hopefully we'll see an actual solution in the official app eventually though!