Closed BenWard closed 1 year ago
Overall, I really like all the ideas here, though I'd probably default to saying they're out of scope for this repository. This might be the beginning of new tools or integrations!
A more specific reaction:
Each filtered post gets added to the user's Bookmarks.
David Colarusso has been doing some interesting work along these lines with their David's Alter (Algo) Ego bot. As I understand it, the bot sources posts in a very similar fashion to Mastodon Digest, but boosts them. All boosts are marked as unlisted, and (I think) David has that bot in a list that they can toggle to so to see the boosts. I believe David mentioned they explored almost exactly the bookmark idea you present, but worried about clobbering the other common uses of bookmarks. (Tagging @colarusso in case they wish to share more about this thought process!)
Closing this. I think it's an interesting discussion and idea, but out of scope for this project.
Hello! Thinking aloud momentarily, would love your thoughts and gut check on this.
I've been thinking a bit about how to integrate this kind of digest experience more natively into Mastodon. Generating the stand alone HTML is a great POC, but user experience and availability would be improved if we had a way to get the results of the digest into Mastodon itself.
In an ideal world (imho, and I'm very biased having worked on this feature at Twitter previously) Mastodon's platform would implement something akin to Twitter's Collections API (aka “Custom Timelines”), which are effectively “lists for statuses”: A named data store into which people can curate posts in an arbitrary order. An application like Mastodon Digest would then add its filtered posts and boosts into a “Mastodon Digest” timeline, which the user could browse through any client.
Since Mastodon Collections don't exist today, I wonder if this could be prototyped by overriding the Mastodon Bookmarks feature. With a few additions for polish, I imagine this:
Obvious caveat: This is a very opinionated use of the Bookmarks feature and I'm sure wouldn't align with how some people already use it. That's fine. It might work for many people and maybe demonstrate the value of arbitrary custom timelines in Mastodon.
You might activate it with a
-b
option, allowing the existing functionality to be used to preview and refine the filtering before writing anything to production.Further thoughts
Love your thoughts. Thanks.