Grouping channels

[sebsel]

This one might be complicated to combine with the sorting algorithm, but as the list of channels grows, it would be nice to be able to put them in groups / folders.

That makes it easy to at once collapse all your IndieWeb related channels, or channels about other general topics and group algorithmic filled channels together.

But I guess most needs can be fixed by just reordering them and playing with emoji.

[EdwardHinkle]

I have started to wonder about this recently as my channel lists continue to grow. One way I've worked around that is by having a "view unread channels only" mode in Indigenous, but there are times where I wish I could quickly and easily make a whole section of channels disappear temporarily so I don't even see if there are new posts in those channels.

This makes me think groups would be useful, however I would recommend groups strictly being containers for channels. Unlike traditional RSS feeds, I feel the following items should NOT be made available as we think about Channel Groups:

• You should NOT be able to "view" the channel as a combined list of all the posts from the channels underneath it (I know RSS feeds in the past have allowed you to view a folder and see all the posts contained within the folder).
• You should NOT be able to see how many unread posts are contained within a group.

I think groups should be strictly for categorizing large lists of channels and showing/hiding those lists of channels to provide an easier way to focus on what you want and ignoring the excess noise.

I think those specifics help make Channel Groups beneficial without some of (what I consider) bad side effects of RSS Reader's versions of Folders.

[sebsel]

This is exactly what I was thinking about, thanks for clarifying. Making the group a summary of the feeds would defeat some purposes of the feeds. I only intended the part of organizing them in the channel list.

You should NOT be able to see how many unread posts are contained within a group.

I thought about something like you may show combined unread counts for groups, but if one of the feeds of a group has a boolean, then the whole group has to be a boolean. But not allowing any grouped unread-counts also works.

[EdwardHinkle]

Makes sense. If unread were allowed within groups I definitely think there should be some type of option where the server doesn't return any unread counts. Because I can understand how some people might want them, but I definitely would want to use groups to hide unread counts :)

[sebsel]

On a recent IWC I talked with someone about this briefly, and we came to the conclusion that it could also be achieved today by creating an empty channel, and starting the name with, say, an emoji or another indicator of sorts.

Your menu would then look like:

🕸 Indieweb
IndieWeb people
IndieWeb public
🙃 Friends
Highschool
Summercamp 2019
Other

Of course some people are already using emoji in their channel-names. You can also do the reverse: use empty channels without emoji in the name. If the spec where to do something, I would say it would be enough to just indicate "this channel is actually a header". Then you can use sorting to decide what is in the headers and what not, and we remain somewhat backwards compatible. These headers could be examples of read only channels.