Modify feeds

[mikedilger]

I'm unhappy with the recent direction the gossip feeds have gone, and recent suggestions about the thread view make me even more unhappy. I am going to reverse course and make gossip the client that I want. Other people are free to fork it to do it "their way".

I don't want to compute more than one feed. Because I want to minimize battery use and CPU drain. Why compute stuff you can't see and aren't using for hours on end while you are in the kitchen making dinner... to speed up switching feeds for a smoother user experience? Fuck users. Those users should follow a gossip fork that caters to their preferences. My preference is to compute less and I'm willing to wait 500ms for the feed to recompute.

Instead of settings for which posts go into the general feed over on the settings page, and instead of four feeds with names that nobody understands, I'm imaging one feed with these controls at the top:

Post by me: [Off | Roots Only | All]
Posts by people I follow: [Off | Roots Only | All]
Posts that mention me: [Off | Direct Only | All That Tag Me]
Ancestors to the above: [None | One]
Replies to the above: [None | Direct]

The last two controls do not allow entire threads, just a bit of context, because otherwise it would be an overwhelming amount of data.

When these controls are switched it will say RECOMPUTING until the thread has been computed.

There will remain a separate thread view, and the context of posts can be entered with the [>] button. This main feed view is not meant to display entire threads of all the posts in your entire feed, that would be overwhelming.

And there will be a separate Inbox, but this time it will be messages tagging you (or if desired, only ones that are direct, and optionally only ones from people you follow), and we will accurately record and remember whether they have been read or not (which we will NOT do in the main thread, eliminating the annoying primal urge to unhlighlight everything).

[mikedilger]

For the moment I've brought it back to

• Main feed with [ Root posts only | Any post ] switcher,
• Inbox with [ Direct Replies Only | Everything you are Tagged On ] switcher

[mikedilger]

Turns out most of the recomputing time was just waiting for tokio and async overhead. I decided to just run the recomputes in the foreground so the overhead could be avoided. On a production build it takes about 10 milliseconds to recompute (on my desktop) now.

[mikedilger]

Nope, that was no good. I put them back in the background again.

[mikedilger]

A lot has happened since March 2023. We don't compute multiple feeds in the background anymore. We have "include replies" switches now. And the different feeds make sense.

But users still can't define a feed that includes multiple user-selected things.

To not have the clutter of this old issue, I opened #929 to replace this. Closing