Comment on Unified Fediverse App - a browser solution?
Coopr8@kbin.earth 3 weeks agoThis is an issue of reading comprehension, I'm talking about a browser with a UI customized to fit Fediverse needs first and websites second, plus a service embedded in the browser to pull unification from each service into a single stream.
Preserving website functionality is still essential to the browser, because both the fediverse clients and the links posted on them shoukd in my opinion be opened in that same browser by default (or set to open a different browser if the user prefers).
Im just talking about UI, no ine said anything about blocking websites. Just because the address bar doesnt live onscreen by default doesn't mean it should be eliminated entirely.
lime@feddit.nu 3 weeks ago
so a set of pwas with a tabbed ui on top. right. i think my sticking point is, what is the “tailored ui” that fediverse services require? if we’re already using the web interfaces of the services themselves, what is left? notification handling? because personally i don’t want notifications to be locked in an app, my desktop handles my notification feed. i used to have those notification counters on my tabs, using a little js snippet that rendered a number on the favicon. but then i realised that i was just reinventing a thing that was already handled at another level.
Coopr8@kbin.earth 3 weeks ago
Why don't the highest use rate clients for Fediverse services look like standard browsers? There is a level of pure aesthetic sensibility at play.
I'm interested in what you mean by your desktop handling your notifications, do you have a central log of notifications you can access via your desktop?
This is actually a pretty great angle I hadn't fully thought out, most clients do push notifications, so is what I'm really talking about just a push notification log with the ability to filter for a set of designated sources? That would definitely handle a hefty chunk of what I'm getting at, the rest is basically just a browser skin and some extensions.
lime@feddit.nu 3 weeks ago
they don’t? i feel like they pretty much do, considering they’re all web pages.
every desktop environment i’ve used in the past 10 years has this, it’s basically been the default from windows 8 forward. GNOME puts them front and center in a dropdown in the middle, windows and deepin has a sidebar, KDE pops out a whole window for them.
basically the crux of it is what you want to do with your notifications. for me, a notification is an indicator that someone wants something, so the action it should perform is bring me to whoever it is. if that’s all you need, then you’re already there because every client i’ve used already has notification settings that allow you to filter stuff.
the reason i’m asking questions is that you’re all over the stack here. you’re talking about a user chrome, then you’re talking about consolidating messages, then about notification filters. i think it can all coalesce into something if you start from the capabilities of activitypub itself. it’s basically a messaging system at its core, with clients all deciding how to handle the contents of each message. i’ve long thought that neither twitterlikes or redditlikes actually play to the strength of the protocol, and that activitypub needs some sort of killer app to really shine. if you think you have something, you should let it form into a coherent idea and present it.
Coopr8@kbin.earth 2 weeks ago
I'm going to have to dive into push notification handling, I basically minimize the use of push notifications at my desktop level to only push work related content, and use the notification system of the clients to handle the "recreational" content which leaves me checking lots of platforms separately.
It makes sense that there should be the ability to create separate profiles with different filters and behaviors at the push notification manager level, I just haven't thought to look into it before.
Regarding killer apps for ActivityPub, and unified clients, I have a second idea which I didn't want to cloud this thread with that seems somewhat inevitable that will require a central portal with access to all services (and accounts?). That is a single publishing UI where the user creates/uploads any piece of content and then it suggests what venue/service/account to publish it on and related add-ons like hash tags, etc. With the Fediverse the APIs are open and multiplatform publishing clients (like FediPlan) already exist, so a level of light ML/AI for publication seems inevitable.
The next level of this, and what could be a "Killer App" is spontaneously generated affinity grouping via content aware publishing, meaning that the publishing client not only suggests where the posts should go, but also has a metalayer where the publishing clients instances "gossip" about the content being published and then create brand new "spontaneous" venues to publish that content in alongside other similar content being published by other users. Suddenly your text post about a super-niche interest or problem is pooled with posts by other users on the same topic, and bam you have a relevant discussion group of commenters/posters.
Problems of course arrise from this re:advertisers/promoters as well as unsavory/harmful mutual interests, but to be honest I think this is more of an inevitability than a possibility, so getting ahead to architect it in a way that minimizes potential abuse before the corpos get on it is probably a good idea.