Comment on Vier Facelift? Before I started work on BookLook the plan was to just create
randompenguin@dillyofapickle.com 2 weeks agoWhile trying this out I've decided I'm going to submit a PR that offers "Hide Comments in Feeds" as Settings > Display option for ALL themes (turned off by default of course).
People who want a really compact feed will love it. People who don't like extra clicks will hate it. But nobody has to use it if they don't want to.
In every feed all of the comments are hidden. But you click on the post body and it opens the post in its own page, only there it will actually show you any comments under it.
This is exactly how the web UI of both Mastodon and Bluesky work so it is a UX with which many users will already be familiar.
The trick is making sure that all the other stuff in the post still works as expected. The contact links in the post header. The (re)action buttons below. Commenting without having to first open the post in the single display page.
The only thing I don't like is that it literally just hides the comments in the feeds. It's still going through all those loops creating them. But the same loop creates the top post too and while the templates are context-aware if they're being rendered in a "display" page or not, the backend is not. So it's not quite as efficient as it could be. Maybe I'll figure out that backend part. But right now on my Dev Server I've got this working perfectly across all the themes.
Now, if I can just get all these PRs I've been working on submitted...
randompenguin@dillyofapickle.com 5 days ago
I retracted my PR for this. It won't be in the next release of Friendica. It conflicts with the existing "Compact Conversation View" feature which hides all other comments except your own interactions with a post author (or something like that), where mine literally hides ALL comments under the post and requires you to click the post to read it on a separate page that shows all the comments.
There were questions of whether there is demand for a feature to make Friendica feeds work the same way as Bluesky and Mastodon? And whether being able to write a comment to a post in the feed, but _not_ see it get added under the post in the feed is too confusing, and whether commenting in the feed should be completely disabled, or on submission should it take you to that post's single page where you _can_ see your comment? Which will take a little more work to figure out to make it do that.
So I'll probably do a post/poll on that question and if there's enough interest I'll resubmit the PR for the _next_ version. We can probably put both options in a dropdown so you can't enable both of them at the same time.
leanderlindahl@friendica-sverige.se 4 days ago
@randompenguin I'm curious to see and understand what that compact view does. I liked the sound of what your suggestion did.
Thats a major thing i struggle with in Friendica (mobile first, bookface), that a single post with comments take up several screens of scrolling and then you give up and switch back to mastodon.
Another thing i struggle with is – it seems you dont get notified when someone interacts with your posts (likes, replies). You find out by accident or not at all.
randompenguin@dillyofapickle.com 4 days ago
@leanderlindahl
Did you ever change this setting?
randompenguin@dillyofapickle.com 4 days ago
@leanderlindahl "Compact Conversation View" was explained to me as only displaying comments that are:
My proposal won't even show those. It hides all replies in feeds. Mine also makes the post body into a clickable link to the single post display page (which shows all the replies regardless of either setting).
leanderlindahl@friendica-sverige.se 4 days ago
@randompenguin I saw some dismissing sweeping opinions about compact view should not be too similar to Mastodon. Why not?
But without having thought it through properly, i'd venture saying you want the original post, potentially abbreviated, and then the most recent reply.